Low Carbohydrate Diets
So I’d seen my mate Bob lose a couple of stones on the Atkins Diet a few years ago, and decided that perhaps it was time I gave it a go.
I started by chopping all the high carbohydrate foods I could think of from my diet. OK, so that was bread, rice, pasta and potatoes basically. At the time I was working for a company in Milton Keynes that had a relatively good (and more importantly flexible) canteen, so my breakfast most days consisted of bacon, sausage and omelette!
How wrong does that sound? Bacon sausage and omelette for breakfast, and on a diet? Sounds mad, but it worked.. Beer at lunchtime was of course banned, and replaced (when required) by a gin and slimline tonic. Solids at lunchtime were a little more tricky so I started taking salads that I’d prepared the night before. Chicken, cheese, ham, whatever happened to be in the fridge really.
Our Online Shop
Dinner in the evening was pretty close to what we would usualy eat, except without the carbs (potatoes, rice etc) and with loads of vegetables. Our one main weakness I’ll confess was red wine, although I reckoned (perhaps incorrectly) that there weren’t that many carbs in red wine, so we could just about fit a glass or two in with dinner. The be fair, wines are generally very high in calories and have very little nutritional value, but we all need a little treat, right?
Well we both stuck to the ‘diet’ fairly well, and in 18 months I’d lost about 25lb and fitted into my wedding suit much better than I would have done the previous year. I even tried to wear one of my old suits to a Christmas dinner, but was informed that it made me look ‘too ill’ as it was far too big for me, with shoulders like David Byrne of Talking Heads fame!
OK, so we got through the wedding, had a great day and life returned to normality… except I changed jobs and went to work in London.
I’d lost the canteen in the morning that supplied me with bacon egg and omelette, and that was replaced with a hastily grabbed bacon roll at the railway station at 7am. Lunch? Well I tried to eat low carb foods for lunch, and there are numberous supermarkets nearby, but you can only eat so many packets of ham or chicken, and it’s SO much easier to just grab a sandwch off the office trolley mid-morning.
Then of course there’s the Thursday lunchtime drink, and Monday or Tuesday depending on how depressing the project is! When the round is 5 pints of lager and 6 pints of beer, a gin and slimline tonic doesn’t seem to fit properly..
Evening dinner? Well I start travelling home now around 5pm and get home about 7.30pm, and the carbs have crept back into the diet again. Not on a grand scale, but a baked potato here, and perhaps a bit of pasta there.. and of course a glass or two of wine..
Guess what? I’m nearly back up to the weight I was 3 years ago. The ‘Low Carb’ diet became a ‘Low Carb – High Fat’ diet, which then became a ‘High Fat with Carbs’ diet!
So back to square one, but at least I know where I went wrong. It takes strength to lose the weight and a purpose, perhaps a specific target on a specific date, like fitting into a decent suit for a wedding!