Many believe chocolate and dieting are incompatible, but this is not necessarily the case. Weight loss is achieved by creating a calorie deficit, which means that you eat fewer calories than you burn over an extended period of time. This is not a short-term solution, but a long-term commitment that needs to be maintained for weeks, months, or even years to achieve sustainable results. I ate at least one bar of dark chocolate, weighing between 75g and 150g, every day for eight days while maintaining a calorie deficit.

Obviously, January can only go by with an experiment, so my main goal this month is to keep moving towards a BMI of around 20-21. I’ve also adjusted my daily calorie limit accordingly, with my intake between 1600 and 1700, with regular daily exercise. Speaking of exercise, I’m doing these now: short warm-up 1 hour of MAF 180 exercise per day: 40 minutes on an indoor exercise bike 20 minutes on the treadmill 4000 steps a day (because of the 20 minutes of running, this is only theoretical) daily back exercises and stretching I can see your eyebrows popping up, that’s a lot of time.

Make the change! It’s time if you’ve been putting it off; if you’ve tried and failed many times - give yourself a chance at a better life. I’ve already described how to count calories and how to determine your fat-burning heart rate zone. Let’s see how you can use this information. First, let’s take the simple rules I built (and still build) my lifestyle change on: try it; analyze it; if it works, adopt it; and start over.

Many people and many different heart rate zones have been proclaimed as fat-burning heart rate zones; I would like to present two that you might want to experiment with. The second one is good for fat loss and everything according to its creator. Try it; the test of the pudding is eating it. Both of these are based on your age, so they may be less accurate, but it’s worth trying them to see how they work for you.

Calorie counting is a tricky area. Many believe in it, oppose it, and consider it unsustainable. I don’t. There is nothing else that will suit the vast majority of people. I’ve tried eating “on intuition”, eating only as much as my body requires. Well, I’m a little hungry wolf when I’m not controlled. If I don’t set limits, I can’t control my appetite. If I knew how much food my body needed, I wouldn’t have lived the previous part of my life overweight.

My highest weight ever was 127 kg, sometime in the mid-2000s. The picture on the left was taken in 2009; I’m the guy in the blue t-shirt. The photo on the right is of me in the summer of 2023. Of course, I tried a lot of things, but my weight yo-yoed up and down until in 2018, I got to the point where it became relevant to take a blood pressure medication regularly.

Unfortunately, I can’t do it without counting calories every day. I can maintain my weight by avoiding high carbohydrate intake and the calorie count I’ve experimented with. If I “go off track” because of a holiday, I don’t worry anymore because I know that as soon as I get back into the swing of things, I’ll pick up the pace again and adjust my weight again. Is this sustainable? I wonder if everyone wants to take the time.

Buy a heart rate monitor, a gym membership or a treadmill or an indoor bike and start moving slowly in your fat-burning range. Focus on getting your body to handle the load first, and get yourself to a point where you can move slowly for an hour: walking or cycling. If you have muscle soreness, you’ve overdone it. Take it easy. Be patient with yourself; just as the pounds didn’t come on overnight, they won’t come off overnight.