I wanted to share with you some of my weight loss secrets. I call myself a ‘professional dieter’. I’m not one of those people who say, “I’ve tried every diet in the book and I’ve failed.” Yes, I have tried many diets and in fact most of them have been successful. Even though I have managed to lose weight on the different diets, some took me longer to lose weight, some were so hard I felt like I was starving every day, and some were just plain boring. So I thought I’d share my experiences with you, to help you examine the good, bad, and just plain ugly diets out there!
I’ll start with the fad diets. They do not work! Well, I should give more details. When I was on the fad diet, I was euphoric about the rapid weight loss, I had visions and fantasies of looking like Twiggy a month from now, but oh my! They come back to bite you as soon as you go off the diet! After I stopped the diet, the smallest morsel of food, even healthy food, would push the scale up, and I quickly regained everything I had lost. The only time I followed the ‘Cabbage Soup’ fad diet for three weeks, thinking “this time I will lose all the weight I want”. Well, I was losing pounds, but at the same time, my hair started falling out and I had no energy, and I got so depressed, you guessed it, that I turned to food!
Emotional eating is my problem, and that’s why any fad diet you try, whether it’s the cabbage soup diet, the grapes diet, the banana and milk diet, won’t help if your problem is emotional eating. With fad diets you will never feel satisfied. So I strongly recommend against following a fad diet.
Beware of diets that are often called the “Doctor So-and-So-Diet” as they usually come in powdered shakes. I once spent three months’ salary trying shakes. A smoothie for breakfast, a smoothie for lunch, a smoothie for dinner! The only good thing this diet did for me was cut me off shakes for life! At first I thought “mmmmm these flavors are delicious, but after the 20th French Vanilla shake, I wanted to throw up!” One had the opportunity to visit the doctor once a month but all he seemed to say was “go on the diet” plus I had to shell out more hard earned money on vitamins and potassium tablets! You’d think they’d be included in the smoothies somehow!
I started to figure it out at that point and realized that there is no quick fix to losing weight. I have tried the following weight loss diets and have been successful on most of them. I wouldn’t really call them ‘diets’ as they are more like ‘healthy eating plans’ and this is what I would recommend for most people who have quite a bit of weight to lose. These were my experiences and opinions:
Atkins diet.
I really enjoyed reading the book and having it as a guide. I was allowed to eat meals that were quite delicious. But I struggled to feel full after a while as they only allowed me very few carbs. I lost 10lbs after two weeks but was craving carbs so badly I found myself ‘cheating’ on ‘just a packet of chips’ which slowly turned into more packets of chips and the rest is history as they say.
The Weight Watchers Diet
I tried to do this diet at home without joining groups, and I think one needs group support and recipe sharing to stay on this diet. I managed to stay with it for about two months, which is quite a record for me, but I found the food was starting to taste very bland and I didn’t enjoy the hassle of the points system.
The Mayo Clinic Diet:
This was a pyramid diet, as I like to call it, and I was allowed to eat as many fruits and vegetables as I wanted, and not too many of the other food groups. With me it’s quite dangerous to say “Have whatever you want”! I ended up snacking on grapes, an exciting fruit that is high in calories, so I didn’t lose much on the Mayo Clinic diet.
The diet of the 4 idiots to lose fat
No, don’t laugh, I’m not an idiot! In fact, I’ve saved the best for last as I’m not just doing this diet, I’m living on this healthy eating plan as it doesn’t even feel like a diet! They allow me three meals a day, lots of healthy food and a wide variety, and even healthy snacks in between! You don’t starve here! I love the way this diet works, since you don’t restrict your calories, you don’t end up feeling deprived! It works on the principle that if I eat a lot of healthy foods at one meal and not too many at the next, and keep doing it, my metabolism speeds up, never adjusts to a low calorie count (which happened on my other diets), and I have the satisfaction of knowing that I am ‘tricking’ my own metabolism into working overtime for me. I’m so excited to find this diet as I’ve lost, wait, 53lbs in just 3 months, and like I said, I don’t even feel like I’m on a diet!
I hope my diet experiences have been helpful to you, and I hope they help you find a diet that suits you and your lifestyle.
