to wonder how the hell she stays so slim??

[SequinsAndSparkles]

My BIL is engaged to a spanish woman, and we spent the weekend at MIL's, all of us together.

She is very slim, I'd guess a size 6/8. Her skin is glowing and she is stunning, yet her diet perplexes me?

On the first morning, we were all having breakfast, MIL made a fry up for everyone, but I am on a diet so I had special K and some toast. SIL prepared her own breakfast (they are currently staying at MILs while they have some work done on their house), and she had some kind of cheese, can't remember what she said it was, about 10 olives and a slice of ham! Yet she said that my breakfast of Special K and toast was stodgy and apparently English women have 'very strange ideas about nutrition'.

For lunch, she had a chicken salad, but it involved lots of extra virgin olive oil, all over the peppers and a big dollop of salsa. And then for dinner she had chicken smeared in pesto, with green beans in salt, more salsa and a slice of cheese.

How is she so slim??

I didn't have a particuarly healthy weekend in the end, we ended up having a takeaway on the Saturday evening, and SIL wouldn't eat any of it, she wasn't rude, she politely declined but I just find it hypocrytical that she eats all this fatty stuff and made the comment about England having strange ideas about nutrition when I was eating Special K and toast!!

Yum! Polenta!

have a banana for breakfast, they are filling, and very very good for you

It is also about portion size - I eat special k for breakfast with skimmed milk and I am most definitely not fat.

For me its about variety - I also love bran flakes and just can't face eggs etc first thing. And although I love olives - not first thing.

I do find though that as I get older that most of my slim friends work hard at it - they are careful about what they eat and exercise.

Breakfast - about 2/3 tub of Total Greek Yog (the full fat one), with honey (if you're fudging low carb) or Splenda (for the purists), sprinkled with chopped nuts. No hunger until lunch with this.

I lost some weight the end of last year with a sort of Atkins-lite low carb regime: just don't eat sugar, bread, rice, pasta or potatoes (no white foods bar chicken, roughly). And now I'm maintaining my new weight brilliantly by only eating carbs at one or the very most two meals a day. It's all very easy and delicious.

Today, for example, I had porridge with a splash of maple syrup, lunch was a salad with mozzarella and bacon sprinkles, dinner will be chicken curry on a bed of spinach in place of rice. Snacks have been a Babybel and a handful of hazelnuts; might have a piece of fruit later if 'nibbly' whilst watching TV.

I do still sometimes eat bread, but have taken to doing things like hollowing out bread rolls and filling them with tuna mix, so I don't eat the stodgy starchness but still have the delicious crunchy crust.

Oh, and forgot to say, drink lots of water too. If you low carb by swapping veg for starch - pasta for courgette ribbons, rice for spinach, etc - and keep up the fluids, constipation shouldn't be a problem.

Ooooh I made a lasagne over the weekend swapping the pasta for courgette ribbons, it was amazing :)

Francagoestohollywood: I stand corrected on pasta - sorry about that. My family are from southern France and I have lived in both southern France and Spain and do not recognise that food pyramid as a Mediterranean diet.

If Italian chickens are loaded with hormones and antibiotics, then Italian chicken producers are breaking EU laws on a massive scale. Do you have any evidence that they are actually doing this?

Blimey All this talk of low carbing. It's not good for you surely. Our bodies need carbs for fuel.

No, I agree - there's a reason why Atkins has a bad reputation IMO. I do think it's easy to eat too much carbs in an English diet, and in particular I'm trying to eat less in the evening.

I changed my eating habits about 10 years ago and cut out the stodge and man size portions. Now I have muesli or porridge for breakfast. Soup and a salad (careful dressing) for lunch followed by fruit. Dinner tends to be meat with vegetables (winter) or salad (summer). I tend to have carbs in winter (but load up on meat and veg) but not in summer. I love spanish/greek/italian food so tend to eat that type of food in all but the winter months. This is my normal "diet" rather than a "Diet". I am a smallish 8 normally, although currently pregnant. It's weird how (non-medical) people have assumed that I would change what I eat because I am pregnant and eat for two or "I have the excuse now" to eat rubbish. but then also talk about me being "all bump" and not having put on any weight anywhere else.

Having said all of the above, I have to confess to always wanting to try Special K but never having got round to it! Does it taste nice?

I like special K. I eat it for brekkie most days, either that or Bran Flakes. Every dinner we eat involves carbs, be it potatos, pasta, rice or noodles.

If it aint got carbs it aint dinner in my book

I believe the brain has a very small need for carbohydrates, which it easily gets from the odd bit of fruit and root veg.

Otherwise, no, they don't. Which is lucky, what with grain crops largely being undigestible prior to the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. We'd have been stuffed for the previous 99% of our evolution otherwise.

Yes, but there are carbs in diary, vegetables and fruit. So if you eat a good range of these then you get plenty of immediately accessible fuel along with lots of useful other nutrients and then your body can use the protein and fat to make more fuel for your body.

The problem is eating lots of carbs with fats and proteins means your body uses all the carbs first, turns the rest into fat in your liver and then also stores the fat as fat. So you neever get around to using the fat. Even with a low fat high carb diet, the carbs can get turned into fat if you eat too much.

Hmmm. Interesting. I think it depends on how sedentary your lifestyle is.

If you have iTunes, there's a fascinating podcast from Stanford Uni called 'Battle of the Diets: Is Anyone Winning?', where a doctor spends an hour lecturing to other doctors, summarising the latest and best research on low carb, low fat and Mediterranean diets.

He genuinely has no axe to grind/ product to sell, and simply wanted to identify 'the message' that the other doctors could take back for their patients.

By and large, he found that all the diets will work if you stick to them. Low carb won, though, as it had slightly better weight loss, less attrition (people giving up) and WAY better medical results in terms of blood test profiling.

Have a listen; I'm not at all scientific but still found it easy to follow and well presented.

Interesting thread.

I have the opposite problem - I have to make sure I eat carbs because, if I don't, the weight just falls off and I get very thin and run down.

(mind you, can't eat wheat, so I have to be a bit more imaginative).

My late nana used to ea Special K.

It is scary how we have been brain washed to think cereal is healthy.

I'd be like a twig if I ate like that! (OP)

I always stayed at a stable weight (a few lbs too heavy!) until went on Atkins and then the weight just fell off. It doesn't sound like the woman is doing a strict no/low carb diet BUT she clearly isn't over-indulging on the carbs like we Brits do. She's eating healthy, oily fats (explains her glowing skin) and plenty of veg. Good on her! My friend lives off olives and she also has a glowing face (she's English).

Yep, I get most of my carbs from vegetables. I eat meat, chicken, fish, cheese, salads, veggies etc. Often have eggs for breakfast but I can't be arsed to boil them in the morning so I keep a bowl of hard-boiled eggs in the kitchen and have a couple in the mornings with salad or leftover veggies. Sometimes have an avocado, too.

I lost around 25 pounds when I stopped eating bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, couscous etc

Also (don't have time to read full thread so apologies if I'm repeating anyone) but breakfast cereals are notoriously unhealthy. I'm studying science and you wouldn't believe the amount of sugar and crappy carbs that go into cereals like Special K - They may be "low fat" but that doesn't mean they're good for you. You'd be better off with a fried egg and bacon!

If I don't have carbs I slow down (body and brain). This happens very quickly and it's quite scary. I can't speak for everyone, and I do appreciate arguments against carbs on the grounds that human beings ate protein and fruit/veg for a long time before we started eating grains, but for me no-carbing it just wouldn't work. I do though eat things like quinoa more than white rice/pasta etc, and I eat loads of protein and good fats like avocado and oily fish.

Well I am training for a half marathon and am loving and needing my carbs right now!

Interestingly tho, we have a Chinese language student staying with us at the moment and she is tiny, a size 6 and she never touches cereal, milk, or cheese. She has rice, salad and sliced ham for brekkie and alot of eggs.

BringBack, that is one of the problems with cutting carbs to extremities but I can't help wondering if that is due to our bodies being so used to carbs? Admittidly I couldn't stick with the atkins diet for more than 3 weeks as I felt shockingly bad (despite being almost a stone lighter!) but I am considering gradually lowering my carb intake, see how it goes

Yes, I think there might be an element of the body getting used to things, but I've never managed to stay off carbs long enough to find out cos I just grind to a halt . Incidentally (or maybe importantly) I am quite thin (5 foot 10 and about 9 stone) so maybe I just don't have enough stored body fat to burn and that's why I have to keep loading up on carbs? By the way I want to be clear that I'm not deluded and have no interest in losing weight; it's just that I get a terrible post-food slump; carbs can make me feel sluggish and tired and I sometimes wonder if my energy/blood-sugar levels would be more consistent if I cut down.