How to loose weight - 27kg or more (Part three)

_ This is the third part of my blog on how to loose over 50lbs of weight. This will cover the foods consumed themselves.

Part one covered incentive, portion size, and meal frequency. Part two covered exercise, hydration, and setting realistic targets.

I am not a medical doctor or dietician, but due to health reasons was told last year that I needed to loose a significant amount of weight. I have had advice from a number of medical professionals as how to do this, and from their advice I came up with this plan and so far I have now lost over 60 lbs, that is more than 27 kilos, so it does seem to be successful. I have just a few more pounds to go to get to my target weight. - (The lower end of the green band in the doctors BMI chart.). Having successfully lost all this weight, a medical friend said I should share how I did it with others, hence these series of three blogs.

_ So we come to food that is being eaten. The first thing I did was sort out what I could eat/drink and what I could not. Out went

• All Alcohol
• All diary products
• Foods that were generally over 6g per 100g fat in content i.e.
•     Ready meals
•     The majority of processed foods
•     Butter/spreads
  

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_ In addition I was allowed

• One meal of lean red meat per week (no more than 500g)
• Around 10 portions of Fruit and Raw or lightly cooked vegetables (not potatoes) a day. Besides helping one loose weight fruit and veg also have other healthy side effects 
• White meat – skinned Chicken, or Turkey Brest
• Fish
• Soya products
• Pulses
• Bran
• Oats
• Black coffee
• Green tea
• Fruit juice – need to check sugar levels on this as some have much higher content than others.
• Low sugar jams, marmalades
• Marmite
• Low fat Bread - Home-made
• If need a fat then use olive oil
  

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_ The base line was bran, oats, fruit and veg normally two times a day with a third meal of something else. I have shared some of the low fat recipes elsewhere in the blog. The main challenge with low fat cooking is that the fat adds flavour to the food. How often have you seen a TV chief drizzle olive oil on a dish just at the point of serving or cook in butter just to give that extra flavour?


To avoid the food tasting bland one needs to add lots of spices to the food, probably anything up to twice the amount normally used. Also curried/hot food tends to taste better when it is low fat than other foods. Another good tip is a teaspoonful of Marmite, takes away the blandness of the food.

As I check on my weight progress every day I can see how I am doing and if doing well and hit my target for the week, then I allowed myself a treat of a bit of a high coca chocolate. If I was not doing so well then the bran/oats & fruit option became my third meal of the day, until I had got back on target again.

In my case hopefully I will hit my target weight in the next couple of months and then I can start to enjoy other foods once again. Whatever I hope this has been helpful and I will keep posting low fat recipes as I experiment.

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