Introduction

In 2006, I realised I was overweight, and that I had been overweight for quite some time.

Since the age of about 16, I always assumed that I was around 12 stone in weight (give or take a couple of stone) and realised that the health forms on any job applications for the last few years were wrong! I was getting married in just over a years time, and my girlfriend and I decided that we’d both try to lose some weight before the big day.

It was just after Christmas, so there was no temptation to pig-out over the festive season, and there had been an advert for something called the ‘Cambridge Diet’ in the local press.

Having gone along to be measured and weighed before starting the course, we left with about £70 worth of soups, milk-shakes and powders, which would last us about a week! More expensive than eating properly!

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The diet was basically a very low carbohydrate, very low calorie, no fat diet, supplimented with vitamins.

The weight loss really was incredible, but to be honest, I managed to stick at it for about a week before I really couldn’t cope with living on a small milkshake and a couple of soup-type-drinks a day. After the diet had settled down for a couple of weeks, there was the option of cereal bars and other snacks, but I wasn’t going to wait that long!

I gave up.. it’s as simple as that. But having seen what an essentially low carb’ diet could do, I devised my own version of the Atkins Diet.

This basically meant chopping a few staples out of my diet:

• No Bread
• No Pasta
• No Rice
• No Potatoes

As far as I was concerned this was great! Breakfast was sausage, egg and bacon, lunch was usually a packet of ham or turkey, and dinner was meat or fish with plenty of vegetables – oh, and lots of water to drink.

Somewhere along the line however, my wife and I found out (or decided) that there were very few carbs on red wine, so the evening meal was supplimented with a couple of classes or rioja or merlot, which was most pleasant!

By the time of the wedding, I had lost around a stone and a half, and I don’t think I had suffered too much in the process..

This may have been part of the problem that followed… I had been living on an essentially low-carb, high fat diet, and when I got close to the target weight (and past the wedding) the carbs started to creep back in again. Before I know what was happening I was on a high-carb, high fat diet, and the weight just flew back on again.

18 months after our wedding, and I’m back to the weight I was when I started the diet, and I dread stepping on the Wii Fit, only to be told that I’m once more obese.

This blog is therefore a chronicle of my efforts to shift some of the pounds again, and to hopefully collect, collate and pass on some useful tips to others in my position.