My way of losing weight

Hi All,

My new year’s resolution was to finally shift the weight I put on 8 years ago when having my twins.  I’ve shifted bits of it every so often but my attempts have normally fizzled out quite quickly and the weight’s gone back on.

This time it seems to be working, yay, so I thought I’d share it with you

I’m doing various different things so that if I mess up in one area I know I’ve still done ok in the others:-

1. I’m parking our car a 10 min walk down a very steep hill away from school so that I get 20 mins of walking at least 3-4 days out of 5;
2. I’ve swapped my regular bag of crisps at 10.30ish for several pieces of fruit;
3. I’ve cut potatoes, pasta, rice etc right back and swapped it for veg;
4. I’ve cut down my breakfast and evening meal portion sizes a bit;
5. I’m not eating puddings;
6. If I can’t resist something sweet in the evening I’ll only have a yoghurt;
7. Because my 10.30 food is much more than a snack I’ve cut back how much I eat at lunch;
8. I’ve swapped the four slices of healthy brown bread sandwiches I used to have for lunch for a bowl of home made soup (gorgeous!) and one slice of bread and marg;
9. Two or three times a week I prance about in front of the tv doing a quick 15 min exercise dvd lol!
10. Every night I do two different girlie sit up things.  One is with legs flat, finger tips behind your ears and raising your shoulders off the floor and back, the other is similar but with bent knees and bringing one knee and the opposite elbow towards each other, touching, putting them back and then doing the same thing with the other knee and elbow.  This works on both sets of stomach muscles.  This is developing some rock hard abs below the flabby bit in the middle! I’m hoping one day I might be able to see as well as feel them lol!

I think that’s it.  I didn’t realise I was doing so many different things until I wrote I down! I’ve found it fairly easy to keep to most of the time, although I’ve found if I’m extra tired I can give in to sweet temptations quite easily.  Although if they’re not in the house in the first place then it’s easy to resist lol! Also weekends when the family are around much more it can be harder too.

I’ve heard that it’s better to eat more meals and small ones rather than three big ones which is why I’ve sort of chopped lunch in half and made it a healthier version. I’ve found doing it this way, having part two of lunch at about 2pm that I can then easily go to 5.30pm without wanting to snack.  Apparently eating like this helps your metabolism increase as if you leave it so long between meals it goes into starvation mode and slows your metabolism down.

The weight’s come off at about 1/2-1lb a week so I’ve lost nearly 3/4 stone so far in two months which I’m really chuffed with, even though it’s slower than I’d like I think the key here is that it’s a way of eating that for me is relatively easy to maintain.   Which means that in another two months I should have lost about another 3/4 stone, which will be 1 1/2 stone!  I’ll be so pleased if this happens and I can then keep it there!  I’ve also noticed a distinct reduction in the ‘love handles’.

I’ll post again at the beginning of May to let you know how I’m doing

Bye for now

Lose weight the Hay Diet way

Reading time: 5 mins

I first heard about the ‘Hay diet’ or ‘food combining’ from my parents.  They found that they lost 1lb a week pretty much every week and weren’t eating any less food than normal, just in different combinations.

The idea is that you don’t eat protein and carbohydrate together, and that fruit and veg are neutral.  There are various other elements to it but this is the essence of it.  There are links at the end of the post where you can go and read about the details of the diet in more detail if you want to.*

Proteins are things like meat, egg and dairy products and carbs are things like bread, potatoes, flour, rice, pasta etc.

So what this means is that you shouldn’t have cows milk on your cereal, meat or cheese in your sandwiches or potatoes, rice or pasta with your meat.

When I first heard about the Hay diet I thought that the idea of losing 1lb a week without eating any less food sounded great until I found out these ‘rules’*.  That put me off rather!  After a couple of months and my parents were still losing 1lb a week and working out at what point they were going to stop as they’d reached their ideal weights I decided that it was probably worth giving a go.  I found out that even just applying these techniques to one or two meals a day was worth it although you wouldn’t lose weight quite as fast.

So I found out from my mum what exactly they were eating for their meals and started the following rough plan:-

Breakfast

Soya milk has protein in it but alot less than cows milk, so I have it on my cereal for breakfast.  My first thoughts on this were that I’d tried soya milk before and thought it was foul stuff!  I tried a little bit of my mum’s (unsweetened) and was pleasantly suprised, it was actually quite ok, not just like cows milk but once it was on cereal it was absolutely fine!  One meal sorted

Lunch

I alternate between two sorts of lunches.  I either have a protein one or a carb one, both with loads of salad.  Being as I work from home I’m not keen on taking too much time out to sit and eat ‘doing nothing’ so my first lunch idea works well.  I cut up a whole load of salad bits (cucumber, beetroot, tomato, spring onion) into mouthful sized cubes and combine them in a cereal bowl along with cubed cheese and hard boiled eggs.  Sometimes I drizzle a little bit of salad dressing too.  This is an easy lunch to eat with a fork whilst catching up on emails!

The other lunch is a sandwich one.  3 slices of wholemeal bread (Burgen’s my favourite as it’s low GI too) with salad in it.

Dinner

This I found much harder to come up with meals that I wanted to eat and that fitted in with what the rest of the family are having as I was determined not to start cooking two different meals.

One easy meal is a cooked breakfast but without the fried slice or slice of bread and butter.  I grill the sausages and bacon to cut out the frying as much as possible.  I must admit we still have fried eggs, although one could have them poached instead.

Another one is when having what I think of as an ‘easy meal’ for those days when I choose not to spend so much time preparing food.  On these days I serve something like sausages, burgers or fish in batter to everyone else and have a veggie alternative myself, there’s a growing amount of choice of this sort of food these days and some of them are really nice!

One alternative we tried was quorn and although we found it quite pleasant (in a spag bol type meal) it had rather undesirable effects the next day that changed our minds rather rapidly!  We did try the quorn sausages too just to make sure that’s what had caused it and it was so we’re not adding that to our diet.  Apparently this only happens to some people so it’s well worth the try as it opens up alot of possibilities for meals.

The easiest thing I found to do for a meal was just to do a bit extra veg for myself instead of potatoes, after all potatoes are only another veg themselves.

Conclusion

I’ve also swapped all snacks for fruit too which obviously must make a big difference in weight loss.  I imagine it’s a combination of the food combining and that I’m eating more fruit and veg and less sugary/fatty snacks.  Either way it’s working, I’m eating healthily, losing weight steadily – what more could a girl want?!  I’ve lost 3/4 of a stone at the consistent rate of 1lb a week so I’m very happy

I’ll be posting some ‘Hay Diet’ recipies soon so do subscribe (top right hand corner of page) so that you don’t miss them

I’d love to hear your weight loss stories too!

Related posts:-

How to survive juggling self employed work and school holidays

Awesome stationary that doesn’t cost the earth

What Now?

Leave a comment (below)

Subscribe to Sarah’s Fleeces (top right)

Email Sarah@SarahsFleeces.co.uk

Check out my shop

##############################################################################

* Read more details about the Hay diet in these two sites.  The diet can be used to help ease digestive problems and many other common ailments as well as being used for weight loss:-

http://www.vitaminuk.com/pages/articles/whatisthehaydiet.htm

http://www.netfit.co.uk/fatcom.htm