The Couch Potato Only Plan

By the DoItYourself.com Staff

Do you suffer from Comfy Couch Syndrome? If you’re a gym bunny, you have no idea what I’m talking about but don’t worry – this article isn’t really for you anyway. This is for my fellow suffers. I am a recovering CCS addict. That’s right – This is to help you recover.

My recovery was a slow process but then so was my slide into addiction. I suffered from CCS for about 7 years. It was only when my doctor upped my blood pressure and sugar medication and told me that I could have a stroke or heart attack that I really stopped to have a careful look at my life.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d tried countless diets, exercise programs, diet pills, etc over the last few years. None lasted longer than a couple of weeks before the motivation faded. In the end, CSS and Survivor won the day.

What did I do?

I looked at my eating habits. I was not just a “greedy” fat person who had no willpower. I didn’t each much at all. I actually ate less proportionally than my thin friends. I couldn’t even finish the food prescribed by Weigh-Less. In fact, I was actually suffering from a mild form of mal-nutrition. I was eating vegetables at most once a week. Sometimes I ate fruit. The rest of the time the food was heavily processed or high in fat. I would have a pork chop for supper, a few biscuits for lunch. I had no energy to prepare meals so I only ate a home-cooked meal if I visited my family. Is any of this sounding familiar?

Then I looked at my physical activity. I walked to and from work every day. (About 5 minutes each way.) At work I was usually stuck behind my desk all day. When I got home, I sank down into my nice comfy couch and pulled out the TV remote.

I then looked at several diet books and exercise plans. Then I threw them out. They hadn’t worked before – why would they now? I thought about why they had failed. I dislike fruits and vegetables and yet had tried to force myself, overnight, to eat 5 servings of vegetables and 3 fruits a day. I dislike exercise, was in no shape for it but had tried to launch into 5 sessions of cardio a week plus weight training.

What would work for me? It takes two weeks to form a new habit. I knew that I had failed before because I was thinking too big. I also thought that there was a quick and easy way to lose the weight. I realized that there was no such thing.

I decided to start off small. I was dying to dive into another diet, guns blazing but thought better of it. I decided to change only one thing in my diet at a time. I realized that this had to be a simple, painless change. It was. I continued to eat normally but started each main meal with a raw carrot. I didn’t cut any foods out. I just faithfully ate my carrots for the allotted two weeks. Did I lose weight – no, but at the end of the two weeks, I started craving carrots. (I am not kidding – it surprised the heck out of me as well.) Then I added an apple before each meal as well. I kept incrementally increasing the “good” stuff and found that there wasn’t as much space for the “bad” stuff anymore. So this week, do yourself a favor, chose a vegetable that you can enjoy raw and have it before every meal. If you don’t want to eat the same one every day, just have any raw vegetable before each meal.

I looked at the exercise. There was no way I would maintain lots of cardio. To be honest, if it meant getting off the couch, it wasn’t going to work for me. So I lay on the couch and thought about it. I pulled in my tummy hard. I did this 100 times. Then I experimented with tightening my thigh muscles, calf muscles, etc. The following day I found that I felt a little stiff but wasn’t in complete agony. I carried on. After a few weeks, I was feeling more energetic. I started sucking in my tummy all the time. I started finding that my back didn’t hurt as much anymore and I started using my exercise bike. I started with just 5 minutes a day. When I got comfortable with that, I increased the time cycling.

Now, I thought, at the end of the first month, I’d have lost a good few pounds. I hadn’t. I began to feel despondent. Then I realized that my clothes weren’t as snug, that my headaches had decreased, that I slept better and that my energy levels had increased.

So, is this plan going to cause you to drop 5 pounds in a week? Never. Why is it worth trying? Consider how many diets you’ve been on. If you’re at the stage I was at, you managed to maintain them for a week or two at a time at most. You then regained the weight you’d lost. Why? Such drastic changes are unsustainable. You’ve spent years cultivating the bad eating habits you have now. You can’t expect to go from chocolate lover to lettuce lover overnight. You can’t go from couch potato to gym bunny overnight. What I love about the Couch Potato Only Plan is that it lets you ease yourself into a weight-loss system that can be made to work for you. The whole idea is to personalize your diet. I found that the diets out there weren’t working for me so I sat back and asked myself why. This is what I came up with and it’s worked for me.

© DoItYourself.com 2006