New Year – New Diet!

Hello all.

It’s been a while since I last posted – life getting in the way mainly!  I had a very busy time tied up in some litigation that has been lingering in my life for far too long but is now thankfully almost done – just waiting for the judge to pass on his wisdom at this point.

But most of all, I’ve been on a diet.  It’s really hard to develop recipes for food that seems yummy whilst also depriving oneself of all things yummy.  Having said that, my diet hasn’t been one of total deprivation and it does seem to be succeeding.  So I thought I’d share what it is that I am doing and maybe a few of the recipes I use too – I hope it works for some of you too!

One of the most useful diet books I’ve ever read was one called The Obvious Diet by Ed Victor.  I actually bought it in the mistaken belief that it was written by Nigella Lawson.  I’d noticed she was looking increasingly slender these days and assumed she was sharing her secret – turned out she had written a forward for the book.  But, as is so often the case, it was a happy accident.  The basis of the book is that, deep down, we all know which bits of diets work for us and which don’t and what foods we, as individuals, can and can’t get away with.

I know, for example, that the cabbage soup diet always gives me a great kick start, losing about 1/2 stone in the first week.  I can’t sustain that rate of weight loss though and the diet is really just one of calorie deficit.

Personally, due to a back injury a few years ago, I can’t really do much about exercising the weight away.  Up until that injury, I had always been very lucky in that all I really had to do to lose any excess weight was to exercise daily – it didn’t even have to be terribly hard exercise – 20 lengths a day at the local pool for example.  Mind you, I’ve never been all that good at moderation so once I got into an exercise groove, I’d end up doing triathlons every other month!

This time I started off with something called Clean 9 from Forever, the aloe vera people.  I am a distributor for Forever and although I’m not trying to push it here, please feel free to email me.  The Clean 9 is basically a cleanse for a few days, followed by shakes and low calorie meals.  It lasts for 9 days and I lost 9lb in that time.  I started the diet at the beginning of December, really thinking I’d lose a little to give myself the ability to pig out over Christmas without having too much of an impact on my average waistline!  But by the time it came round to Christmas, I’d lost a stone and my appetite seems to have decreased and I was really reluctant to eat “empty” calories.  The same couldn’t really said about drinking them I’m afraid but, unusually, I managed not to put on any weight at all over the festive period and now that we’re into the New Year I’m back at it!

The cabbage soup diet made me think about soup generally.  I find it really filling and if I avoid having bread with it, then it is generally quite a low cal meal.  So the basis of my diet now is that I have soup for lunch every day.  I’ll be posting some new recipes for soups over the next few days.  The main one is my red pepper soup which is already on here though.  It freezes really well so I have lots of half pint pots of it stashed away.  The other part to my diet is a rather strange idea that I have that if I am eating from Marks and Spencer, it isn’t really a diet!  So my evening meal is an M&S calorie counted meal with added veg on the side.

I’m trying to change the way that I eat in the long term so when I am eating out, then I eat either what I’m given or what I fancy from the menu.  I’m not really one for puddings generally so I often don’t bother with one anyway.  I don’t then worry about the fact that my calories for the day are higher than my diet “allows” or try to do anything to compensate.  So far, it’s going really well.  I reckon I’m a month away from being where I want to be.

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