Diet plan

This diet plan provides me with everything I need not only to lose weight, but also to detox, get ripped for body building, and have a much healthier diet in general. It takes some of the best features of low carb, low fat, low calorie, and detox diets, with a fraction of the drawbacks. What's more, it has become the foundation for my regular diet, and at the risk of making it sound like one of those miracle cure alls, I hardly catch a cold these days because of it.

What is the diet?

Well it's low carb... but it's low fat as well. It has the normal low carb advantage of getting your body into ketosis quickly without the drawbacks of unhealthy fatty foods. By staying in a fat burning mode, you aren't switching energy sources like low calorie diets, allowing you to get used to the feeling and preventing nasty cravings. It doesn't give you a sugar addiction like the low fat diets, and without blasting your taste buds with sugar, normal healthy foods start tasting much nicer.

You can have 3 good sized meals a day, so you don't have the grumbling stomach you get with a low calorie diet. The foods you eat are very healthy, packed with all the nutrients, minerals and vitamins you could possibly need.

What are the ingredients?

You may have guessed that you are pretty limited as to what you can eat. But that's all part of the fun! Each day you should experiment with different recipes, see what combinations you can come up with. Your ingredients are:

Meat

All meat must be carefully prepared to have all the fat cut away or otherwise removed. Personally I cut away fat, use the George Foreman grill, then cut away any left over fat whilst eating.

* If you are using this diet to detox, you probably want to skip these meats.

Vegetables

This list has been take from About.com Low carb veg

Flavouring

Be careful as some spices may be carby, although when used in very low quantities it sometimes isn't an issue.

Sauces?

You may be used to adding sauce to your meals. Well off the shelf sauces are a no go. Even tomato ketchup has a load of sugar added to it. However, I found that I could make my own sauces and dips from the above ingredients.

Can I add things not in that list?

Probably not! Things like potatoes are a no go. The foods must be low carb and low fat. If you do think that something is ok, make sure you double check it before it goes in.

Recipes

See my diet log below for the recipes I use. I'm hoping you'll submit your own recipes to me and I can share them here with everyone else.

After the diet

So it's two weeks later, you've done the diet, lost the weight, and you are feeling pretty chuffed with yourself. The temptation will be to reward yourself with some sugary fatty meals. That isn't a reward, it's a punishment. You've just learned how to fill up on healthy food that enables you to lose weight. You've just kicked your sugar addiction so natural sources of sugar like fruit will taste great. Keep some of the meals in your diet and introduce selective old foods slowly. If you learn from this diet and change the way you eat and view food, then you'll forever have control over your weight.

Personally I've kept the soups and extra vegetables in my diet, and I feel much better for it. I monitor my weight, if I see it creeping up then I'll make small adjustments to my meals. If I know I've got a holiday coming up I'll lose a few extra pounds before hand, eat what I want when away, then run the diet for a few days after as needed. Having control of your weight feels great.

Diet logs

Lyle's diet logs

Video log

For my video diet log I tried to emulate what it's like for people that are unhealthy. I ate terribly for weeks to put on the weight. From overweight people I've spoken to in the past I keep hearing excuses like "it's easy for you, you've never been able to eat like I can... you can't put it away like I can. To counter this I did a video of myself eating a load of cakes:

Coming soon... YouTube video

I had a kickboxing class right after doing that video. I joined in for the warm up and I didn't feel good. I kept getting pains in my chest, my breathing was difficult. I can only assume that my blood was thick with fat and my veins and arteries were struggling to cope with the increased heart rate. It gave me an understand as to why out of shape people with poor diets will do a little exercise and decide it's bad for them. It's not the exercise causing the problem, it's the poor diet clogging up your arteries! That bad feeling isn't your body saying the exercise is bad, it's screaming that you need to eat better and do more exercise.

The video log itself:

Coming soon... YouTube video

Some of the meals weren't ideal. It can be really hard to stick to the diet when you aren't at home. The best thing is to prepare yourself meals. But as you can see I didn't always do that, and sometimes I had to improvise. As I'd been eating a high fat, high sugar diet to put the weight on, I tried to wean myself off and help improve digestion by adding Actimel after each meal. I've since decided that this probably didn't help as it just perpetuated the sugar cravings. When I've done the diet since I haven't had the Actimel along with it.

The video log differs from the photo log in how the weight came off. Although I lost fat at about the same rate, the way my weight changed was dramatically different. I've had friends who've tried this diet have similar experiences. They've been really happy at first as according to the scales they've lost a lot of weight in the first few days, then called me up worried as their weight appears to have plateaued. You must remember that you carry around 7 pounds in your bowels. I dropped weight really fast the first 3 days as effectively I emptied out. I think this was because of the unhealthy food I'd had in the run up to the diet, switching to healthy food caused it to flush out. So for a few days my weight stayed the same. I knew I was losing fat because I was eating, no longer going to the toilet, and my weight wasn't going up. My bowels were effectively refilling, and once things were back to a regular flow I started losing a pound a day as expected.

Photo log

Preparation day

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

Day 6

Day 7

Day 8

Day 9

Day 10

Day 11

Day 12

Day 13

Day 14

Day 15

Having a healthy body

This diet is very effective without exercise. But being healthy is about more than just being a healthy weight. The proved medical benefits from regular exercise are far to many to list. I strongly recommend participating in regular exercise. However, if you aren't exercising regularly at the moment it's important to take precautions so that you do not do yourself damage.

Preparation

If you go from doing no exercise, and eating unhealthily to suddenly exercising twice a day, your body isn't going to be happy. You'll end up aching all over, feeling sick, and you'll give up. It's important to ease into it over a couple of weeks or so. That way it won't be such a shock and you'll stick at it.

You Must

You May

Skin

Skin loses elasticity as you get older. It can also only spring back so much. If you've developed stretch marks from your weight (not the ones you get in puberty, most of us get those no matter how unhealthy you are), then your size has pushed your skin beyond it's limits. This is one of the clearest warnings you can get that you need to lose weight. I recommend using a skin firming cream religiously during dieting and for months after to help the skin pull back in place. If you are very over weight, you may find the need to stop dieting for weight loss every 2 or 3 stone to give your skin chance to tighten up. If you are obesely over weight then there may well be a limit as to how much your skin can shrink back.

Exercise Do's and Don'ts during dieting

Do

Don't

If you go from doing no exercise, to exercising twice a day then you will strain yourself and you will give up. If you are dieting for weight loss you will be under eating, your body won't have the resources to heal strains quickly or build muscle. If you are weight training you really can't push it, drop your weights right down and do more reps, but don't burn out.

Things to note

You'll probably lose weight quickly over the first couple of days
Most of this won't be fat. It'll be because there is less food in your bowels.
You'll gain weight after the diet if you aren't careful
If you go back to big meals after the diet, you'll have more food in your bowels so your weight will go up right away
Watch out for calories and carbs in all of your drinks as well
Smoothies are high in calories, so is juice, you have to include this in your totals
Skipping breakfast isn't that bad
You may well have heard that skipping breakfast is bad, and that statistically people who skip breakfast are more likely to be overweight. This is just more propaganda presenting the statistics in a different light. Obviously people who skip breakfast are more likely to be overweight, otherwise they wouldn't be skipping breakfast.