A New Beginning!!

On Tuesday 13th June 2006, something amazing started to happen...

A few weeks beforehand I accompanied Debbie to the hospital to see a professor, who has been following her case with PCOS over the last 4 years. Since she has had the condition for over 16 years, its very hard keeping her hormonal state in balance!! There are lots of side effects which include rapid weight gain and the weight she gains feeds an overactive hormonal gland and thus results in more weight gain, this intern can result into becoming a diabetic. Scary, very scary…

She was enrolled on a 12 month weight loss plan, it’s not a diet, it's a change of life.

With the plan comes a book to read with a food diary to keep and make other notes in, a couple of cd's to listen to and a tablet to take each day which is designed to suppress hunger. I've taken up the challenge along with Debbie, following the plan in exactly the same way but without the tablet.

Because it's a change for life, the changes required for success aren't as drastic as they can be for most diets. The main aim is to keep the weight off and live a healthy life. The guidelines we've been following over the last 3 months are sticking to food containing no more than 4g of fat per 100g and less than 10g of sugar per 100g. The last guideline and probably most important in my case, is the alcohol! We've stuck rigidly to only having any alcoholic beverages on Friday and Saturday nights, for the rest of the week it's strictly brews and water only.

When we set off on our first healthy shopping trip, we were astonished at some of the things that are laced with either fat or sugar, sausages and burgers we expected, but surely not turkey and chicken roll! Yep, we only have fresh chicken now and the cooked meats are mostly confined to ham and beef. Just spending a little time examining labels in the supermarket reveals a hidden world of very crafty marketing where nothing is as it first seems. The healthy stuff is there to be had but it's normally surrounded by rubbish in appealing packaging to mask the dodgy nutritional content. One recent find has been Ryvita Minis, one of the very few so called healthy snacks that are actually low in fat and sugar but high in fibre.

The plan does suggest becoming more active and for a few weeks we did go swimming first thing on Saturday and Sunday mornings but with the sessions being from 7.30am until 9am, it soon took its toll. With a week of getting up at 6am we do need an extra snooze at least once in a while, so walking Lucy and taking lots of photos while in the process is better for us.

The results of our endeavours?

Well, this will explain why Debbie was overjoyed with her new smaller size clothes on Tuesday...

I've lost just short of 2 Stone over the last 3 months and Debbie... wait for it... can we have a drum roll please... Debbie has lost 3 Stone!!

We're still only a quarter of the way through the plan, we're determined to see this through to the end and then beyond that, sticking to the life changes we've made.

Paul.