There is absolutely no reason for you to get bored or hungry on the diet. There are over 80 recipes to choose from. If you find yourself getting into a rut, go back to the recipes and find some new ones to add to your repertoire. If you are hungry then have another look at the plans and make sure you are following the guidelines and eating something every four hours. Snacking is an essential part of the GL diet. It’s far better to pre-empt hunger than to wait until you are so hungry that you grab anything in sight! If you snack regularly and don’t allow yourself to get too ravenous you are far more likely to choose something healthy.
Getting More Help and Advice
If there are specific foods or elements of the diet you are confused about, reread the book and check through the food lists and the ‘Your Questions Answered’ chapter to help give you the clarity you need. If you can’t find the answers you are looking for in the book, do visit us online where you can get more help and support from us and from other Diet Freedom Fighters on the lively forums.
Eating Out
Don’t panic if you’ve got a night out coming up. If you are eating out then find out what type of restaurant you’ll be going to and use the eating-out guide to help you plan what you’ll order. If you are just going out for drinks, then eat a sensible low-GL meal before you go and set a limit on the number of drinks you’ll have during the evening.
Family Meals
Although you are following the GL diet to help you lose weight, there is no reason why the rest of the family can’t eat low GL as well. Try not to get into the routine of cooking different meals for yourself. There’s no need. You might want to give other members of the family a larger portion and not worry too much about how many potatoes or how much pasta you put on their plates.
Calling All Supporters
Before you start the diet, think about previous diets when you’ve been successful. Did you diet alone or with friends? A lot of people find it really helpful to ‘buddy up’ with someone, whereas others prefer to go it alone – there isn’t a right or a wrong approach but it’s well worth thinking about what will suit you best. Is there someone whom you think would be good to diet with? If you are going to diet with other people, choose carefully. There are diet saboteurs out there who can be really good at subconsciously spoiling your plan by encouraging you to take a shortcut here, or make a slip there. Make sure the person you choose is really committed and of a similar mindset to you.
Sometimes well-meaning friends and relatives just don’t support us in the best way. Nagging, bullying and humiliating are thoroughly unhelpful, and guaranteed to make you stick two fingers up at the world and abandon your diet. Decide if you want to tell people you are trying to lose weight. If you do, decide what they can best do to help you and ask them for what you need. If you don’t want them to eat biscuits in front of you, ask them not to. If you want them to ask how you are getting on once a week rather than every five minutes, or if you’d prefer them not to mention it at all, ask them. If you want them to query whether you should be eating certain foods, ask them to phrase the question in a way that doesn’t sound accusing or patronizing. Decide on the kind of support you want and will respond best to and ask for it! If you prefer your support to come from people less involved with your day-to-day life then you can log on to our website and get an abundance of really helpful support.
A Word about Goal Setting
Take some measurements before you begin the diet so you can see how much weight you lose.
It’s useful to know your BMI (body mass index). No weight-for-height charts are perfect but we prefer the BMI because it gives you an indication of the risk to your health from your weight. It’s also useful because there is a wide range for each classification, and for people with a lot of weight to lose it’s really helpful in setting staged targets. It’s important to remember, though, that the BMI is a guide, not the Holy Grail.
For your reference there is a BMI chart on our website. There is good evidence that having a BMI of 20–22 has greater health benefits than a BMI of 23–25. However, we wouldn’t recommend that you try to achieve a BMI of less than 18.5.
If your current BMI is between 20 and 25 then you really don’t have a huge amount of weight to lose. You can probably expect a weekly weight loss of about 2lb as it tends to be slower the less you need to lose. If your BMI is between 25 and 30 you’ll lose a little more each week, and if your BMI is above 30 then it wouldn’t be unusual to lose more then 5lb in seven days, especially if you are able to be more active than usual, but check this first with your doctor.
It’s also a good idea to take some body measurements such as your waist, hips and bust or chest. Use a tape measure and make sure you measure the same spot each time. Keep the tape measure straight for the most accurate result.
To measure your waist – measure around the naval or belly button
For hips – measure at the widest point of your bottom
For bust or chest – measure around your nipples
If you are working on increasing your day-to-day activity levels then measurements will be especially important. You may well change shape and lose inches faster than you lose weight. This is because as you increase your activity level, you replace some fat with muscle, which weighs more than fat. Physical measurements, especially around the waist, are just as meaningful as actual weight changes. Besides, if your goal is to drop a dress size or get into jeans two inches smaller than your current pair, does it really matter how much you weigh? No, of course it doesn’t!
The more you move about, the less you’ll wobble
There’s more information about goal setting coming up in the next chapter.
Chapter 4 KOKO – KEEP ON KEEPING ON
We talked in Chapter 3 about the importance of planning before you start your diet. Well, an integral part of the planning process is deciding what it is you actually want to achieve.
You might be thinking at this point: I’m reading a diet book, so I guess I just want to lose weight! I suspect that if we look a bit more closely at your motivations, we might find you’ve got quite a bit more to gain as well, and you can set goals for these outcomes too. You might want to feel more confident, be able to buy clothes more easily, lower your risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer or other diseases, or improve your fitness. Of course your goal might be as simple as just wanting to get back into that dress or suit you haven’t been able to wear for ages.
Whatever you want for yourself, the art of goal setting is keeping it real and achievable, and also having performance measures or milestones along the way to let you know you are heading in the right direction.
We’ve been very careful throughout the book to keep our promises real and achievable, and we really want to encourage you to do the same with your expectations of yourself. If you set unrealistic, unachievable goals for yourself you also set yourself up for disappointment and failure, and we all know what that feels like from our past experiences of diets, don’t we?
Weight-loss Goals and Measuring Your Success
You may wish to find out your BMI (Body Mass Index) from the chart on our website. Remember, people with a BMI of between 20 and 25 should expect to lose no more than 2lb per week; people whose current BMI is between 25 and 30 could lose between 2 and 5lb per week; while people with a BMI higher than 30 may lose more than 5lb.