How I used Scrum to lose first 10 pounds

Today, I am going to share the story of how I've lost the first 10 pounds by applying some of the scrum principles to weight loss. Let's go. First 10lb are different I've lost my first 10 pounds quite some time ago. The reason why I didn't want to share this story was that somehow I had this idea that I have to complete my entire weight loss journey and only then share my story. But then last week I was just sitting there and I thought, if I do that, first of all, it's going to be such a long episode that no one would listen to. And second of all, the principles I've used to lose the first 10 pounds are different from the principles of "used to lose the second 10 pounds. So I thought, okay, since I've already lost the first 10 pounds for good, and haven't gained it back, I'm actually close to losing 20 pounds altogether. Today, I'm going to focus on the first 10 because I think those are the most difficult ones. To be honest, a lot of the videos and podcasts that you listen, they don't differentiate between the first ten pounds, second 10 pounds, third 10 pounds. And I think they're vastly different. The intention is different. The method is different. The reason why you do that is very different. So, let's focus on the first 10 pounds. Sprint Review Before I embarked on this journey, I've never applied scrum principles to weight loss. This time around, it was the first time I was actually incorporating weight loss into my monthly method sprint planning. Before I embark on this big project, I like to do the kind of like the sprint review but since I haven't done any sprints on the weight loss, I thought, let me just review maybe the last year and see, what worked, what didn't in terms of weight loss and what I should improve in the first sprint. Again, just a reminder, the monthly method is based on Scrum and Agile Product Development Framework that I've kind of tweaked around to apply to personal productivity, personal life and projects. The sprint length under the monthly method is three weeks. So when I was doing this sprint review before starting my new sprint, I thought, okay, let me analyze what I had done up to this point. What worked, what didn't and what I should improve in the first sprint. I haven't like looked all the way back. I didn't have to analyze my entire life. I was like, okay, over the last six months, let's just look at the last six months, what worked, what didn't. And I realized that the number one reason for my weight gain up till this point was the fact that we as a family, as a couple, we're relying a lot on takeouts. We didn't cook at home as much as I would like to and as much as we used to. I could really see the difference in the weight gain. When we stopped cooking at home and started eating out a lot, that's when the weight gain started to happen. I was able to narrow down the root cause of the problem to the fact that we were eating out a lot. The next step was to figure out why, why did we rely on takeout so much? Why did we go to the restaurant so much? The most obvious answer of course convenience but I decided to dig deeper and I realized that first of all, I don't like grocery shopping. I don't know what is it about me but I just don't like going to the grocery stores. It's such drudgery for me to go to a grocery store. First of all, you have to carry all these heavy bags. There are so many temptations. You buy a bunch of junk food and then you beat yourself up. Then also on the days when you don't buy a bunch of junk food, you buy ultra-healthy food. All the green stuff, salads, cucumbers, tomatoes, lean proteins and all of that, that's it. You have no idea what meals you gonna cook, what meals you're going to make out of this healthy produce and how it's going to fit into the entire week. You just like to buy the healthiest thing that you see. Then you come home and then the week rolls around. For dinner, you want to eat something delicious but all you have is some celery sticks, salad and chicken breasts. And I just couldn't figure out what delicious food I can make out of this healthy produce. So, I wanted something delicious and I didn't have a slight idea of how I can make anything delicious from this green stuff in my fridge. So that's why we would go to restaurants or order takeout. So, that was kind of like the main reason. First of all, didn't like grocery shopping. Second of all, when I went to the grocery store, there was no plan on what products to buy so that I can then make delicious food. The food that I could make out of this ultra-healthy produce was not something that I enjoyed eating. The food that I enjoyed eating was the food that I would order from restaurants. That became clear to me, the dissonance between the produce I bought and the food that I enjoyed eating. Sprint 1 The first idea that popped into my mind is like, okay, well you have to meal prep. You have to create a grocery list based on the meals that you want to cook. Then you need to go to the grocery store with the list and buy all the ingredients. Then you need to cook everything and cook in advance. All of that. To go from the place where you mostly eat out to the place where like you find the recipes, you create grocery lists, You go to the grocery store, you buy the things, then you also train yourself to cook all this stuff. It's a lot. I'm so grateful that I didn't decide to do all of it in the first sprint. What I did for the first sprint, I clearly remember the goal that I had for the first sprint was to find 21 recipes that I would enjoy eating. Not the recipes that are the healthiest, not the recipes that have the most vegetables in them. No, let's say if I knew that I like Thai food, then I need to find recipes online that would replicate my favourite takeout and something that I can cook at home. I found a bunch of Thai recipes. They had noodles, they had white flour and noodles, Bryce noodles, not necessarily the healthiest but at this point, I didn't care. I was like, I just need to start cooking at home because as you probably know, even if you take the same food, let's say it's pizza and the pizza that you get from pizza hut and the pizza that you get when you cook one at home will be completely different. The one that you will make at home will have fewer calories, less fat, fewer additives, less questionable ingredients. Right? Of course, you use less salt, less fat, less oil, less sugar, and all of that. So, I was like, okay, forget about the healthy for now, just focus on cooking something at home. The first print it wasn't even cooking. It was just collecting the recipes that I would then like to cook and would enjoy eating. So, the definition of done for the first sprint was to collect 21 recipes and save them in paprika three app. The paprika app gets rid of all the BS texts that no one cares about and it just saves the ingredients. It saves the steps and the serving size. So, just saves the information that you need. It might save the picture. It gets rid of all the advertisements, all the texts, all the nonsense. It's just the recipe and then you save it. You can categorize it and it's there. When it's time to cook, it's so easy to use because it already like, you know what to pull out. And the first step, the second step, then they have the timers and everything. The most important part is that you can create a meal plan. They have a calendar option where you can put the recipes that you want to cook for lunch, dinner, and breakfast on each of the days. Then you can create a grocery list based on the recipes that you've scheduled for the week. Amazing! Like seriously, if you want to start cooking at home and you just don't know how to handle the whole recipe thing, install paprika app and do that. It's gonna save you so much time and frustration. Oh! And then what I like as well is that you can rate the recipes. Whenever I cook a recipe, I can then put five stars, four stars, three stars to see whether we liked it or not. You know, which ones you liked and then you can cook them again. So, it's beautiful. Sprint 2 The goal for the first print was to collect 21 recipes that I would enjoy cooking and eating, save them in the paprika app. And that's it. I did that. In the next sprint, I decided, it's time to start cooking these recipes and paprika app made it so easy that I can create the grocery list. But remember how I said that when I was doing the sprint review, before the first sprint, I have recognized that I don't like grocery shopping. Now that I had the paprika app and I had the grocery list in PDF format, I could now order groceries online. I could be a hundred percent sure that if I order all these items, I'll have everything I need to cook for the entire week. That was awesome! I think the delivery charge is usually around $10 but honestly, it's so worth it for me because I just don't like grocery shopping. It's a lot faster for me to order it online and fewer temptations. And eventually, it turns out it's cheaper for our family to do online grocery shopping because you only order what you need. You only ordered the items from the paprika app. So, the definition of done for the second sprint on my weight loss goal was to do grocery orders because I knew that if I ordered groceries for the week, then I have everything in my fridge that I need, I have the recipes in my paprika app. In terms of convenience, it will be faster and easier to cook a delicious meal at home than to go outside, walk to the restaurant, place an order, or even if we ordered Uber, we still had to wait like for an hour for the order to get here. So, it was a lot easier at this point to cook at home because I've had all my groceries. I've had all my ingredients. I've had my recipes. I've had my beautiful app. I had everything I need to start cooking. So, the definition of done for the second sprint was to place weekly grocery orders based on my paprika app schedule for the meals. And it worked out nicely. Cooked most of our meals at home. It was beautiful. I think my second goal for the second sprint was to do some at-home workouts, like 20 minutes a day. I was doing YouTube workouts. But then I've only done it for one sprint because I got so bored with at-home workouts that I didn't want to continue. That's the beauty of this sprint method is that you can experiment with something for one sprint. And if you absolutely hate it and you don't see results, you can just do something else. Sprint 3 This is what I've discovered when sprint number two was over, I was doing the sprint review, I said, okay, doing the weekly grocery orders online worked beautifully. It's so helpful. I loved doing at-home workouts was not enjoyable, didn't like it. They became boring at some point. I didn't want to continue that. The conclusion from it was to continue with the weekly orders, but instead of doing workouts at home, the next sprint I would just do a lot of walking. So, I had a goal in mind of how many steps I wanted to do in the week, in a day. And that was my definition of done. One of the goals is to reach a certain number of steps in three weeks. That was flexible because if one day I didn't really have time to walk, then the next day I would just go for a longer walk. At the end of the day, what mattered is that the total number of steps for three weeks was that number. Also at this point in time, I've decided to try intermittent fasting. I've tried it before, didn't really work. So, this time around I was like, okay, let me apply the monthly method, Scrum Principles. Start small, I started with the 14, 10 split and that was quite manageable. The definition of done was to fast a certain number of hours in total for a three-week period. You kind of multiply 14 by 21. Oh, I think I didn't do 21. I think I only wanted to do it on the weekdays, so it would be 14 multiplied by 15. So, it was 210 hours in total. I wanted to fast for three weeks considering that I was only doing it on the workdays. Sprint three, the new goal was intermittent fasting. To fast for a total of 210 hours. And also continue with my weekly grocery orders online. I also had a goal of how many steps I wanted to walk. Sprint 4 So, that was sprint three. When I was doing the sprint review, I liked pretty much everything that I've done. I felt comfortable about increasing my intermittent fasting to 16 to eight split. For the next sprint, everything stayed the same. The only difference was that I increased my intermittent fasting to 16 to eight split. The definition of done was again, the total number of hours that I wanted to fast. And that was 240 hours in total. The reason why weight loss worked this time I think the reason why intermittent fasting worked this time around was because of the monthly method. If you know, under the monthly method, you set the goals in three different areas of your life. You always set goals in career growth, health and key relationships and quality of life. All my weight loss goals were under the health and key relationship category. But I also had goals in the other two. You have to have goals in the other two under the monthly method. I think this is what made it easier to do intermittent fasting and everything else. I was just starting out with the monthly method back then in terms of the podcast. I was just launching the website, the podcast, and I was busy with, all of this work. It was exciting and the time flew by, it was something I could focus on and not think about food all the time. Also, the quality of life goals made life enjoyable outside of food as well. I had something to do on my weekends, in the evenings, something exciting, maybe work on my hobbies, maybe meet with people, maybe go travel to a new place, maybe go for a hike. So, there were all these goals in the quality of life that required my time. That time is usually if you don't have these goals are spent kind of mindlessly watching Netflix or YouTube and snacking on stuff. When you didn't intermittent fasting, the schedule that I followed is that I would have dinner at around 6:00 PM and then not eat after that. All of a sudden watching Netflix and not snacking became almost painful. I knew that, okay, I have to do something with my time after 6:00 PM. At first, it was just like spending all this time cleaning because I didn't know what else to do. It was like, okay, I should not watch YouTube or Netflix because it causes us all the cravings but what else can I do after 6:00 PM? At 6:00 PM, I have dinner. Then what I have like four, at least four hours of time I need to fill. I need to fill it with activities that are not food-related. Of course, the monthly method was so helpful because it gave me suggestions of what I could do. I had all these goals that I wanted to do. I would go for a walk because I have this goal of how many steps I wanted to reach in three weeks. I would also work on the monthly method and I would try new hobbies. At some point, I had this sprint goal of trying to draw and paint. I would watch some videos and then try to paint, didn't stick, but it was something, it was a sprint goal. It was December. So, there wasn't much you could do after 6:00 PM. I would explore new hobbies. I would clean, would do laundry. I would do household chores. I guess most of the quality of life goals happen on the weekends because you have more time. We would go and visit nearby towns over in the UK back then. We would explore different towns. We would go on a hike. That was beautiful. It will take most of the day. And when you consciously choose the goals, the quality of life goals, that they're a bit more demanding, a bit more time-consuming but then it was so rewarding. You get all these endorphins and happiness from doing these high quality activities that you don't need food to give you all this happiness because I think oftentimes, that was definitely the case for me. Food was one of the very few things that could bring me happiness on a daily basis. I now realize that if you want to address the weight issue, you kind of have to diversify your pleasure, your happiness portfolio. The food is good. It's one way to make yourself happy but you also have to have like 10 more ways of how you can increase your own happiness. It can be getting a massage. It can be going for a walk. It can be dancing to music. It can be watching your favourite movie. It can be meeting with friends. It can be playing your favourite sport. If you want to address the weight issue, you need to diversify your happiness portfolio. The monthly method definitely does that because every sprint you set up your quality of life goals and you can try new hobbies, new activities every single month. Then experiment and maybe discover new things that you enjoy doing. Conclusion So the first 10 pounds. Took me four sprints in total. Remember the first sprint I didn't change anything about my eating or working out. I was just collecting 21 recipes in the paprika 3 app, I was just collecting 21 recipes that I want to cook in the next sprint. Realistically, it took three sprints of actually doing something and changing my behaviour to achieve the 10-pound weight loss. It was very manageable. No heavy exercise was involved. The only exercise I did, in the beginning, was the 20-minute workouts that I did at home three times a week I think. Then I didn't like it. It was too boring for me. So I switched to walking and I just love walking. I walk, I listen to podcasts. I listen to audiobooks. So, three sprints in total, not really doing anything major and not really changing my preferences and food. I just changed the fact that instead of getting Thai food from a restaurant, I would cook Thai food at home. That was the only difference, really. ---- Yeah, that was quite fast, 10 pounds from reducing the number of takeouts and eating most of our meals at home. Intermittent fasting, I don't really do intermittent fasting right now. I don't eat breakfast most of the days but I don't count the number of hours I fast or what not. I would have dinner at 6:00 PM and then I didn't have any additional snacks after that. At first, it was due to intermittent fasting. Then I had to find a way to fill this time. That's where the monthly method was helpful for all those extra goals that I had for myself. Now, I actually had the time to invest in the quality of life activities in the career and growth goals, et cetera. Key takeaways My main advice if you want to lose your first 10 pounds, start cooking most of your meals at home, don't go ultra-healthy. Just see what you usually like to order at restaurants or for takeout, then find the recipes for these meals and then cook them at home. Also, when you set your weight loss goals, have other exciting goals in your life. For me back then, it was this podcast, launching my website, getting first clients. I also had some quality of life goals that those excited about every single month. So, have your life filled with so many exciting non-food, non-diet goals that your weight loss is kind of happening in the background. You have one or two goals in this sprint but the other seven goals are not related to weight loss. That way, it doesn't feel like your life is consumed by weight loss and all of that. When you have your mind engage in something interesting, it doesn't have this space to be thinking about food all the time. That's my advice. It's a long podcast but that's what I did. That's what worked and that's what they recommend to people who are about to embark on their weight loss journey. This is it for today. I'll talk to you next week. Cheers.