I’m a 60 year old man. I have lost 12lbs since 23rd Nivember 2016 by reducing alcohol units to 10 pw, cutting out all starchy carbs, eating more berries & doing 10,000 steps a day. After my husband’s birthday on 2nd January I will step up a gear & follow the 8-week diet. No alcohol. No snacks. Wonderful nutritious food with portion control. My challenge will be increasing fast exercise. I love the forums & all the encouragement they bring. Have a great 2017 everyone!

Hi TuftyTraveller, it sounds like you’ve made a great start.

You’ve come to the right place; keep posting, keep losing and keep positive.

Best of luck on your journey through 2017!

I’ve just read your profile. I used exactly the same approach of not counting calories. As I’m not a fussy eater, I just adopted the recipes in the book and can now create meals that fit BSD principles without counting calories, although I do weigh/measure ingredients to stop my portion size drifting upwards.

Hi cmawp,
Happy Christmas to you and everyone else reading this !. I’m just back at work after a day off yesterday. I’ve been thoroughly inspired by your incredible weight loss and journey. Your stats before starting are very similar to where I am now. Today is my first day, I’ve had quite enough rubbish over the festive period !. I had a lovely day yesterday with my family, but enough is enough now, I’m tired of carrying around excess baggage all the time !. I’m extremely committed, and will be very prescriptive in my approach to how I follow this plan (I’m intentionally not going to use the term ‘diet’ !). Your story and that of others, namely Bill1954 and CaptainLynne are really inspiring and truly show that this works – period.
I’ve had a go before, but unfortunately wasn’t prescriptive enough in what I allowed myself to eat, so this time I am going to follow your approach, and stick rigidly to the 7 day plan in Michael’s book. I’ve done the shopping prior to Xmas, so have all the ingredients needed. My wife said yesterday that the fridge resembles an allotment now !, lots of strange green objects lurking about…
On the face of it, this plan is fairly hard to achieve, BUT, the results are exponential. Your results have been exceptional, as you have stuck rigidly to the golden rules, the way that Dr Taylor designed it. I have a few questions if you don’t mind ?

How much water did you drink daily ?
Did you weigh yourself daily ?
Did you abstain totally from alcohol ? (I will be, I’ve had far too much over the last couple of weeks !)
Did you use a ‘app’ at all to log your food, or just a written diary ?.

Sitting here now, it’s incredible to think that I could potentially have your fantastic results in a very short space of time, I’m feeling very excited at finally being able to take control and lose the extra weight.

I’m doing a kind of scientific experiment entering data daily onto a spreadsheet. I weigh myself every day , around 6pm, in similar clothes then enter it into a spreadsheet in st & lbs, kilos & total pounds. I calculate weight lost/gained & colur in the cell green for lost & orange for gained. I have created formulas to calculate the weekly loss/gain & the total lost since I started. I also have colums for the daily entry of number of glasses of water, steps, fast exercise, blood pressure & for the contents of each meal & any snacks I have. An important colums is headed “comments” where I add my mood & feelings that may or may not be associated with food, drink or exercise & any notes about sleep. It is already producing some interesting trend data. It may sound obsessive but I know it will be a useful tool in talking with my doctor who is very supportive of my plans.

I aim to drink at least 5 glasses of water a day. This means more frequent trips to the loo! I will abstain totally from alcohol for 8 weeks from 3rd Jan. I am just finishing a glorious & expensive bottle of Californian Merlot that has taken 3 days to drink (I used to do that & more in one evening!). I will get it again in March – buying better quality & drinking less is the way to go – for me. My doctor did a full range of blood tests & will do them again at the end of the 8 weeks. They are currently within the normal range so it will be interesting to seewhat impact the diet has on them. I love chocolate so currently limit myself to 4 small squares of Green & Blacks 85% cocoa. My weight, by the way, when I started to get serious about living healthy on 23rd Nov 2016 was 16st 6lbs. I am 5′ 6 1/2″ tall so am clinically obese. NOT for long!

Hi TuftyTraveller,

Your mindset seems to very similar to mine, a prescriptive and even clinical approach to weight loss. I love the idea of producing a spreadsheet !, it’s not obsessive at all, I think it’s taking back control of our lives !. I’m with you on the Merlot, my fave tipple, but I’m going to abstain from now, as I’ve had more than enough at various parties over the last few weeks !. I’ve started today in earnest, as I seem to have the right mindset, so I’m going to roll with it. We have arranged a party NY eve, but in actual fact I’m really not interested in over indulging, so I’m going to drive there and if anybody asks, I’m just going to say that I’m abstaining for health reasons. I have worked out the end date for my 8 weeks, and another 4 weeks if I’m not at goal, and am going to closely monitor my progress daily. I can’t wait to see results, and post my success on here !!

The trips to the loo are not just you drinking more but the way the body flushes out fat, it is a good sign. You are super organised, I too like to chart everything. I have a book i write in daily, weight, BG, insulin given and exercise. I have to take this with me to the doctors every 3 months and he picks random pages, I also make notes if i went out for a meal or ate something off plan (pre BSD). Now I also plan my weeks menu every Sunday and pin it up on the fridge so hubby can see if there are any days he wants something different and i prepare my shopping list from it. It might be anal but it keeps me on track. Over the months I have around 8 weeks printed out and kept in a file so if I am pushed for time I can just pull out a week I fancy the look of.

When I go home on 3rd January I will pull out week one and start all over again. Keep on keeping on…..

Hi Seadog, welcome to the club! Thanks, it’s nice to know my journey has inspired others. I can’t quite believe how quickly it has all happened; almost achieving goal weight in 14 weeks far exceeded my expectations!

To answer your questions:

I now drink about 4 litres of water per day with 2 or 3 double espressos or strong black coffees. In the beginning, this was a conscious effort to fill gaps between meals and was supplemented with fruit tea and a daily diet fizzy drink if I stayed on plan. Then after 3-4 weeks, ketosis made me drink that much and I went to drinking water, espresso and carbonated water only.

I weigh daily to keep a ‘lost to date figure’ and write down a weekly figure for tracking.

I did cut out all alcohol for the 8 weeks. Even after that I only had a mulled wine, a taste of a fine wine and a solitary Christmas night of drinking. For me this was no great loss, I would only drink every 3-4 weeks anyway and food calories are far too valuable when there are only 800 or 1000 a day!

I didn’t use an app, just the recipes from the book. I prefer 3 meals a day and generally had 150-200 cal breakfast, 200-250 for lunch and 400-450 for dinner. Others have used different approaches to meal sizes and times – we’re all different so just experiment and see what works best for you. I found if I had too much for breakfast, I wouldn’t be satisfied at other mealtimes which increased the chances of evening snacking.

I think everyone has a chance to take control by using this diet. Being male and having a muscular frame does give us an advantage of losing weight even quicker. My body was only just able to keep track with the speed of weight loss. In the first week or 2, I noticed my back cracking lots (in a good way) as the stresses on it reduced rapidly. I had to change my driving position and workchair position as my tailbone would rub uncomfortably on the seat base. I went through countless pairs of jeans as I dropped from a 38 to a 31 inch waist jean in 14 weeks – I’ve kept the same belt for prosperity, I make a regular trip to Timpsons to have extra holes added!

Also to everyone on this thread, I’m loving your analytical/statistical approaches! It’s my natural tendency to record and analyse data so what you’re doing seems normal to me.

Just so long as you don’t over-analyse of course! Remember, you’re never being proved wrong, you’re always learning what’s going on. Sometimes the patterns alter and it can be a shock.

I noticed a pattern of a weekly big loss followed by a weekly small loss. Quite simply this could be explained by needing a big number 2 (I could drop 4lb overnight after a day of losing weight in the loo!). But one week I had a marginal gain when I was expecting a big loss. This was corrected the following week when I had a massive loss! Even 14 weeks into this diet, big losses are possible.

As an ex-teacher I also love any type of spreadsheets and lists! Thanks for the inspiration. Good luck to all of you.