When mentioning the word diet, most people think about how little they can eat and how much food they will need to exclude from their diet. Most diets also leave you hungry and depleted of energy and most of all is not sustainable.

The truth is when you go on a diet where you can only eat fruit or soup, you are going to come back with a vengeance when you stop your diet and worst of all you are going to be forced to stop because you are going to develop serious cravings and you will be left completely without energy. We have all seen this phenomenon where people go on these diets and claim huge weight loss just to suddenly switch to another diet and nobody can see any sign of weight loss.

Looking at Google you will see endless advertisements for diet pills that will let you lose a lot of weight in a very short time. Some of them are downright dangerous to your health.

The truth is that there are some diets that will let you get good results with or without exercise, but if you lose more than a kilogram a week you are not going to sustain the weight loss and  eventually you will give up and regain the lost weight.

What we have known for a while is that there are a couple of simple principles to apply to your normal diet that will let you lose weigh at a steady pace over a sustained period of time and will leave you with a sustainable habit that will also provide you with the energy to do exercise and provide an even better result.

The primary principles are:

• Start your day with a protein breakfast
• Mix your protein and carbs for lunch – this means you can pretty much eat whatever you like
• Eat only carbs at supper
• No bread or sugar

The secondary principles are:

• Eat before you become hungry
• Keep your portions small
• Don’t eat after 17:00 (5 pm)  in the afternoon – the general rule here is no eating 5 hours before you go to sleep

When I started on my journey, I had no issue with any of the principles above except maybe the curfew on eating after 5 in the afternoon. I also found that I initially got a bit hungry between meals and found that drinking coffee with cream assisted in overcoming these hunger events.

Dietary guidelines:

I don’t want to get into very strict dietary guidelines but will tell you in broad terms what worked for me.

For breakfast I would alternate options.

• Option 1 – Three eggs fried in a pan in butter with grated cheese sprinkled over it and some cream poured over it. Put the lid on it and let the cheese melt and dish up. Sometimes I fried some mince in a Teflon pan and put it on top of the eggs.
• Option 2 – Scrambled (3) eggs with cream and some cheese or cheese and mushrooms on top – Serve the mushrooms any way you prefer. I happen to like it fried in butter and cream.
• Option 3 – A beef or ostrich patty with an egg and grated cheese on top and frittata on the side. You could replace the patty with a pork or beef sausage or even bacon if you prefer.

For lunch I really have no specific guidelines. I really just ate what I wanted, but I liked things like cottage pie or mince and rice, sometimes with curry other time just onions salt and pepper, but you can really eat anything as long as you keep the portions reasonable.

For supper I alternated between oats cooked with a bit of cream and honey to taste, or Future Life energy cereal mixed either with water alone or water and a bit of milk and/or cream. I served the Future Life like a shake in other words more liquid than food. Future Life is very filling and you only need a little bit to see you through to the next day. My brother also served a shake consisting of skimmed milk, whey powder, peanut butter and some oats or oat bran. The shakes become a meal replacement.

If we had a braai (barbeque) in the evening I would keep my food for lunch the next day. I was really strict on this as I was very committed to get to my target weight as soon as possible. You can play around and decide to have a cheat day, but I found that it set me back too far and then I had to work harder to get my weight back down. This is a personal choice, but my advice is to take the plunge and just do it.

The tools that you need are:

• Commitment
• A target weight that you want to achieve
• A good electronic scale
• Some tool to manage your journey towards the target

Applying yourself to the journey towards reaching your target:

Commitment is what I explained in my blog about the Moment of Truth. If you are not committed to go on and complete this journey you will fail, so make sure you have the stamina and will to continue. Managing your journey to the goal will play a vital part in completing the journey successfully.

Select a target weight but be realistic. Using the BMI weight for your length is usually a good indicator. If you are severely overweight, make it a bit higher. Once you achieve goal 1, you can always select a new goal.

A good electronic scale is essential in managing your weight loss journey. Weigh yourself every day first thing in the morning. Record your weight with a tool that allows you to see the target every time you capture the lower weight recorded. Now here is an important thing that worked for me. I only recorded my weight if it was lower than the previous recording. That worked like a sort of mini target every time I temporarily exceeded my previous day’s recording. Remember that a bit too much salt the previous day can affect your weight the next day so being a bit heavier doesn’t mean you are necessarily heavier. Just ignore it and keep on recording away every time your weight goes down even a 100 grams. This is a long term journey, depending on how high or low the target is that you set for yourself. I became passionate about my results and the first person I saw after achieving another notch on my journey would hear my weight rather than a “Good morning”. I was extreme and people thought I was crazy until they saw the results and how it kept getting better and didn’t stop until I achieved my goal.

Tools to manage the journey towards the target can be a piece op paper that you stick on a wall, a whiteboard and pen, a spreadsheet or an application. Talk to me by dropping me an email if you need some advice on this. In my case I started with a spreadsheet and later progressed to an app which really worked very well. From time to time I advertised my results by sharing it with people. In my case my bicycle also became a tool that I used to achieve more impressive results. I will share my results that included my weight and performance gains in blogs to follow.

These results became my secondary motivator that kept me motivated to keep going.

Finally, this is all you need to achieve your goal and all the benefits that come with it.