New Year, New Diet

[Enid]

Sorry to do this, but I am already planning. Last year lost pounds by having porridge for breakfast, beans on toast (no butter) for lunch and something from the Good Housekeeping Low fat cookbook for supper. Oh and no alcohol...

How I'm dreading it this year.

Support and tips desperately needed.

how long did you eat this for and how much did u loose? i hate fruit and veggies so find it hard to eat 'good' plain food but i could do beans on toast.

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robinw - have never heard of glycaemic indices! The diet worked fantastically though, I managed to shift a stone and a half (stubborn pre pregnancy fat - am I the only person who put ON weight while bfeeding??) over about four months. Just used common sense really, it was supposed to be low fat - porridge with water and a spoonful of maple syrup (nigella's suggestion!) and beans or egg on toast. No snacks except twiglets and the occasional muffin with jam (no butter).

I did exercise quite a bit with a yoga video and long walks with the buggy.

More about GI please...!

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I tried the GI diet last summer,I lost weight and I never felt hungry .I lent the book I used to a friend and can't remember all the details but I seem to remember drinking vast amounts of apple juice and having at least 5 meals a day.
Before I went on the diet I was having mild problems with my blood sugar level - waking up each day feeling really muzzy-headed, getting ravenous/feeling faint if I went more than a couple of hours without eating. The diet actually made me feel better as well as losing weight.
I stopped the diet when I became pregnant, but I'm thinking of starting again in the new year.
It's not the easiest diet as far as willpower is concerned as you can't have 'a little of what you fancy' without messing it up. In the past I've done calorie-counted/weightwatcher's type diets and found them much easier to follow as you can 'sin' and still lose weight, but the GI diet is the first one I've felt better for doing.

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Just been reading the Times today, and then I flick onto this board - how appropriate...

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,7-2002000098,00.html

we women are so-o-o predictable!!!!

Oh for gods sake. What is so 'terrible' about a 'cyclical inevitability'? Christmas happens at the same time every year, we all eat too much and then diet. Big deal. Wohoo, think I'll write an article for the Times about it.

But the article highlights the way women use dieting as a form of female bonding - what diet are you using? ooh I'm using this really, really obscure one, my, haven't you heard of... GI foods, protein/carbohydrate only, red and green days, cabbage soup, slendertone...etc etc. Its so sad that women (especially) have to be on the hunt for the latest guru and the latest fad, hoping against hope that hidden on page 7 might be those immortal words.. "this is THE SECRET OF DIETING, you've paid me £17.50 for this book so ...go-on stuff your face, tell your friends I've said its OK, then I can get paid even more money!!"

Sorry guys but the only way to lose weight is to eat sensibly and everything in proportion - but doesn't that sound boring and patronising?

What sort of an attitude to food is this that we are bringing our kids up with? Its up to us mums to lead by example - and not bring up another generation of children obsessed with faddy dieting.

Lil I see where you are coming from, but unfortuneatly some of us need to make a real effort to lose weight, and if some diet does work, we all want to tell everyone else about it. If we think rationally we know that eat less/exercise more is the key, but it is really difficult to sustain that.

Also using diets as a female bonding thing, well yes that works! I went to a slimming world class to lose weight, and it was the support and advice from others who made me feel normal for a change. Hey it worked for me, and I have got others doing the same. What has also worked, and kept the weight off for me, is the knowledge that others helped me do it. I have put on a few lbs over Christmas, but I am straight back on my red/green days etc to get rid of it quick, and I will go back to class next week for the additional support. It won't be until I can keep this weight for a long time with the support of others, that I will feel able to go it alone (so to speak)

Don't see whats wrong with a bit of bonding over dieting! I'm not too fussed about 'the latest diet', but I am always interested to hear how friends have lost weight - they love talking about it and I love listening!

Anyway I bet the Sunday Times will be jam packed with rubbishy diet tips next weekend, probably from some society 'it' girl and her incredibly expensive private nutritional consultant or somesuch.

lil - i've only had time to skim read the article but I got the impression that it was just another author plugging their new book about how all the other diets are wrong and this 'new way of thinking' will solve everything.

Do you have daughters though? How will you feel the day they come home and say 'mum, I'm going on a diet, i'm not eating this, that and the other, so-and-so said at school that this is the best diet at the moment..', and then watch them push food around their plate. I'd hate it and feel I'd failed. I really want my kids to love food, and not treat it as a vice. The thought of them spending hours and hours talking about what strange combinations of food they are allowed to eat etc is depressing. Wouldn't you rather your daughters turned out like Nigella wit a love of good food and curves, rather than Calista whatsit from Ally Mcbeal????

dm2, yes she is an author, I saw that at the end. But there's nothing wrong in that. At least she is trying to get people to look at their obsession with dieting, rather than coming up with yet another strange diet. Trying to treat the cause rather than aggravate the sympton maybe!!

Now I've read the article I agree that it is one big plug for her new book. She had an even bigger one in the Gaurdian recently. What she is saying is to eat when you are hungry, and stop when you are full. Hmmm sounds sensible, what it doesn't address is the reasons why people eat in the first place, boredom, unhappiness, routine etc. Now if we were all weel balanced, happy, content people who didn't feel the need to change then eatig when you are hungry seems logical. However it won't work for poeple who cannot control their fod intake like this. A diet can be a good way to kick start yourself to break those habits that surround food, and I don't care what Susie Orbach or anyone else says, it worked for me.

But Crunchie, I don't get it. If you are following the red/green diet, and it is working, then you must be putting in a lot of thought and effort into planning your meals, and making sure your proteins and carbs don't touch! If you have got that much patience and self-control, then surely you don't need a fad diet in the first place. Wouldn't it be easier to sit down and write a shopping list for a 'normal' diet in the first place - just using ordinary cookery books rather than diet ones!!

Lil, even Nigella has a low-fat eating section in her cookery book - she diets too! Anyway, she's hardly the other end of the scale. Would you rather your daughter turned out like Lisa Riley?

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Have now read the article again and I still think that it's a plug for a 'diet' book. In this case instead of red/green days, food points or combinations the author is selling a 'eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full' diet.

As crunchie has said, this would only work if people only felt 'hunger' when their body needed nourishment. I eat for more reasons than simple hunger - from boredom, habit, for social reasons etc. therefore over time I build up excess weight. Since being overweight (I'm not talking about healthy 'nigella' size! ) is not good for my health I choose to eat differently sometimes with the aim losing the excess weight.
If a red/green day diet or calorie counted diet still provides me with a broad range of foods and nutrients but concentrates my mind on only eating for hunger then I'm all for it. Personally I found the GI diet suited me, it is very much a healthy eating regime for life rather than a 'get thin fast' scheme.

My mother eats what she wants, when she wants it, and not surprisingly she is very overweight and has lots of medical problems because of it. I would rather diet every now and then, than have my son worry about me the way I worry about my Mum.

By the way Lil, the red/green thingy is just Slimming Worlds way. Since I'm veggie (a fad diet before I even start!) I only do green days because they are about loading on carbohydrate. Now I am sure that this diet has helped me rethink me eating habits and look at food in a different light. I love recipe books, I adore Nigella, in fact I cook loads of stuff, including cakes and I enjoy eating them now because I have learnt how much I should allow myself and enjoy every mouthful. I also know how to adapt high fat food into low fat versions which I can eat freely. With a diet like this and the support of a 'club' where you get get non-stop help/advice, I think you can relearn eating habits, so although there maybe occassions that you overeat, the food is better for you.

I don't have the answers, all I know is that for me dieting has worked, and I needed the structure of a simple plan to help me. Over Christmas I overate, but I allowed myself and ate without guilt, as I knew that come Jan (now) a couple of weeks of sticking to the plan and the weight would be gone. I don't see the harm in that.

My mum has never had a weight problem and I was brought up in a family that ate really healthily. We had proper food, not kids stuff, and ate at real restaurants not McDonalds. However I love my food, my dh is the the same, and over time we had drifted into bad habits. Funilly enough I am obssessed with what my daughters eat, since the oldest one was 3 months premature, and at nearly 3 still hasn't hit the chart for weight and height. Yet everyone says how much she eats! I worry she's too skinny. But of course I want my kids to have a balanced view of food, hence I cook all the time with my 3 year old and hope i have instilled in her the pleasure of food that i was brought up with.

What a shame that Susie Orbach's article had a book plug at the end. To me, that negated much of her argument about getting in tune with your body simply by eating sensibly when you are hungry. Do you need a book to explain this to you?

But, I'm with lil on this. As far as I can see, there is no magic formula to losing weight - and then keeping it off. The slimming industry makes far too much money out of us. I read that a shocking 95% of dieters put the weight back on again. But I am saying this from a position of huge ignorance!!!

I am not a dieter, so I do not read diet books. I used to know the calorie counts of most foods in my teens but have long forgotten them. I did not know what I weighed, even to the nearest stone, until I became pregnant. I asked the nurse not to tell me unless medically necessary when I had my regular weight checks. I have absolutely no idea if my current weight is more or less than my pre-pregnancy weight.

I spent my late teens being calorie obsessed, trying to change my average weight body into a slightly below average weight one. I felt inferior to my friend who was anorexic, but I liked my food too much - I hadn't the willpower to spend the rest of my life living on steamed marrow for lunch, I cheated like mad, and began to put on weight again. I read that too much dieting can seriously mess around with your metabolism, so I stopped dieting and stopped weighing myself, took to wearing baggy jumpers and reverted to having an average-shaped body.

Anyway, all you knowledgeable dieters out there, can you answer these questions?

Do diets stress the importance of maintaining a healthy metabolism? I know of course that exercise raises your metabolism. But am I right in thinking that merely reducing your food intake can lower it - and yo yo dieting can cause serious long term damage? If so, how do diet plans address this?

Also, going back to this point about responding to your hunger pangs, eating sensibly and all will be well. I have to admit, reluctantly, that I don't think this works for everyone, even though it sort of works for me. I have lived at close quarters with both big and small people. Now, to the best of my knowledge, the big people certainly did not eat three times the amount eaten by the small people or were three times as inactive, even if they were three times the size. Often, my plumper flatmates ate far more sensibly and excercised more. Why the huge difference in weight?

I really have never understood this. Is it simply down to different metabolic rates? If so, isn't upping your metabolic rate far, far, more important than dieting?

Tigermoth - As a confessed 'dieter' I'll try to answer some of your questions.
IMO there are 2 types of slimming diet - a) 'crash' diets where calorie intake is severely limited for a short time to produce a dramatic weight loss (and normally an equally dramatic weight gain once the slimmer reverts to their normal eating habits). These effectively make the body think it's entering a period of starvation and probably do affect the metabolism. This would mean that the person would be more likely to gain weight with a normal calorie intake and it would be harder to lose the weight the next time they dieted.
Examples of this would be meal replacement drinks, 'cabbage soup' diets etc.

b) Long-term commitment to a healthy balanced diet that has slightly fewer calories than the amount you need each day, usually regular exercise is also encouraged.
These diets aim at producing a small but consistent weight loss over a long time. Hopefully this type of diet shouldn't affect your metabolism, but should re-educate your palate so you no longer crave the higher calorie foods, and teach you to concentrate on why you are eating. The long term goal of these diets is to be able to eat according to appetite and have a healthy balanced diet with no weight gain for life. Examples of these are the slimming club diets.
'eating sensibly and everything in proportion' as Lil said, is just what they recommend.
The red/green days, the point counting, or calorie counting is just a way of recognizing what you are choosing to eat and evaluating its place in your long term diet.

That's my view of things anyway!

When I was a teenager I could eat anything and not put on weight - to the despair of my friends. Then my weight began to increase and despite increasingly healthy eating it has gone on increasing. I discovered I had PCOS - a condition that predisposes you to weight gain. Through the excellent self-help group Verity I learnt about glycaemic indices. This is a way of altering your diet. You eat foods that do not produce such a rapid insulin response. For the first time in my life I managed to lose weight - a stone over about 3 months. I managed to keep this off as long as I ate low GI foods. Unfortunately after years of eating carbohydrates I do miss them. After about 6 months I went on holiday, ate too much carbohydrate and put most of the weight back on again.

The GI diet is about a way of eating that avoids hunger pains for longer and therefore allows you to eat less. It isn't a quick fix like cabbage diets. It is sometimes recommended by dieticians, especially those working with athletes. It is also being investigated as a way of reducing heart disease.

Some people are resistant to the insulin their body produces and those people gain weight more readily. There are ways of testing to see if you are insulin resistant but they are expensive. Insulin resistance is common in PCOS (it may be the cause) but even those who have been diagnosed with PCOS can not normally get the tests done. It provides a possible explantion for why some people can eat what they want and others can't. It also provides an explanation of why traditional diets have never worked for me - they all involve carbohydrates in levels my body can't handle.

Incidentally as exercise is believed to improve the body's response to insulin increasing the amount of exercise you get is also recommended.

Suitable books for anyone who wants the detailed story are The GI Factor by Dr Anthony Leeds and The Glucose Revolution by Anthony Leeds and Jenny Brand Millar. I wish everyone would read them, especially those who can eat what they want.

Wendym - thanks for your post - I didn't know that insulin resistance and PCOS were linked - I self-diagnosed my insulin problems and as I've already said the GI diet was wonderful, I felt great and the weight loss was an added bonus. I had just started medical investigations for infertility when I became pregnant ( ) but the most favoured diagnosis at the time was PCOS.

Dm2, I can see where you're coming from. I would agree that any reduction in food intake, like substituting sugar for sweetners in hot drinks, is only valuable if it's something you're prepared to live with for years, not weeks. Otherwise, whatever is the point?

But I still wonder if all people can lose weight through gradual reduction and re-education of their eating habits. I know slimming clubs work and do a lot of good. It's just that I don't necessarily believe that most large people eat huge quantities of food to begin with, remembering the people I have lived with. That's what puzzles me and brings me back to my queries on metabolism....

Also do you think that your examples of long term re-education of eating habits, ie through slimming clubs, tend to make people focus less on their food intake or more? Is there a danger of replacing a bad food obsession with a good food obsession? Personally I get very uneasy about being too focussed on what I am eating. That's partly why I stopped weighing myself. There are so many other things to fill your day with.

I think that Lil made a good comment earlier: if you have the motivation and discipline to stick with a recognised healthy eating programme/club, why do you need to follow it in the first place?

Why not just cut down on your intake a little and eat a broadly healthy range of foods? For me at least, belonging to a slimming club or following a diet plan would, I'm afraid, definitely increase an obsession with food and my weight - and I would be realy worried that my children would pick up on this.

Yet, I can see by the countless messages here that slimming groups can work, so it's each to their own, I suppose.