Minimize Me: 10 Diets to Lose 25 Lbs in 50 Days (5 page)

Here
is photo proof of what I looked like at the start of the project and what I
looked like after diet number two

Thursday 30th October to Monday 3rd
November

Weight: 15 Stone 4 lbs

Day 11 and I’m on my third diet, the
balanced diet. I’ve decided to take guidance from the NHS website and this is
what they have to say about it.

"Despite what you see in some diet
books and TV programmes, healthy eating can be really straightforward. A diet
based on starchy foods such as potatoes, bread, rice and pasta; with plenty of
fruit and vegetables; some protein-rich foods such as meat, fish and lentils;
some milk and dairy foods; and not too much fat, salt or sugar, will give you
all the nutrients you need. When it comes to a healthy diet, balance is the key
to getting it right. This means eating a wide variety of foods in the right
proportions, and consuming the right amount of food and drink to achieve and
maintain a healthy body weight."

In truth it seems fairly simple, but if
it is, why do so many people struggle with it? According to research, as many
as 67% of British men and 57% of British women are overweight or obese, and
that figure climbs to 71% and 62% respectively when looking at American men and
women. There are countless dossiers, reports and studies which have identified
the reason and then proceeded to put forward their radical proposal to rid the
world of obesity for good. Have any of them made the slightest bit of
difference? No. For me it’s something that is going to be very hard to change.
It will certainly get a lot worse before it gets any better. It all comes down
to the two ‘C’s. Convenience and cost. Jamie Oliver famously waged a war
against schools for serving Turkey Twizzlers and the like, and the reason it
was being served up to our children was not because the government or local
authorities thought it was good nutritious food, but because it was cheap and
quick to prepare. Schools were (and still are) under huge pressures to stay
within their allocated budgets, and often have to take the easy way out. As far
as I’m concerned, as long as fattening foods remain cheap and healthy, organic
food remains expensive, we’ll have a problem. Is there enough incentive to
choose healthy over fattening when it costs twice as much to buy and twice as long
to prepare?

People will have you believe that you
can easily prepare home-cooked meals which are nutritious, healthy and simple
to make, and while that might be true for some, for me it’s just not practical.
For example,
Jamie's 30-Minute Meals
was a fantastic television series
and a wonderful book – I loved it so much that I’ve pretty much made everything
in the book – but it’s just not practical to use it on a day-to-day basis and
it works out hugely expensive. It never actually takes 30 minutes, because you
always need to factor in the time it takes to go down the shop to get those
essential edamame beans. And I promise I’m not lying when I tell you that the
ingredients for one of his salads alone cost me £14.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter what
you’re cooking and eating, as long as over time it’s well-balanced. Louis, my
nutritionist, has said that a balanced diet essentially means that you should
eat the right amount of food for how active you are, depending upon your
height, weight, basal metabolic rate etc. What? What does any of that even
mean? The sentence above proves as much as anything else where the problem
lies. It is not always a lack of knowledge, it is often more a lack of
understanding, and the best way to help people in that respect is to make
things simpler. I asked Louis to come back and explain it to me using words
that a) I could understand, and b) that do not require the use of a scientific
calculator and compass.

"Okay," he said. "To put
it really simply, you should eat a range of foods and stick to the basic
principle of 80:20 – 80% good and 20% bad."

I liked the idea of 20% bad. I briefly
toyed with the idea of using up the 20% in the first day. One day of pure
unadulterated badness, followed by four days of being good. It was tempting,
but as the basic principle of this diet is balance, I can’t see that a whole
day gorging on sugar and fat would really work.

The NHS website explains that to have a
healthy, balanced diet, people should try to eat the following:

·
          
Plenty of fruit and
vegetables

·
          
Plenty of starchy
foods, such as bread, rice, potatoes and pasta

·
          
Some meat, fish,
eggs, beans and other non-dairy sources of protein

·
          
Some milk and dairy
foods

·
          
Just a small amount
of food and drinks that are high in fat and/or sugar

Initially I thought that the ‘balanced
diet’ was going to be one of the easiest to follow, as it doesn’t have any
strict guidelines, but in fact it’s the lack of strict guidelines which could
end up being my ultimate downfall. I’m having to go it alone. There are no
foods which are out of bounds, there’s no calorie counting or tracking of foods
at all. It’s all down to me to make the right choices to ensure I get the right
balance. Looking at the diet in more detail, it seems to be the perfect ‘diet’
for long term success, and I decided to place the word diet in inverted commas
just then because when you think about it, it’s not really a diet at all; it’s
a basic principle which everyone should stick to when eating food. It works as
a diet for me and for my challenge because I currently eat unhealthily and I’m
overweight, so by following these new principles, I should naturally lose
weight. Here’s hoping anyway…

It’s fair to say that being on the
balanced diet has meant that I’ve had to think about food far more than I had
previously in the challenge. On the 5:2 and the Special K diets I had it far
easier, as the decisions were effectively taken out of my hands, but on the
balanced diet I have had to carefully plan every meal and snack.

I decided that the best way for me to
succeed on the balanced diet was to write down a meal plan for the entire five
days. It has taken a fair bit of planning, but has meant that I don’t have to
wake up each morning and wonder what I’m going to eat, which is good because I know
that if I found myself in that situation I would simply cheat. I’d be taking
the first thing out of the fridge and arguing that a carrot cake is in fact
very well balanced indeed because it has vegetables, dairy and nuts.

I’ve written down my five-day meal plan
below in case you’re interested in knowing exactly what has passed my lips for
the last five days. It’s not adventurous, ground-breaking, or even that
interesting, but for those of you who may be thinking about trying your own
diet, it may provide a bit of insight.

Day 11

Breakfast: A small bowl of Special K
(seems silly to waste it)

Snack: Banana

Lunch: Tuna salad

Snack: Fruit, nut and seed mix

Dinner: Pasta with homemade tomato and
vegetable sauce with pancetta

Snack: Two-finger KitKat

Day 12

Breakfast: Weetabix

Snack: Apple and satsuma

Lunch: Ham salad sandwich and a packet
of baked crisps

Snack: Healthy granola bar

Dinner: Butternut squash risotto

Snack: Two-finger KitKat

Day 13

Breakfast: Yoghurt with granola and a
berry compote

Snack: Fruit, nut and seed mix

Lunch: Vegetable omelette

Snack: Banana

Dinner: Homemade chilli con carne and
rice

Snack: A chocolate HobNob

Day 14

Breakfast: Poached egg on toast (a
Sunday treat)

Snack: Healthy granola bar

Lunch: Ham salad

Snack: Apple and satsuma

Dinner: Jacket potato with the rest of
the homemade chilli con carne

Snack: A chocolate HobNob

Day 15

Breakfast: Yoghurt with granola and a
berry compote

Snack: Banana

Lunch: Chicken salad sandwich and a
packet of baked crisps

Snack: Two rich tea biscuits (was meant
to be the fruit nut and seed mix again but someone brought in a load of
biscuits, and it was a Monday)

Dinner: Homemade fish and chips (breaded
haddock with potato wedges)

Snack: A two-finger KitKat

I’ve found the balanced diet relatively
easy to follow and stick to, and in truth that’s exactly how it should be,
because it’s the way everyone should eat. It has a fair bit of flexibility
because there are days where you will undoubtedly overdo it, so by using the 80:20
principle that Louis talked about, you simply make some changes in the
following days to make up for it. If you have a meal out planned, then perhaps
you could eat well in the day or two leading up to it. You could of course eat
well on the day afterwards, but if that meal also included copious amounts of
alcohol, then the next day would be a write off too, courtesy of the sausage
and bacon sandwich needed to bring you to your senses.

Looking back now, I think I made a
mistake on the balanced diet. I think I should have had a day where I treated
myself either to a huge piece of chocolate cake or maybe even a takeaway,
because I now sit on the verge of diet number four - the juice diet. No solid
food for five days, and now not even the memory of a chocolate cake or Chinese
to help get me through. That said, the lack of chocolate cake and takeaways
probably helped me towards my final weigh-in, which revealed a 4lb loss. I’m
delighted with that because although I had read quite a lot and received advice
from Louis, I really was going it alone on this one. Also, it means I’ve hit a
milestone – I’ve lost a stone, and in just fifteen days.

Summary:

An easy diet to follow, and one which
offers huge flexibility. It’s clear that for long-term success, this is a diet
which should be followed. The beauty is that once you’ve reached your desired
weight, you carry on eating this way – there’s nothing to change; the diet
simply becomes a principle. The only downside is the lack of structure. This is
a great diet for the strong-willed and the stubborn, but not so good for those
who lack willpower and the confidence to go it alone.

Starting Weight: 15 stone 4 lbs

Finishing Weight: 15 stone 0 lbs

Weight loss: 4 lbs

% of body weight lost: 1.90 %

Faffiness: 5/10

Difficulty: 5/10

Would I do it again? Yes, and I plan to
stick to these principles once I get to my desired weight

Total weight lost: 14 lbs