My Food Journey to Good Health

Month One:

Like many, I have had a lifelong battle with my weight, and with extremely busy work pressures over the last 5 years, as far as priorities go, my health and body shape have definitely been on the back burner.

However, with a change in work commitments, I have been able to re-prioritise my health and well-being, and have spent the last six months of 2016 looking forward to, planning & researching for, as well as getting my head in the right space for a lifestyle overhaul!

What better time to undertake a big change than at the start of a new year?

2018 dawned, and it dawned on me that I needed to get started on what I didn’t want to call a diet, but more of a Sustainable Eating Plan (StEP)!

In preparation I have read many diet books & watched every health programme going, both promoting all sorts of different ways to lose weight, and while I am overweight, I wanted my StEP to be about good health & great food that I would enjoy preparing and, most importantly, eating.

I have probably already been on most diets you can easily name in my lifetime; some successfully, some not; some enjoyably, some definitely not. Once engaged, my problem has never really been losing the weight, it has been keeping the weight off!  That’s why I didn’t want to start a ‘diet’, because that infers a beginning and an end, and that’s why I didn’t want to do diet-y things, like calorie counting & forever weighing both food and myself. I had to come up with a cunning, but well informed and sustainable plan!

Looking at my body I knew that I had, (and still do have), dangerous tummy fat, also known as visceral fat, so I knew I should target that in particular to help my overall health. Having recently read somewhere that your waist should be a proportional measurement of half your height, I thought that I would make that my target, rather than focusing on pound by pound loss, thus taking my attention away from the dreaded scales! After all it stands to reason that if I have a healthy waist measurement, then I will most likely also be a healthy overall weight too.

So number one – take the focus off weight loss alone.

I love food, so much of what we do in life that is pleasurable revolves around food – pretty much all our social life involves eating! So the type of food on my StEP had to be readily available and tasty. So I have devised easy, fail safe recipes as well as ways to beat the menu when eating out.

Could I boost my StEP anymore to really target visceral fat? Yes – I have taken elements of good healthy eating practice picked up from all these years of dieting, and integrated them into my StEP, put them into practice and found that they have worked!

I have been following my own Sustainable Eating Plan for 1 month now, and I can honestly say I have not felt hungry, nor have I felt hard done by, even when eating out! I have had fresh, tasty, interesting and varied meals that I have truly enjoyed so that I’m not thinking about food all the time.

I have also had results, great results that I am really pleased with. Especially as I am not on a ‘diet’, but a Sustainable Eating Plan, a StEP to a healthier me”.

Inch Loss

Bust 0.5″

Waist 3″

Hips 4″

Weight Loss

10.5lbs