Kev K's 'it works for me' diet
The reason I’m overweight is purely and simply that I eat too much.
How do I know? Well, for a period of six months I kept a record of everything I ate, together with their approximate calorific values and fat content. I was aiming for the 'guideline daily amount' figures of 2000 calories and 90g of fat. It worked - I lost about three stone in six months.
Then I stopped watching what I ate, didn’t keep to a stringent diet and stopped exercising so much (and exercise probably has a lot to do with it). The weight piled back on (with extra reinforcements), which has taught me a valuable lesson in dieting. It’s a simple formula – eat less food; do more exercise.
No Limits
But here’s another interesting thing. I found that as long as I stuck to the calorie limit, it didn’t matter what I ate. If I felt like a chocolate bar, I could have one, as long as I factored it in. What mattered was that I was physically eating less.
Trolley Madness
The thing is it’s so easy to eat too much. I’ve noticed my friends who don’t have cars are usually thinner than me. I think that’s because they don’t go to the supermarket, load their trolley up full to bursting with food, wheel the groaning shopping cart out to their car, drive home, ram the food into their cupboards, freezer, fridge and wherever else, and then proceed to eat it all. I, on the other hand, do that.
You see, when there’s food in the house, it usually ends up in me.
So along with ‘eat less food’, I’d add ‘don’t buy so much food’. And probably ‘do some exercise’ too.
The problem is I actually enjoy eating, which is why my soon-to-be-patented dieting secrets let me carry on eating the food I enjoy, just at a reduced rate. It’s common sense that I can’t eat my own bodyweight in chips and expect it not to have an effect. But I can eat a small bag of chips, occasionally (as part of a reasonably balanced diet), and still lose weight…
The fourth rule
My fourth rule for healthy eating and losing weight would be ‘don’t eat crap’. For example, I agree with Michael Pollan, who wrote ‘In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto’, when he said you should avoid food products with ingredients you can't pronounce.
Back when I worked in Minimum Wage Hell we sold ‘ambient hot dogs’, which you could store in their packets at room temperature for 18 months. One of the ingredients on the packet was butylated hydroxytoluene. Mmm, tasty.
Marketing ‘healthier’ food
Pollan also adds that you should avoid food products that make health claims. That makes you think, doesn’t it? But then research comes out which claims that drinking ‘diet’ pop makes you more likely to gain weight, and you realise most health claims are just canny marketing.
Ah, but Kev, I hear you say, what about the latest ‘superfoods’ and ‘diet doctor’ goodies? My friend, they are a ruse designed to get you buying stuff you don’t need, at over-inflated prices. It’s just marketing, or, to put it another way, complete bullfeathers. So, here you go – all the knowledge you need to lose weight!
Kev K’s 5 steps to thin-ness
Aim for your GDA amounts of calories and fat
To do this:
- Keep a record of what you eat
- Eat less food
- Buy less food
- Do some exercise
- Don’t eat junk
Written by Kev Kennedy.
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