I am convinced the low sugar diet is the way to go, but looking at the recipes in the book they are too much of a faff to bother with. Its the same with all these books, they put in these fancy recipes with the hope of it being attractive and to make the book up-market. But all I want to know is what foods can you buy and eat that are common and cheap to buy and don’t require much cooking.
I am used to eating things like a tin of soup, beans on toast, a tuna sandwich, or a bowl of porridge, all of which takes five mins to prepare with a min of washing up. I am not bothered about an Avocado curry or some other exotic dish and I just wouldn’t be motivated into making special shopping trips to buy the ingredients. I just want to know what the basic foods are.

Hi VinnieMac, welcome to the site. First of all this diet might be low sugar but sugar can also be in the form of carbohydrates like bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, breakfast cereals, in fact these are the biggest source of sugars unless, of course, you are living on cake and and desserts. So get your head around the carbs in your life. That soup, those beans and the bread, all high in carbs – e.g. can of Heinz Chicken Soup is 20g carbs, a can of Asda baked beans is 30g. One main thing is to get rid of anything in a can or packet with ingredients you would find in a chemistry lab.

Not to make this too difficult for you at the start and assuming your not diabetic you need to reduce your carbs to under 100g, which is considered moderate carbs and you can go lower once you are used to the diet. There is no need for fancy cooking. If you want quick look at eggs – boiled (and easily transportable for lunch), scrambled with full fat cheese for breakfast or lunch, omelette with a few veg thrown in like chopped red pepper and mushrooms for dinner. No, you cant live on eggs. Baked beans are ok now and then, look for low sugar, bread should be high in grains and not just pretend to be ‘brown’ or ‘healthy’. Yes a bit dearer but you will only be having one slice instead of 2 or 3. Real oats, rolled oats are good, do not buy ready oats, you only need 30g to 40g serving – most people pour out too much cereal for it to be a ‘diet’ meal. Look at buying nuts and seeds to sprinkle on the oats – chia, linseed, flaked almonds etc.

Can you cook a bit. Make a batch of mince with a few veg like peppers, onions, garlic and mushrooms with canned tomatoes (yes you can have them, look on the back of the can, it is mainly tomato). If you do enough for 3 or 4 meals you can portion and freeze. Same applies to a beef or chicken stew – quite simple to make. One other thing, do not give up on good fats, do not buy low fat foods, again looking on the packaging they are full of sugars or things like rice powder (another carb). Buy full fat yoghurts, cheese etc. Those avocados don’t have to be fancy, just slice, take out the stone and eat. Do you eat salads, tuna, chicken, ham.

If you think, sod that for a game of monkeys (is that the saying), don’t give up. Come back and tell us what it is you want to achieve i.e. weight loss, better health, looser clothes. We won’t give up on you.

Good luck.