Does this sound like a plan?

[mamahanji]

I'm not trying to lose a large amount of weight. Maybe a stone or so. I'm more interested in toning up and sorting out my unhealthy habits like butter on toast for breakfast and lunch and fizzy drinks all the time.

Im upping my exercise anyway and already do a decent amount. My question is do I need to cut calories? Or carbs or fat? Or does this sound ok?

Breakfast: fruit, yogurt and flax seed, 1 wholemeal toast with peanut butter, 2 boiled eggs on 1 piece of wholemeal toast, porridge. Scrambled egg and mushrooms, ham and egg in English muffin.

Lunch: Some sort of homemade soup, salad with chicken/fish/eggs, leftover dinners like cold rice or couscous salads.

I'm trying to take a more whole food approach. So less processed and more fruit. I could happily eat a whole plate of carrots, peppers, cucumber, with some hummus or homemade mackerel pate. But I struggle with eating fruit. I'm much more a savoury person.

Any meal plans and suggestions would be great.

Try to cut out anything that has sugar in it (muffin, peanut butter, etc.) and up your intake of vegetables instead of carbohydrates (such as rice, spaghetti etc.) No soft drinks.

Thanks for you comments. I'm stopping the fizzy drinks, my peanut butter is literally just peanuts and a bit of oil and salt. No added sugar. And an English muffin like a McMuffin so virtually no sugar. I love my spiralizer so often do courgette and carrots as spaghetti and noodles so 50% wholewheat spaghetti and 50% spiralized veg.

Have you looked at the eight week bloodsugar diet, for eight weeks? I find it's very appealing, seems to work. In any case you can set up your diet whatever way you want as long as it works. The other thing to ask is if it's just one stone you "need" to "shed", maybe your current weight is perfectly ok. People talk about losing several stones, usually. Sorry about the muffin-comment, I sort of associated to big American-style jumbo chocolate chip muffins.

Oh no worries. Yh a chocolate chip muffin wouldn't be very conducive to weight loss would it!

In all honesty I NEED to lose more than a stone to be in a healthy weight range, but because I am relatively happy with my appearance, I don't want to overwhelm or bore myself saying 'right. I need to lose x amount' and make it into a massive negative part of my life.

I want to not be bloody addicted to sugar. I can eat a really great diet, breakfast lunch and dinner, it's the iced coffees, diet fizzy drinks. And in the evening I just itch for wanting something sweet to eat.

I haven't heard of that. I'll look at it. Sounds intimidating though!

I'm in a very similar position to you - I need to lose about 14-18 lb to put me in the middle of the ideal weight for my bmi (and to feel better and wear nicer clothes obviously too ). I've had a few sessions with a personal trainer and nutritionist, and this is what he's recommended (and seems to be working - steadily and slowly) for me:

• Get a very good night's sleep, ideally 8 hours. You're much more likely to overeat if you're tired, and sleeping more leaves a smaller daytime window in which to eat as well (my downfall was always snacking between finishing work and bedtime).
• Avoid caffeine after about 2 pm for the same reason - drink tonnes more water, fruit tea, green tea
• Reduce alcohol as much as possible
• Eat 'real' food and avoid processed as far as possible - in practice for me this means drastically reducing bread, pasta, rice, noodles, cake etc, although eating those once or twice a week is OK
• Eat far more vegetables - for me easiest in either home-made soup or smoothies
• For protein eat eggs, nuts and beans/lentils, fish, turkey/chicken as much as possible and definitely avoid highly processed red meat (sausages, bacon etc)
• Try not to eat much after 6-7 pm (this is virtually impossible for me as I don't get back to work til around 6 and then take kids to various activities in the evenings so often don't eat til 8 or 8.30 pm)

A lot of this is common sense, and a way of eating, rather than a diet as such - though has a lot in common with the blood sugar diet. I find it reasonably sustainable and haven't missed break as much as I thought I would. All might change at mother's day afternoon tea this weekend though!