A friend of mine has recently decided to embrace a healthy lifestyle in an attempt to break free from yo yo dieting.
Her attitude to diets and to eating healthy is PERFECT. She has forgotten any fad diet and instead taught herself how to fuel her body for life.
It’s this that tells me she will be very successful in her journey.
Here’s her story
” We all follow the cliché motivational quote type pages, whether is be on here, twitter or facebook. I follow them everywhere and while looking at skinny people and healthy food won’t make you thin, it’s a good reminder that if you’ve got time to be sat there looking at those pictures online – you’ve got time to work out so get off your ass and go for a run.
From since the age of 15 (ten years ago now) I’ve been part of the fad diet culture. It sucked me in and I never got out of it up until 3 months ago. I always had a certain respect for any type of diet no matter what it was because somewhere along the lines the goal is the same which is to lose weight and get healthy.
Well, no. Fad diets do not encourage that.
I struggled with my weight constantly and let it control my life and obsess about daily. I’d tried Slimming World, Weight Watchers, the Special K Diet, slimming pills. I did them all and they didn’t work. I’d reached the end of my tether with it all and I didn’t know what to do.
I realised I needed to make a huge change to the way I live if I wanted long term results but I was at a loss, so I did what I know best and researched.
The internet and social media is a fabulous place to do this. I started to follow fitness blogs on here, started following health professionals and personal trainers on Twitter. Paying attention to what meals they ate and got an insight in to how a healthy lifestyle goes. I gathered information for roughly 3 months while I figured out how I could make this fit in with my budget and life. Sounds dramatic but I was so sick of getting quick results but being unable to maintain them that I knew big changes had to be made and I wanted to do it right.
Please let me point out here that I’m not claiming to know what I’m doing at all, I just know that it’s working for me. You may see flaws in my plan and I’ve even been told that I’m under eating but it’s all trial and error and I’m still learning and I’m open to advice and opinions. It still blows my mind that people on here and twitter send me messages asking for advice or telling me that I inspire them. That’s such a phenomenal compliment and means so much to me.
Potatoes, crisps and white bread were the first thing I removed from my diet. White bread makes me terribly bloated, crisps are full of fat and salt and potatoes were just something I trailed cutting out and I still don’t have them in my diet. Carbs have pretty much gone but I do have brown rice in the cupboard to bulk up my meals if I fancy something with a bit of “stodge”.
Typically I will eat:
Breakfast: fruit and natural yoghurt , usually a mix of berries, grapes or melon and other days I will have weetabix and others coco pops and at weekend I will usually cook eggs with spinach, mushrooms and tomatoes.
Lunch: salad -usually lettuce, tomato, cucumber, carrot, celery, spinach with either tuna or ham.
Tea: I will have either steak, chicken or cod as the basis of my meal and then add broccoli, spinach, sweet potato, carrots or salad to bulk the meal out.
Snacks: yoghurt, blueberries, grapes, carrot sticks and other general fruit and veg.
Eating clean is very easy and when you find something you like – stick with it. I very rarely add anything to my meals outside of salt and pepper or maybe a tin of chopped tomatoes and onions to make a sauce etc. It was very hard to train myself to shop clean and was typically met with ending up with unused or unnecessary food. I typically spend £26 a week on food and that lasts me over a week. I keep my eye out for deals on meat in the supermarkets and then when I get home, bag them up individually and stick them in the freezer.
I’m far from a saint, I’ve made huge changes to my day to day living but I still indulge and that’s something I’ve found me doing less and less of. That’s the thing when you’re not following a diet and something doesn’t have a high “syn” or points value. It’s just food and typically an unnecessary one at that and it holds no nutritional value or benefit but GOD IT TASTES GOOD.
When I completed my 10k run, I went home and had 10 slices of white bread toasted with jam due to being so hungry, I then went out and had Nandos with chips and a side order of chips. In the week that followed I had Chinese takeaway, Pizza Hut and McDonalds. I don’t know why I did it because I generally didn’t enjoy it. It tasted all wrong. Well the Nandos didn’t but everything else just tasted of processed junk.
I’ll only shop in supermarkets now as “popping to the shop” usually means I’ll end up grabbing something unnecessary because it’s only 50p! In the supermarket I’ll head straight to the fruit and veg aisle but if I’m having a fairly tempting day I’ll go to the clothes section first and look at a pair of jeans or underwear in my goal size and think of them the rest of the way round and that typically has me swapping my carrot cake for blueberries.
Slimming World didn’t work for me and I still don’t fully understand the plans. Weight Watchers infuriates me. People are still allowing bad and unhealthy foods into their diets because their points allow it. I’ve been there – I’ve done it. I had that bacon sandwich and I’ve saved 12 points so I can have a large bag of dolly mixtures. It works for some and it’s worked for me in the past and that’s great but long term it isn’t a solution. Depriving yourself of something healthy in your meals so you can have a glass of wine? Why?
“Eat clean, train dirty” is a motto you will see and hear every day and it really is the best diet plan to follow if you can even call it that. Not at any point during this transformation have I felt controlled or restricted in my eating or like anything was out of bounds and typically I just haven’t wanted anything bad. I’ve not felt hungry and most importantly, I’ve got results.
I’ve lost 2 dress sizes and I stopped weighing myself but I weighed myself yesterday and lb wise, there isn’t that much difference in the two but as you can see a lot of fat has gone from my body.
I still have a long way to go, but if that’s the results from 12 weeks, I’m excited to see how I can look in another 12…..”
Healthy Hazimax 