Despite the need to lose a stone or so, I have decided this New Year to not go on a diet. The need to lose weight is important since I am carrying the equivalent of around half a dozen bags of sugar too much, but I have done diets before and, like 80% of my fellow citizens, have found they don’t work. This is not to decry the benefits of going on a diet but my problem was always when I reached my required weight, what to do then? My answer was usually to start eating again.
I have done the Weight Watchers diet a few times which was bearable, at least for a few months. But I decided, reluctantly, that I was bored sick with it and that I would sustain my weight loss without it. Well, I didn’t sustain my weight loss and gradually put it all on again as the years went by. There had to be another way.
I did not fancy the 5/2 diet which appears, on the face of it, to involve five days of eating chips and drinking beer and two of eating lettuce leave, albeit only one per day. (I may have simplified things a bit here.) There was a cabbage soup diet too and various other diets, all of which I felt might well induce weight loss but also kill you quite quickly.
I knew that the traditional glutinous Christmas would necessitate some lifestyle changes in 2015 and I decided there would be only one way to deal with that: to eat less and to exercise more. Cut out the booze (well, not cut it out, that would be silly, but reduce it) and stop snacking. I know the results of this will likely be much slower than the diets of the past. I loved the first month of the diet – well, the end of the month, anyway – when I found I had lost 7 lbs, and liked the subsequent months as the weight loss slowed down. My theory involves eating less crap.
What finally did it for me was speaking with a colleague at my last place of employment. Without being disrespectful, she was more than slightly overweight and the reason was that she ate lots. And then she added, “I’ve been going to (name of slimming company deleted) for five years now!” I am not a cruel person and I did not reply, “Why?” I figured that rather than paying money to join a club and even more money on an exercise machine such as a treadmill, I could simply eat less and better and walk more, which might actually save me money!
Whatever works for you, then do it, but organised slimming clubs and gyms don’t cut it for me and the statistics suggest I am not alone.
