These two photos were taken at the same event two years apart.  The second photo was taken at the end of 2014. At the end of a year when I think I finally got it.  ‘It’ being the relationship between diet and exercise.

I can’t say that I have tried every diet known to man but I have experience of a good number of them.  I have done Weight Watchers, Slimming World, Atkins, 5:2, diet pills and meal replacement. I have lost weight on all of them. They all work but the challenge is keeping the weight off once you stop.  Throughout my dieting history I have exercised.  Sometimes quite intensely but at other times hardly at all.  But I can’t be confident that I did both at the same time. As an example, when I was training for a London to Paris cycle ride in 2012 I can see by the celebratory photo that it hadn’t had a huge impact on my weight and in a photo taken as I emerged from a great swim in 2011 I look like a fat, menopausal penguin. I’m not going to post the photo as it is so awful. Only the super slim can make a wetsuit look attractive.

At the beginning of 2014 I joined up to do an 8 week body challenge at RAW Inc. Training. The challenge consisted of following an essentially low carbohydrate diet focussing on clean foods. I also had to commit to doing three training sessions a week.  As I had been training two to three times a week so this wasn’t a problem but the eating plan proved more challenging.

Eating clean means only eating food that looks like food, eliminating processed food and cutting down on sugar.  It is amazing how much of the food that is available to us today does not fit this definition.  Lunch during the working week was the biggest challenge.  I work in the centre of London surrounded by the likes of Pret a Manger, Starbucks, Eat, Abokado etc.  Nearly everything they produce contains high amounts of carbohydrate and more alarmingly sugar. On a closer look at the ingredients of a soup advertised as the healthy option revealed that it contained 15.2 g. of sugar. This is nearly 4 teaspoons.  Lunch provided at a meeting was invariably sandwiches and wraps so I had to either bring my own or scrape out the innards of the sandwich/wrap which made me look a bit eccentric

But I persevered and not only did I start to look better I started to feel better. I stopped getting that post lunch dumped down feeling and my energy levels soared. I started to consider how food was going to make me feel not just the impact on my weight.

I repeated the challenge in the summer and have continued eating in the same way ever since.  Amazingly I got to a stage when I was losing more weight than I wanted to. I had never been in that position before and as a twenty/ thirty year old I would have embraced it. But it  is a sad fact of life that when a 50 something loses too much weight they just start looking scrawny.  So on the advice of my personal trainer, Chloe, I started to increase my carb intake on the days I was working out.

So four months into 2015 I seem to be maintaining my weight loss.  Not that I don’t have the occasional lapse. It usually consists of chocolate and lager.