AIBU to have found the 2 best diets ever that WORK?

[Ambushedbycakeinmydreams]

That's it. I now have the formula for successful and doable weight loss. Here they are, there are 2 methods that I can say absolutely work. But please don't tell me that "they don't work because people often put all the weight back on" - it's not the fault of the diet; diets will only work if you stick with them.

1. Fast 800 Keto After 7 days - 2" lost from my waist; down by a dress size; suddenly regained a lot of formerly worn clothes. Pros - fast results, very motivating Has science behind it so has integrity (Dr Mosley and his GP wife) The food recipes are easy to prepare and the food is gorgeous - I'm so enjoying the food.

Cons - the first phase is hard as though the food is excellent, the portions are small (but you do get used to it after the first week or so).

2. Slimming World Pros - allows you to eat a diet where no foods are excluded, so you can tailor it to personal requirements eg incorporate a bit of alcohol, chocolate, etc you get my drift. Easy to follow - no need to count calories.

Cons - weight loss is invariably slower eg average loss for me a few years ago was 1 - 2 lbs a week.

I did SW a few years ago, lost nearly 2 stone and then Covid hit so no meetings or weigh ins to help keep me on track. And then I did all the Covid stuff too eg lots of baking and bread making (and put over half of the weight back on).

Currently now on Fast 800 Keto to shift the aforementioned weight gain.

Not routinely, no. I weigh it up before making the decision. Non-functional food makes me feel tired and lethargic, so it’s not worth it to me. It’s food marketing that makes us think food = reward/celebration. I had 2 days “off” at Xmas and enjoyed the foods I wanted. (I don’t often make roast dinners so thoroughly enjoyed a fancy one.). That didn’t include mince pies this time. The world didn’t end.

I had a little bit of birthday cake at my toddler nephew’s party a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t really enjoy it and needed a nap when I could really have done with doing something else.

I was at a xmas party last week and stuck to plan food wise but had a few gin and slimline tonics. Thoroughly enjoyed and no hangover. I could have stuck to water but decided I wouldn’t.

I can have anything I want. I choose not to eat the things that make me feel less than 100% the vast majority of the time. I have brain clarity, better sleep (for less tie), more energy, less inflammation. The crap food just isn’t worth the effects, for me. It’s total food freedom and once you have it you don’t want to let go of it!

@ShirleyPhallus

Lol at slimming world. A “diet” which allows unlimited pasta / potatoes / sugary yoghurts isn’t really encouraging healthy eating.

Yes, its unlimited but no where does it say that you have to eat unlimited, everyone has their own threshold. I can't eat more than a small bowl of pasta and more than one yogurt even though ita unlimited. Each person can judge for themselves unlimited means to them.

Unlimited pasta etc AFTER you've eaten a third of a plate of low cal vegetables and a third of a plate of protein.

So first eat your fibre and calcium allocation, then protein and low density food likes green beans, kale, leeks, peppers, cucumber...

Then whatever pasta you need to feel full.

A jacket potato and baked beans, or a bowl of pasta and cheese- that's not following slimming world.

Slimmingworld gets slated on here from people who have never done it or not done it recently. It doesn’t say eat buckets of pasta, muller lights and mug shots. It’s the plan the nhs recommend, in some areas you get 12 weeks free on nhs if bmi 30 plus. It doesn’t exclude food groups. Basic concept is minimum 1/3 plate veg each meal which is helpful as you fill up on lower calorie food. Their recommended portions eg 40g oats or a wholemeal roll are in line with bupa healthy eating guidelines. Encourages cooking from scratch.
I lost 5 stone in 8 months to a healthy bmi. I maintain a healthy weight. It’s not faddy, it’s sustainable long term. I’ve had oats, skyr and berries for breakfast. Veg chilli & baked potato lunch. Tonight I’ll have homemade cottage pie and green veg.

Obviously any diet you stick to will work. There's no magic diet that works any better than others. If you consume fewer calories than you use, you will lose weight.

800 calories a day god how miserable

All diets work. Pretty much every single diet you have ever read will work, for the simple reason that one way or another, you are taking in fewer calories than you are using. It’s when you stop the diet that the problems start

YABU. Almost any diet will work if you can stick to it. The problem is that people can't. That's why the vast majority of diets fail, it's not that there's anything particular wrong with most of the diets. It's just that anything that requires permanent willpower strong enough to fight against appetite, temptation, convenience and social expectations is pretty much doomed to failure.

Meh - in both examples you’re eating under your required calories so yeah you’ll lose weight.

You haven’t discovered anything, you could eat 3 mars bars a day and still lose weight as long as you’re under your maintenance calorie level.

Both of your examples are methods of controlling calorie intake - ths science is the same regardless. They all work on cals in / cals out.

If they work for you OP that’s all that matters. The method is personal, the science is fact.

Unless you can provide non biased research papers then the fast 800 is not backed by science no matter who wrote it!

Lol at slimming world. A “diet” which allows unlimited pasta / potatoes / sugary yoghurts isn’t really encouraging healthy eating.

This is a myth though, peddled by haters of SW. (although FYI pasta and potatoes can absolutely form part of a healthy diet). Anyone who thinks you can eat "unlimited" amounts of these things though and still lose weight is of course deluded.

I lost weight following SW and have managed to keep it off, more or less. I stopped going to group about ,3 years ago because I found the "image therapy" sessions after weigh-in deathly boring. Some people love the sessions and find them integral to maintaining their weight loss.

I've continued to follow the plan - and guess what? The weight has stayed off. If I go off-plan (ie. eat whatever I like and as much as I like) I start putting weight back on and have to reign it back in.

Any "diet" works, be it Keto, fast800 whatever so long as you follow it - but if you start eating lots of takeouts/chocolate/fatty foods again you will obviously revert back to your previous weight.

But if you can treat it as a long-term lifestyle change and not a diet it will continue to work for you.

It's not rocket science is it? Any diet is basically calories in v. calories out. They are all just framed in slightly different ways.

@SarahBellam

All diets work. Pretty much every single diet you have ever read will work, for the simple reason that one way or another, you are taking in fewer calories than you are using. It’s when you stop the diet that the problems start

Yep!

The best 'diets' are sustainable lifestyle changes that change how you approach food and eating, because most of the buzzword diets are not sustainable for the long term. That's why so many people at Slimming World etc are repeat customers. I know people who are on their third or fourth time round. 'But it works!' they cry. Clearly not.

@Peoniesandcream

Well done *@BusinessMindThoughts*

aw thanks! I don't really bang on about it as it's a bunch of small changes that I don't always stick to but I feel loads better for it and have found exercise that I actually enjoy!

My biggest problem is that I cook my meals and usually enjoy all my recipes so to only have a small portion that doesn't take long to eat makes me feel a little hard done by...

@theyhavenothingbuttheaudacity

800 calories a day god how miserable

Not at all!

I am loving the food - so much variety, textures and easy to prepare. Eg today's menu:

pancakes with raspberries and greek yoghurt;
Pea and mint soup with feta crumbs and small can of tuna wrapped in cabbage leaves;
Courgette lasagne with ricotta and spinach.

I'm eating a much wider range of foods than I did pre-diet and will be more than happy to carry on eating similarly post-diet (obvs with more quantity). The menus have given me a boot up the backside regarding expanding my cooking repetoire.

And I'm already losing weight, in 7 days 2" off my waist and down a dress size. Now I'm over the adjusting to keto hump I feel really good and energised, especially knowing that everyday I wake up I am losing weight.

I tried the fast 800 and I was so exhausted, that I couldn't even think. Plus headachy, weak and grumpy. I only lost a pound a week on it (I do have subclinical hypothyroidism though and a busy life). Definitely did not work for me.

Paradoxically, slimming world doesn't cut calories enough for me to lose weight, even with extra excercise. I seem to be in a no-mans land where I either eat enough to not feel terrible and remain fat, or go on an extremely low calorie diet and feel massively I'll the whole time.

Fingers crossed my TSH will cross that magical no. 10 with my next blood test and my GP will cough up the levothyroxin 😕

YABU. You clearly had a poor and unvaried diet. You are loving the food, the very ordinary, normal food, that you describe in your last message. It's not the diet, you just needed to learn how to cook nice stuff.

That's why so many people at Slimming World etc are repeat customers. I know people who are on their third or fourth time round. 'But it works!' they cry. Clearly not.

You're missing the point - it DOES work. It just stops "working" if you go back to eating crap or too much food.

Whether you want to call it a diet or a lifestyle change - it works as long as you keep following the plan.

SW is based on eating 3 healthy meals a day and having low-cal snacks. If you can't live this way (ie. Don't have the willpower) of course you will put the weight back on. That's down to the individual giving up on that particular way of eating - not the diet itself not working.

Eating healthily and drastically cutting back on stuff that's bad for you requires a lot of willpower. It basically comes down to how tough you are mentally and how much you want to stay slim I guess?

It basically comes down to how tough you are mentally and how much you want to stay slim I guess?

I guess you don't understand the science and psychology behind willpower and overeating.

You're basically saying fat people are weak and just don't try hard enough. Do you really think that's the case?

Also some plans are generally easier to stick to longer term than others, which in my view makes them "better" diets.

You're basically saying fat people are weak and just don't try hard enough. Do you really think that's the case?

Well, that's a brutal way to put it but...yes, I guess so.

We all make a choice what we put in our mouths don't we? No one is force feeding us?

There is a psychology behind why people overeat, of course (in my case I think it was the fact that food was in short supply when I was growing up). But what you weigh comes down to how many calories you consume. If you want to blame the "science" go ahead, but if you can't find a way to control what you eat you will unfortunately stay fat.

@Lesperance

YABU. You clearly had a poor and unvaried diet. You are loving the food, the very ordinary, normal food, that you describe in your last message. It's not the diet, you just needed to learn how to cook nice stuff.

Is this aimed at me by any chance? There was nothing wrong with my previous diet - meat, fish, home-made bread; lots of fruit and vegetables; all meals cooked from scratch - hardly ever do takeaways.

The problem I had was I like cakes, puddings, bread too much. And I'd eat too much of them (my own home-made seeded bread, my own home-made crumbles and eves pudding).

But the difference with my recent way of eating is that I'm adding more things in such as omelettes, unusual soups, courgettes and cauliflower as pasta and rice; and going back to cooking with extra virgin oil (rather than a low-fat spray).

The thing is to drop weight you have to eat less energy than you need a day ( over over a course week) and so is that is hard, to maintain you can relax a little, you don't need that deficit, but it's only a little and that is where it goes wrong for people. They relax into bad habits.

I'm fine at maintenance now my weight is the same every week, even with cheeky treats here and there, but I want to loose weight and dropping down that low makes me feel weak and down.

I highly, highly recommend weight loss resources for weight loss and maintenence. It's basically calorie counting- and moving more!- really good format, links to your fitbit and just works!
Not knocking SW as I know loads of people have been successful on it, but it left me with a weird relationship with food.- and the ONLY way you will lose weight, on any diet, is by being in a calorie defecit.
I have a friend code for 7 days free on WLR if anyone wants it.

@bluepeacock

You're basically saying fat people are weak and just don't try hard enough. Do you really think that's the case?

Well, that's a brutal way to put it but...yes, I guess so.

We all make a choice what we put in our mouths don't we? No one is force feeding us?

There is a psychology behind why people overeat, of course (in my case I think it was the fact that food was in short supply when I was growing up). But what you weigh comes down to how many calories you consume. If you want to blame the "science" go ahead, but if you can't find a way to control what you eat you will unfortunately stay fat.

You know NOTHING and I do mean NOTHING about obesity or why it occurs. Not a thing.

I'll never understand the obsession with losing weight. Your bathroom scales literally show the gravity you are exerting on the planet! Yes, it's a useful indicator of progress but should only be part of the calculation.

Each pound of muscle on your body burns 100 calories a day. Each pound of fat on your body burns 10 calories a day. If you drastically reduce your calorie input, your body will start shedding the high calorie burning muscle before it loses fat. Yes, the scales show you are losing "weight" but you're losing all the good stuff. Your metabolism slows down and you become a skinny fat person!

At age 20 I weighed 8 stone and was a dress size 10. Twenty five years later, having learnt about nutrition and training, and recovered from being overweight in my 30s, I weigh 9 stone and am a dress size 8. My wedding dress fits me better today even though I weigh a stone more! I eats loads of healthy food to fuel my strong body.

That's why WW and SW are a load of tosh. If I lost 3lb of fat and gained 4lb of muscle, some sanctimonious cow bag would tut at the scales and tell me I'd failed that week.

If you look at research around commercial diets you will find that the five year results are pretty appalling. At 5 years following weight loss around 95% of people will have regained all the weight to within a pound or two. There’s even an increasing body of evidence showing that a high minority….around 40% will have gained more on top. As a treatment for obesity it has appalling outcomes, would we accept this of treatment for any other issue?

Fact is that slimming clubs rely upon repeat custom. The only club which acknowledged this (once) was WW.

Most of them are not sustainable long term and there are good biological reasons for this.

Have a read about set point weight theory which is fascinating.

Meanwhile…I’ve lost a huge amount of weight but being diabetic is turning out to be a pretty powerful motivator to keeping me going. I will never again not weigh myself weekly for example.

I’ve had to find my own way though. I do it with SW (although I don’t follow their plan) and use it as a vehicle for weighing accurately once a week. I look at carbs, I look at protein and I look at calories. I don’t care about fat….when I do note it I see I am eating pretty low fat on the whole.