Having spent the year losing around half the weight I intended to lose, I suspect that Christmas 2015 saw me put most of it back on again. I did not “go on a diet” as some people call it because I have been there, done that and bought the T shirt that no longer fits. Diets don’t work for me.
Diets are, by their very nature, highly restrictive and temporary fixes to lose weight and around 95% of people who have been on them eventually put all the weight back on again. I know this to be true because I have done it several times.
Obviously, the best thing about dieting is the loss of weight. Clothes fit better, you don’t feel quite so bad looking in the mirror and you are probably a bit healthier. But the worst thing, in my opinion, is that the pleasure of eating is lost. At least with a formal diet, you can at least console yourself with the likely knowledge that once you have achieved your desired weight, you can eat all those nice foods again, even though you will put the weight back on. And then you can start again.
Instead of going on a diet, I changed my diet, cutting out as much sugar and fat as possible, although not all the time. There was the sacrifice of cheese and chips, to name but two favourites, but once you get into the swing it’s not so bad and by changing my diet, I could have the occasional lapse one day and then return to the more permanent regime the next. Except for Christmas. Any day now, it is back to thins, back to fruit, no cheese and no chips.
There was definitely the sense of guilt I felt about ending my new regime which had served me so well, but since I know it works, it causes me very little in the way of inconvenience and I can eat and drink a decent selection of unhealthy stuff, it will be little trouble.
Getting older doesn’t help. Until I reached my forties, weight was what someone else worried about. I was one of those, you see, who could eat and drink anything without affecting my waistline. I reckoned without the passage of time and like most other people the pounds began to pile on, slowly but surely. Sadly, I was not immune from weight gain, as I had always assumed I was.
It won’t be a specific diet that takes me back to where I was before Christmas and a half stone below that; it will be a different eating regime which is very different.
I shall be back to cutting out sugar and fat, taking more exercise and I know that by the spring I shall be back to normal once more.
Nothing would suit me more than to spend each night eating cheese and biscuits with several fine bottles of red, after an evening meal of fish and chips. I can do this myself without the hassle and expense of dieting clubs and whilst I don’t recommend it – how could I possibly recommend cutting back on eating nice things? – I know it will work!
