I do not eat rice, carbs - Kyambadde

Pr Kyambadde before he lost weight. He says through constantly exercising and minding what he eats, he has been able to keep the weight off. Photo by Edgar R. Batte

What you need to know:

  • Pastor Daudi Kyambadde battled being overweight for close to 20 years. When he finally lost some weight, he backtracked and regained all of it. He has since been disciplined through exercise and controlling what he eats and because of this, he has stayed lean.

For more than 20 years, Pr Daudi Kyambadde weighed 115 kilogrammes and no single day passed without him worrying about how to lose the extra weight.
In 2016, he purposed to start living a healthy lifestyle and exercise. He bought a skipping rope and started exercising. He made that routine and as he skipped every day, he also carried out research on other ways to lose the extra weight.

Diet
Kyambadde realised that what he ate had contributed a lot to him being overweight and dietary changes were needed. He, therefore, not only exercised but also started watching what he ate and within eight months, he managed to shed off 20 kilogrammes.

However, he backtracked and regained all the weight which led to frustration and depression. In 2017, Kyambadde started reading self-help books, especially those that taught discipline in various fields. He says he realised that indiscipline had contributed a lot to him backtracking.

“Discipline, as I understood it, is consistently doing what you sometimes do not like doing in order to get what you want. When I regained weight, I felt frustrated and branded myself a loser,” Kyambadde explains.

His wife had initially tried to help him deal with the weight by encouraging him to watch his dietary preferences. She introduced more vegetables at lunch and dinner times, and during breakfast.

Also, he loved eating rice which he would eat at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Research showed that rice was a heavy carbohydrate and eating that much of it every day was not only bad for his general health but would also thwart his weight loss goals. On his birthday that year, he resolved to quit heavy carbohydrates.

“I realised that in addition to exercising, I needed to watch what and how I ate. To me, eating the right foods is key and working out comes in as a bonus. I embraced eating more fruits and I totally removed processed foods such as soda bread and sugar from my diet,” he says.

At the time, Kyambadde had developed high blood pressure but through exercising and controlling what he eats, it has since gone down to manageable levels.

Water
One of the tricks Kyambadde swears by is drinking enough water. He says he drinks six litres of water, spaced over different times of the day. For example, he says, when he wakes up, he drinks 1.5 litres. He then jogs and paces from one end of a basketball court to another, shadow playing.
He also utilises the punching bag in his courtyard and skips the rope in the morning and evening.

“I only eat boiled food and as organic as I can have it. I eat lots of fruits but I am careful about my intake of sugars even if they are natural,” Kyambadde says.