Why is my diet not working?

In 1990 I decided to become a vegetarian. Well, to be exact, Pescetarian: I continued to eat some fish and shellfish. My reasons were mainly because I felt more and more uncomfortable cooking and eating meat and I didn’t like the idea of ​​killing animals. I had also become very active in the new age movement at the time and the environmental cost of meat production just didn’t make sense. It wasn’t long before even the idea of ​​eating meat became unpleasant to me and I have never been tempted to eat meat since.

However, I started to put on weight and have continued to struggle with my weight for 25 years. When I changed my sex and started taking hormone replacement therapy it got worse. I’ve tried the Weight Watchers Diet, the Lemon Diet, the Grapefruit Diet, the 5:2 Diet, the Mediterranean Diet. the Beverley Hills diet, the cabbage soup diet, the Ayurvedic diet, the Atkins diet (really challenging if you are a vegetarian), the Paul McKenna diet, the Think Thin diet, and many more that I have now forgotten.

At that time the only diet that worked was Sure Slim – this is a very complex diet and also very expensive based on metabolic type, low glycemic index, low fat, low carb and personal food preferences. The diet includes blood tests and an in-depth interview followed by regular weekly and then bi-weekly consultations. Each meal has to be meticulously weighed with ingredients selected from a rather restricted list. I lost about 4 stones in six months, then got most of it back in the net six months.

Every year since then I have decided to lose weight again and every year I give up after a few months and the weight comes back. The problem is that I had to follow a complex diet to even maintain my weight and that made it almost impossible to eat out, eat at a buffet, grab a bite to eat when traveling or go out for dinner.

I’m sure most of you reading this article have had similar experiences, and the older we get, the more difficult it seems to be to lose weight and maintain good health.

I’m not giving up though and have recently started looking into low carb and low GI diets in more detail to see if I can find a way to simplify this process and find a more acceptable long term diet that works.

There are a few books that have contributed to my growing understanding of diet over the past decade. Rose Elliot’s Low Carb Vegetarian Diet is excellent, although you must indulge in eggs and tofu to follow that diet in the first 14 days. That being said, she is one of the leading experts on vegetarian food and her explanations of the basis of the diet have really helped me better understand the principles of the safe and slim diet that worked.

Chris Woollams The Rainbow Diet is primarily about how to beat cancer by eating healthier with a version of the Mediterranean Diet. But if you can beat cancer by changing your diet, it’s the same process and diet to beat heart problems and diabetes and set you on the path to Perfect Health. The book has really helped me understand how nutrition and the body work and what our diet can do to make it work poorly or work better. Why my doctor hasn’t read this book, I don’t know.

Finally, a book I found over 20 years ago that is now out of print but available secondhand is Tish Hayton’s The Food Addicts Diet. Helping her son overcome a major problem of allergies to many foods, Tish came to the conclusion that many of us suffer from food addiction and the foods we are addicted to are wheat, potatoes, milk and the sugar. When I first read it I didn’t want to believe it even though I knew it made sense. These four foods are the basis of all prepared foods. Between them they make up about 80% of everything we eat.

Putting together everything I’ve read from these and many other books, I’m beginning to understand why a diet worked and why I put the weight back on. I am beginning to understand how to simplify my diet so that I can lose weight and keep it off. I haven’t managed to do it yet, but what I am doing is recording all my progress and I will write more articles about my journey towards perfect health.

My problem has been an addiction to foods that encourage my body to store fat. They are the reason diets fail because as soon as we come off a diet we inevitably go back to foods that encourage us to store fat.

The food industry knows this too, but profits so much from this food addiction that it’s not even prepared to try to address the problem. Instead, we have been scammed and lied to for decades. We’ve been convinced that the villain is Gordo. So we’re all obsessed with low-fat foods and diet drinks loaded with sugar substitutes like aspartame.

But it’s not the fats from food that are stored as fat in the body, it’s carbohydrates, particularly simple carbohydrates from grains, and sugars. It’s not just wheat and sugar. Our bodies need glucose for energy from carbohydrates – any excess carbohydrates are converted to fat as a reserve for times when we don’t have enough. Back in the day this was quite common, but now in the west we just aren’t that hungry.

No matter how much you cut down on food, if you give your body more carbohydrates than it needs, it will store the excess and not burn fat. The only way to make your body burn fat is to deprive it of carbohydrates. Cut out grains, sugar, and even starchy vegetables.

I’ve been eating a healthy diet of fruits and vegetables for years thinking it would help me lose weight, but it doesn’t. Many fruits and vegetables are high in carbohydrates.

So the first step to losing weight and keeping it off is to face the number one villain, SUGAR, wherever it comes from. Sugar, honey, fruit, corn syrup, maple syrup, etc. Sugar is sugar, it breaks down quickly into glucose. So my first piece of advice for tackling weight gain and making a permanent change to your diet is to lose your sweet tooth.

The more you restrict your sugar intake, the less you’ll crave it until you finally find the sick sugar. It’s not going to be easy, but if you value your health and want to get to a good, comfortable weight in the long run, your enemy will be sugar and it’s got to go.