Our successful diet
From the 5th January Sarah and I embarked on a health and weight loss diet. It wasn’t a New Year’s resolution. Sarah has always said she would give her body 12 months to recover from her chemotherapy before going on any kind of diet. She had her last dose of chemo on the 2nd January last year, and we chose our first day back in work after the Christmas break to begin our health regime in earnest.
Four weeks on, through diet alone, Sarah has lost 10lbs while I have lost 8lbs. I’m ashamed to say “through diet alone”, as last year we bought a multi gym for one of our spare rooms. It’s one of those “stacked” all-in-one systems that doesn’t take up too much room. We also bought a treadmill – one that has no motor. You have to hold on and power it with your legs. It takes a considerable amount of effort and as a result we have to measure in tenths of kilometres rather than kilometres. I haven’t made much use of it at all recently. But in a way, this helps to quantify the success of the diet. Had I been exercising too, how would I know if it were the diet or the exercise that was causing the weight loss?
We were becoming chocaholics. Nearly every evening we would have an almost obscene amount of the stuff, and I know that this is the biggest factor in my cholesterol battle. Had I not had my brain haemorrhage nearly six years ago, my high cholesterol levels would not have been discovered, even though it was unrelated. I would possibly, by now, have died of a heart attack. This is one of the many reasons why my brain haemorrhage was one of the best things to have ever happened to me.
We have now cut out almost all carbohydrates from our diet. No potatoes (except the sweet variety), no bread (except for a little treat on Sundays so far), no sugar, no processed food. Virtually everything we eat at the moment is homemade. We cook only with coconut oil and olive oil. Sarah has cut out sugar from tea and coffee (I never took sugar in the first place). Every evening, just after we come home from work, while she spends about 40 minutes preparing our food, I prepare our salad and fruit-based lunchboxes for the following day in work. Sometimes we manage to prepare both for two days, giving us an evening off food preparation the following day. It’s not hard. It’s actually quite fun working together in the kitchen. By 6.30pm at the latest, we have finished our meal and have the rest of the evening to ourselves. The food she is cooking is no less than delicious. It is no hardship at all. She also makes a type of cake/biscuit from bananas, oats and raisins which replaces the biscuits that we would shovel down with a cup of tea every day when we arrived home from work.
Sarah has cut out alcohol altogether. I drink red wine on a Saturday evening. If we had been exercising, we could easily have each lost a stone over the last four weeks. We haven’t eaten cake, but we will snack on nuts and raisins, or a bowl of cherries. In work, despite there always being biscuits and cakes lying around brought in by various colleagues, I have opted out and will only eat the food that I have brought in prepared from the night before.
My natural weight is 10 stone. I was 12 stone on the 5th January. Sarah isn’t hugely overweight, but needs to lose some (notice how I tactfully avoided mentioning any numbers). This is working for us, and neither of us sees any reason why we should stop. Self-discipline is not an issue as we are really enjoying it.
Anyway, it’s Saturday evening and it’s time for my wine :p