Hi everyone
I have researched this diet and I am preparing to start on Monday. I have the recipe book too and feeling very excited as nothing in the past has worked for me. I am 51 years old and probably 50-60 pounds overweight with a lot of weight around my middle. I am hoping to cook easy meals that I can give to my husband too. Any advice will be greatly appreciated. Linda

Hi Linda and welcome to the forums!

Good to hear you are feeling excited about starting this plan. I am re-starting today so also feeling raring to go. I’m not sure I feel especially qualified to give advice given that I’ve had a bit of an up and down relationship with the BSD of late, but I’m going back to what I did in my first week where I lost 10lb. So:

Plan. Planning is absolutely your friend for this way of eating and doing it will make things much easier and, importantly, will help to prevent you from reaching for snacks, comfort food, the odd sandwich or carb-heavy meal when nothing else is available.

Include healthy fats and stay away from anything that says low fat as that’s typically full of sugar and chemicals and won’t do you any favours. Things like full fat Greek yoghurt, olive oil, avocados, nuts (in moderation) will keep you feeling full.

Drink lots of water. More than you think you need to. Again, this will help you feel full and will also keep flushing toxins from your body. You will probably notice that you have to go to the loo a lot more!

Don’t beat yourself up if you have an off day. I am the master of doing this and it really doesn’t help! Accept that you will have great, good and not so good days. If you have a not so good day (or really, a not so good meal/snack) make sure your next meal or next day is better. Don’t let it derail you entirely. That’s currently where I am and it’s extremely annoying to see all your hard work undone!

Measure! Make sure to take your measurements (hips, waist, bust etc) before you start. You can then do this at regular intervals throughout and track your ever-shrinking figure! Sometime this helps to keep you going if the scales are being stubborn, which leads me to my last point….

…the dreaded plateau (you can search lots of threads and posts about this). This is where all your exciting weight loss comes to a sudden halt. Expect to run into one at some point – most people have. It’s frustrating but keep plodding on as things in your body will still be changing (hence good idea to measure). You may experience good losses in the first couple of weeks but see things slow down in, say, weeks 3 and 4. Don’t despair! Just carry on and soon you will see what lots of people term a “whoosh”, which is where after a period with no losses, you suddenly seem to drop a lot almost overnight. In fact, I would say this is probably the most important thing to remember and be aware of and not let it affect your overall progress. I fell foul of my first one and it made me lose motivation and I let the bad stuff start creeping back in as I got quite fed up, which is now why, almost 10 weeks later, I am restarting a new 8 week period. Don’t be me!

So, good luck with your efforts and keep us all posted with your progress!

Hi there and thanks for your reply. I appreciate the guidance you have offered and I will certainly bear this in mind. I have made a list and looked at some easy recipes to start me off first week. I will keep you posted and thanks again.