Eat 1 Less Roti a Day – Small Change, Big Impact

If you can find a way to decrease caloric intake without feeling like crap, your chances of success are greater because it’ll be easier to stick with it over the long run.

– Christian Thibaudeau

Let’s suppose someone eats 3 Rotiya every night as part of their family meal and they have a few pounds to lose. The go to strategy is usually a restrictive diet and some intense cardio based training.

It’s very easy to do too much. It’s one of the reasons people feel overwhelmed quickly and give up.

There are small things we can do which can have a big impact, although very unsexy and much slower in pace, you’ll be surprised how the small efforts can accumulate. Reducing daily Roti intake by 1 can be one of these things, let’s break it down. 

1 Roti = 120 calories (average size)
3 Rotiya per day = 360 calories
3 Rotiya per day for a week = 2520 calories

But remember we want to reduce by 1 a day.

2 Rotiya per day for a week = 1680 calories. So just by reducing 1 Roti per day there is a saving of 840 calories a week (2520 – 1680). 

Just so you know there is 3500 calories in a pound of fat. 

3500 / 840 = 4.166

This means with all else kept the same, no additional steps, no additional exercise, no diet, simply by reducing 1 roti per day we can lose a pound of fat in just over 4 weeks. 

This is significant. A pound every month is 12 pounds a year (5.4kg).

The important thing here is highlighted in the quote at the beginning of this post. You will not feel like crap choosing a method like this, it’s simple to do and stick to and doesn’t restrict you from eating Roti. 

I like to think of this sort of method as accumulating impact. It isn’t a big impact intervention by any means, but it accumulates over time to have a sustained and meaningful impact. The maths shows this. 

Another example

One of my goals is to bring up my back muscles and pulling strength. My chosen method is to work on pull-ups daily.

Rather than doing 3-6 sets once or twice a week which is fairly typical in most programs I do. I’m going to be doing 20 every single day.

For the record the most I’ve ever done in one go is 26, just so you’ve got some reference to my pull-up strength. So doing 20 across a day, broken up into as many sets as I wish really isn’t difficult at all. I could do two sets of 10, one in the morning and another in the evening or as I prefer I could break it down into much smaller sets every time I walk past my garage which has the pull-up bar. 

Doing things this way means I’m active throughout the day and my fatigue is managed really well.

20 pull-ups daily = 140 reps weekly
20 pull-ups daily = 606 reps monthly
20 pull-ups daily = 7280 reps yearly

Usually in the gym I will do pull-ups on two days (upper body days) and might do 50 total reps a week. 

50 pull-ups weekly = 2600 reps yearly

7280 reps is just under triple the amount of pull-ups I would normally do in my gym programs (based on 50 reps a week). See how they accumulate? 

In other words I would need nearly 3 years of pull-ups in my gym program (50 a week) to make up the amount of pull-ups I can accumulate in 1 year by doing 20 daily at home, broken up into easy to manage sets. 

What to takeaway

There are some easy pickings, small changes we barely notice which can have a meaningful impact over the long term if we ignore the immediate result.

Hopefully you can apply this method to an area where you feel you’re lacking. Maybe it’s removing that 1 Roti if you want to control some weight gain you’ve been noticing, maybe it’s working on pull-ups if like me, pulling strength needs work or maybe you want to read more. 

10 pages a day is something I’ve been doing for a long time successfully. That equates to 3650 pages a year! Or just over twelve 300 page books.

10 pages, 1 less Roti, 20 pull-ups (in my case) are such small changes, but they have such a big impact.

I hope this helps you get some accumulative gains.