Louisa's Weight Loss Blog

For those of you out there who want to lose weight but feel overwhelmed about the amount of diet and exercise plans out there, don’t despair just yet.

Yes, there are hundreds, possibly thousands of different diets out there, but don’t delay trying to lose weight even though you aren’t sure about which plan to follow. How on earth do you know which one is the best for you? After all, can you possibly contemplate a life without carbs? Do you love cabbage so much that you’d be happy to follow the cabbage soup diet but live with the flatulence?

There are so many diet methods out there to try, yet no matter what anybody tells you, there is no “correct weight loss method”. Anybody who tells you that there is only one method to lose weight is probably trying to sell you something and will probably hinder your progress more than help it.

All diets follow the basic weight loss principle: if you reduce your intake of calories and increase your exercise, you WILL lose weight.

Go on a diet, lose weight. Simple!

Weight loss plans pretty much all follow this principle – they just take a different route. As you will already be aware, everybody is different and different plans work for different people. Will Atkins work for me, Louisa? Heck no! I love carbohydrates and when my IBS royally kicked off three years ago, I temporary had to give up gluten and dairy. This meant no bread, milk, cheese and pasta – everything I love! I lived off chicken, veggies, oat milk, porridge and gluten-free pasta and pesto. I mean it when I say that this is pretty much all that I ate for months. I lost weight but at what cost? I was generally unwell and miserable. Would I enforce that kind of diet on myself again? No, there has to be a better way that I am happy to live with where I don’t feel denied anything I’d like from time to time.

Dieting is a lifestyle choice. Once you reach your goal, are you going to go back to your old eating habits? No! You need to be happy with the diet you’ve chosen otherwise you’ll resent your decision and will be less likely to stick to it… and get fat again.

Slimming aids

A side note for those contemplating taking slimming aids like the acai berry products or Hoodia – you need to realise that

a.) They will not work unless you eat a healthy diet and exercise too

b.) The clue is in the name – they are slimming aids!

You can’t eat rubbish and expect to lose weight. Again, anyone who tells you that pills makes weight loss easy has ulterior motives. This means that you still need to choose a healthy diet plan, they are not a long-term solution but the right one could certainly help you lose weight and keep it off in the long run. As you know, I recommend Proactol.

Choosing the right diet

For fussy eaters and those with food allergies, how do you choose the right diet that lets you eat the foods that you like? Over the coming months, I intend to ‘Showcase’ a selection of diets and not just write a bit about them, but give an honest account of what it’s like to follow these diets. Soon, I will be publishing a piece about the South Beach Diet – make sure you look out for it!

AMELIA

Today is my driving test and just over an hour before I get in the car with the examiner, of course I’m nervous, but I’m calmer than I have been in recent weeks over it.

I’ve had a cup of coffee and some frosties for my breakfast which I know isn’t going to hold me in good stead because it’s sugar and I’ll definitely feel hungry again in half an hour.

The temptation to eat badly at times like this is overwhelming, you just grab what you know is going to be tasty and something that is going to reassure you that everything is going to be ok. Just before my instructor picks me up in a bit, I am going to have a bit of a snack, 2 oatcakes and an apple and knowing that I’ve put something good into my body I believe is going to help me firstly not feel hungry and secondly feel good about myself that I am worth it.

Sometimes when you are stressed, you might just grab food before you have even thought about it and say later that you deserved it because you’re stressed. Perhaps instead of a bowl of frosties I should have had a bowl of porridge and an apple… because I deserve it, which depending on your feelings of porridge might sound self deprecating, but it works.

More than ever when you’re feeling stressed, you need to slow yourself down and just stop and think about what is going on, before you snap at your partner, feel the pressure get on top of you and the next thing you know you’re in the nearest car park of a drive-thru scoffing junk.

Total Chunk Tip: Stress can lead you many different ways, but if you take a moment to think about what you’re about to eat and believe that you deserve to eat well to be able to cope with what you’re going through, you’ll make better choices and feel good about yourself and have the energy to get through the day.

This last week has been difficult to say the least! My car died and I was terrified that the time had come to scrap my 13 year old corsa. Firstly because I love her, secondly because I can’t afford to replace her. As always, Jonny and I persevered and I would drop him off at work on my way to work. Inevitably, he would make me late but beggars can’t be choosers – he was letting me borrow his car so that I could get there in the first place. Anyway, the difficulty lay in that he was working 14/15 hour days last week as his company are launching a new product this week. On the Tuesday, he worked 12 hours and I sat in his office waiting for him. Clearly, that is very impractical to bother with for more than one day. The following two days I had to go back out to his work to get him. On the Thursday, I stopped at the supermarket to pick him up something microwavable yet healthy. He got salmon and new potatoes. That was alright for him!

You see, my father and I have a difficult relationship at times. He is extremely temperamental and we’ve had monumental arguments in the past. We still do to this day. However, if I need him, he will whinge and generally make a pain of himself but he does always come through for me. He demonstrated this last week by driving 100 miles from Gloucestershire to where I live (Nottinghamshire) to fix my car. So (back to the original point about Jonny being lucky to have salmon) I decided to make him a home-made sausage casserole  for me and dad as cooking is not one of mum’s strong points. Unfortunately, my efforts were rubbish! I had lost the recipe and I tried to memorise it but clearly to no avail. Anyway, in spite of my poor show in the kitchen which resulted in the breaking of a glass measuring jug and an equally innocent wine glass, dad fixed my car in less than 40 mins. He even looked at Jonny’s car and fixed my phone as I had dropped it the previous night. We are currently liking my dad.

I drove back home for the MOT on Friday night sans Jonny. It was easier that way as I needed to be up early Saturday morning for the aforementioned MOT. Surprisingly, my car PASSED! Don’t worry about congratulating me, I have already celebrated – with one solitary glass of wine.Have you not noticed, I am trying to diet but had no time to exercise and prepare decent meals. This week, it’s about damage limitation.

Anyway, since my return from The ‘Shire, I have been massively tired and completely incapable of writing anything carefully constructed. In fact, this has been a stream of consciousness which I expect to read back tomorrow and think HUH?!

It’s not about self-discipline, it’s about being in the right frame of mind to make dieting work otherwise the stressful aspects of your life suddenly magnify. There is self-discipline, there is knowing when to stop eating… and then there is knowing when to give yourself a break. Losing weight is a lifestyle choice that needs to revolve around you. When you start revolving around your diet and stop doing the things you are MEANT to be doing (meeting friends, lunch with a colleague etc) that is when you need to ask yourself if you have a problem.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to cover the issue of taking dieting too far and why it is better to be slim rather than thin.

AMELIA

When I first went to uni, I stocked up on microwave meals on a 4 for £5 deal because I convinced myself that it would be the cheapest way to eat. As I adjusted to feeding myself and realising how much food really costs, I began to realise how I could eat the best I can with value for money for just myself or a group of people.

It’s all very well saying that paying out for takeaway food is cheaper than paying for ingredients for a lot of people, but perhaps unless you’re buying sturgeon caviar and fillet steak for a thirty person dinner party. I always find it hard to believe someone who has been out of their parents home for longer than six months who say that eating healthily is expensive.

Our main source of carbohydrates: rice, pasta, potatoes can all be purchased for more than four portions for under a pound. One of my favourite lunch time meals is jacket potato with fillings like cheese/beans/coleslaw/tuna, these are again cheap and simple nutrition as long as you go easy on the size of your portions as it’s still calories and cheese isn’t fantastic for you in large portions.

Pasta and sauce, pasta and pesto, spaghetti bolognaise, add in with tomato sauces and vegetables and a little bit of meat and you’re away.

You'll see the savings you make very quickly

Rice will cover chilli con carne, home made curries made with tomatoes, not cream and there is no end to the amount of healthy meals that you can make.

Then you’ve got the foods that are so simple, you wonder how you didn’t think of it sooner… omelettes, meat and veg, sausage and mash and stews.

There is also soup! I hate ready made soups, but I love my own. Alright, there is the initial expense of the food processor, but you’ll earn that back quick enough. My favourite and cheapest is tinned tomatoes whizzed in with some chilli, maybe you’d like to add some pulses, a little spaghetti… other ones I really like is beetroot and potato, bacon and lentil on a tomato base, winter vegetable. Summer soups would also include gazpacho or a really tasty cucumber. Not only does it fill you up, but it all goes a long way, freezes easily and is so cheap to make on a budget.

Meat is expensive, but there are still ways around it. Still choose lean cuts and don’t cook with the skin. Cheaper cuts of meat such as neck of lamb, beef shin or pork hock. My mum made a curry with neck of lamb and the meat didn’t even cost £3. I can vouch it was still just as tasty. Mince is also cheap, but buy the lean stuff and you’re laughing.

It’s not just what you buy, but when you buy food as well. Food that’s in season is always going to be cheaper because they don’t have to import it from other countries and we have it in abundance. Root vegetables are winter vegetables, so your parsnips, pumpkins, squash, etc will generally be cheaper at your local supermarket or farm shop.

Also if you go at the end of the day, supermarkets reduce their food to sometimes pennies. If you eat this food immediately or freeze it, you’re not going to worry about it going off. I would also recommend portioning your food before freezing it, wrapping chicken breasts individually, slicing bread, this saves stabbing at your food to defrost it.

All of these things are so simple to cook, they don’t take long when you consider how long you wait for a pizza delivery on a Saturday and you can control exactly what goes into your food and not feel obliged to eat huge portions, no point in making all this cheap food to then go and eat more than you need!

It’s been a while since I weighed myself. As I’ve started a new job, I’ve found routines a bit rough as for the first few weeks we were next door to a supermarket and would squeeze though the fence to get food at lunch time. After 3 weeks, we moved to another office with no shops for miles around. This is good as you can’t pick up snacks in weak moments. It is bad because you don’t bother to go for a walk at lunch time.

Now I’m starting to get settled into the job I decided to weigh myself. I had worried that I would gain weight but I had stayed constant at 11 stone (154lbs). I had dared to think that I had lost weight as both Jonny and his mum complimented me last week but alas the scales don’t lie. Unfortunately, I’ve not been taking Proactol either which means my stomach hasn’t been great. This morning I was seriously considering picking up some laxatives on the way home but it wasn’t necessary. Phew!

I feel much more settled now though and ready to commit to dieting properly. Even though I am a healthy weight, I would like to be fitter and slimmer rather than a healthy weight and a little wobbly around the edges. My BMI is in the healthy range at under 25.

Tuesday’s food diary

breakfast: strawberry museli

snack: kit kat senses (165 cals)

lunch: cheese sandwhich

snack: cinnamon bagel with a tiny bit of butter

dinner: half a pizza

Overall, that’s roughly 1800 calories.

I could have eaten the whole pizza but I didn’t want to. It’s not a signal of self-control or strength as some would have you believe, it is a sign that you are more in tune with your body and you should be pleased with yourself that you can stop when you want to, rather than you think you should. I know I am proud of myself!

You’re reading my blog for diet tips. For this I must applaud you as you must be fairly intelligent. Having established this fact, you must be pretty confused as to why the UK government has gone back on it’s advice regarding calorie intake.  According to the latest information released, women and men can eat an extra 16% of the original government recommended daily intake of calories without gaining weight.

Women can apparently safely consume an extra 320 calories whereas men can have an extra 400 calories. To make it easy, that is a small cheese burger a day you can eat on top of your diet. Apparently.

As I said, you’re probably fairly intelligent so you will understand that this advice could blow back in the face of the DoH when the UK is set to rival America in 2012 with a third of adults being overweight if current trends continue. So why am I outraged?

Everybody processes calories and converts food into energy at different rates. What’s good for the goose is not always good for the gander. This is because our current weight and the speed at which we metabolise mean that a blanket one-size-fits-all approach is not suitable when advising adults how many calories they should eat. There are methods by which you can calculate how many calories you can eat to maintain your weight but this is complicated and should be done with an expert who you are fully honest with.

Michael Phelps can eat far more than the average person as he burns calories off swimming to an Olympic standard.

At the Beijing Olympics last year, it was revealed that Olympic swimmer, American Michael Phelps ate 10,000 calories a day. His breakfast was:

• three fried egg sandwiches, with cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, fried onions and mayonnaise,
• three chocolate-chip pancakes
• a five-egg omelette
• three sugar-coated slices of French toast
• a bowl of grits (a maize-based porridge)
• two cups of coffee

However a woman weighing 10 stone may only be able to eat 1800 calories a day to maintain her weight but a smaller woman with greater muscle mass may be able to have 2200 calories a day. A guideline such as this is dangerous  for those who stick to these guidelines but does not have a particularly active metabolism.

Also, studies have indicated that people misjudge the amount of calories they actually eat. This is why you should keep a rigorous and detailed diary of everything that you put in your mouth, including drinks.

If you are currently trying to lose weight, keep a strict food diary and log everything you eat. Yes, unfortunately, you must be clear about your portion sizes too. Weigh your food if it helps. From there you will be able to calculate what you honestly consume in a day and from there you can make your own boundaries.

As even a spokesperson for the National Obesity Forum said, this is not a green light for people to eat themselves silly. In this situation, I wholeheartedly suggest dieters ignore government advise on this issue as I feel they are not only giving out mixed messages, they could further contribute to the growing obesity crisis.

2012 - better on the big screen I suspect

Last night, Jonny and I went to the first showing of the new film 2012 staring John Cusack and the only other name I recognise, Thandie Newton. I won’t give the plot away to those who haven’t seen it yet, but it wasn’t the greatest film I’ve ever seen. Yes, it’s rather predictable in some places, the acting leaves much to be desired and there are plot holes that should be better explained. However, if you enjoy general chasos, death and devastation and if you like to watch famous monuments crumble such as the Washington Monument, the Cristo Redentor in Rio de Janeiro or the Vatican in Italy, this is definitely something you might like.

Anyway, standing at the cinema I was appalled by two things. The price of food (£6.50 for a crappy frankfurter hotdog and a massive sugary fizzy drink) and the quality of the food and drink on offer.

There was a Ben and Jerry’s Ice cream stand, a huge kiosk for pic and mix sweets and the aforementioned hotdogs, nachos and the obligatory popcorn.

Considering this kind of thing is crammed with salt that is deliberately intended to make you thirsty and quaff gallons of the expensive fizzy drinks, I do feel somewhat outraged. Why does this make me so cross? Most cinemas have a policy where they do not allow you to bring your own food in.

This is wrong for a few reasons:

1. Their portions are gigantic and they encourage you to buy a medium rather than a “small” drink by reminding you that it is only 20p more.
2. You don’t realise how much you are eating when you’re sat in a cinema and in my teens, if I had popcorn it was usually eaten by time the half an hour of ads finished before the film started!
3. They actively encourage you to buy food by making the food stands more prominent in the lobby than the box office. By time you’ve waited 10 mins to buy your movie tickets, you’re hungry because your brain has been bombarded with images of food!

How can you get past this?

Take a big handbag to hide your snacks of suitable portions. Drink water instead of a litre of evil fizzy drinks. Do you remember my blog posts about fizzy drinks?

Total Chunk Top Tip: Cinemas are a business like everybody else but dieters need to be aware of their underhand money-making techniques. Until cinemas are offering diet-friendly snacks for those dieters who really enjoy a little munch when watching a film on the big screen, my advice is to take your own food and do not apologise if you are ‘caught out’. Dried fruit, rice cakes or a small packet of crisps are all OK in moderation but if you’re really trying to lose weight, get used to not eating whilst distracted with a good movie.

I am like Superman, by day I work as an anonymous copywriter, you might have seen some of my work and will never know. By night, I am a vibrant advocate of weight loss! Scouring the internet, trying to dispel weight loss myths, call people upon bad (or just ridiculous) “advice “, and generally try to make the internet a more interesting place.

Unfortunately, for me, last week the company I work for moved offices. It is only a few extra miles on top of my journey, but I now spend an hour a day driving. This frustrates me for two reasons

I love driving but when I spend an hour a day driving, I do feel as though my time could be better spent...

1. Petrol now costs 105.9 English pennies per litre of unleaded fuel. This is £1.06 to everyone else. Therefore it now costs £50 for me to fill the tank of my little Corsa. This makes me sad.
2. The traffic is awful in the mornings so driving to work takes up an hour or more of my precious time.

If you’re really trying hard to lose weight, this is time wasted.

Or is it?

I drive around in this little purple corsa. Sure, she is a bit old and I need to adjust the clutch tomorrow as the gears won’t go in but she is called Vivienne and she is my baby. If I were to make a lot of money, I would probably tidy her up a bit but I’d make sure I’d get some decent mileage out of her, I’d never sell her unless I really had to. Anyway, in the car I sing for pretty much the whole journey and I couldn’t help but wonder: Does singing burn off calories?

I did a quick search on Google and the results pointed towards singing and waving your arms in church. Now, I am not a believer in any religion and I don’t wish to enter into a debate about my lack of religious belief here. Although I am happy to clarify that Richard Dawkins really helped me clarify my non-beliefs.

Anyway, after much searching, the general consensus appears to be that you burn off 4 calories a minute singing. This is 240 calories an hour. I expect this is if you belt songs out as opposed to shyly humming.

I wouldn’t replace singing for the gym or anything, but for burning a few extra calories when you really can’t do much else, plug in your ipod and pretend you’re Whitney Houston or Pink in the car! I’ve been singing in my car since I passed my driving test back in 2004 and I’ve come to enjoy the weird looks from bemused drivers. I suppose people seeing me (a young woman singing in a car covered in flowers) would think I am weird but I couldn’t care less! Belt out your favourite songs!

Researchers have pinpointed the day that thousands of people across the nation will start their diets – today! Just in time for Christmas.

There are two reasons for this:

1. People want to look amazing over the Christmas period as lots of photographs will be taken

2. Others will want to lose weight in anticipation of the weight they expect to gain over the gluttonous Christmas period.

Either way, get behind the 60% of women who are dieting for the Christmas period and bring fruit into the office instead of mince pies!

I would be very surprised if I were to come across a woman who is not remotely interested in shoes. Women in particular like shoes because they are a great way of expressing your personality. Even Tory MP Theresa May is often photographed in weird yet always wonderful foot-orientated creations.I would very much love to go shoe shopping with her, she certainly seems to find some individual items!

A woman's way of expressing her personality - shoes!

For women who are losing weight, high heels are a wonderful way of creating a beautiful womanly shape. If you wear high heels with a pencil skirt that cuts a couple of inches below the knee, you create an elegant image but better still, your calf muscles appear far more shapely.Once you learn how to balance in high heels, you are more likely to adopt a better posture. Your bottom is pulled forward, your tummy gets sucked in and your shoulders go back. You can appear to have lost several lbs just by wearing high heels and standing properly.

I have been madly in love with Office’s Iron Fist range. I am completely undecided about which pair I would like as there are several I want! Unfortunately, funds dictate that I may only have one pair of shoes. I had to buy some smart flatties at the weekend as high heeled shoes are not always practical if you have to walk a fair distance during the day at work.

Total Chunk Top Tip: If you work in an office, it is fine to wear high heeled shoes. Not only can you create a sexy silhouette if you wear a pencil skirt, your posture improves, your calf muscles look more defined and your confidence will sky rocket. If you find high heeled office shoes uncomfortable to wear, there are several foot treatments to prevent blistering if you wish to persevere. Good posture can take pounds off your appearance. Give it a try!