Hello
I’m starting the BSD today after buying the book last week. I’m 5’2″, weight 9st 9lb, but up until the last few years, I have always been overweight, over 15st at my heaviest. I don’t eat healthily and constantly snack on sugary things, I’m hoping this will reset my habits, fingers crossed!
I’m generally quite active and currently training for a triathlon, I normally run a couple of times a week, although kids on holiday at the moment so everything has stopped! Proudest moment this year was finishing the London Marathon, especially as I was always the fat kid at school who never got picked for anything. 🙂
I’m 40 this year, and would really like to lose 1 stone and be able to keep it off. My main concerns are that I am a veggie and a lot of recipes have meat in, so would love to have more veggie ideas please.
My other worry is about running. I’ve had so many years of people saying I need to eat lots of carbs for running, that now it seems counter-intuitive to drop them.
Thank you for reading. I’m a bit daunted by starting this but really need to get a grip as I seem to have been on a ‘diet’ for a couple of years now and have successfully put on weight, so I think the rapid approach is quite appealing.
Here goes
🙂

Wow Mumofthree, sounds like you’ve changed your life completely around! And apart from being veggie and a lady, you are similar to me! 40 this year, 3 kids and doing the Blenheim triathlon next June (although it will be my 3rd tri).

Huge respect for doing a marathon. I think the furthest I’ve ever run is 10 miles!

If you’ve got a lot of weight to lose then your body will create it’s own carbohydrate from protein that you ingest and fat reserves (if you don’t eat enough protein it will use your muscle mass!), but it doesn’t sound like you’ve got a lot to lose. It is right that you need to eat carbs before doing any cardiovascular activity, but don’t forget this is a low carb, not no carb diet.

My suggestion would be that say an hour or two before your run, have a good portion (half??) of your daily carb allowance, but make sure they are good slow release carbs (quinoa, bulgar wheat, rolled oats, etc).

Cutting out the sugary snacks is definitely the way to go. You may feel a bit weak when you’re on the sugar comedown but afterwards you’ll feel so much better. I used to get really bad food coma mid-afternoon. No such thing for me any more!

As for meat free protein, eggs, pulses and full fat yoghurt will be your friend. You can get plenty of usable protein from veggie food, you just need to make sure you combine your foods and proteins in the right combination to make sure that you’re getting the 8 essential amino acids that make up “usable” protein. I can recommend Patrick Holfords “Optimum Nutrition” for advice on how to combine food to get the most usable protein.

Out of interest, what distance tri are you doing? Is it open water or pool, and finally don’t shirk the swim training. For my first tri I pretty much did 80% swim training (2.5k front crawl) 3 times a week and I only ran or cycled once per week! I should have done slightly less swimming and a bit more running/cycling but my cardio vascular fitness was so good I breezed the cycle and run. It also took me 12 months to build up to that level of swim fitness! Also, make sure you practice bricks (where you go from cycling to running).

Hiya

Welcome! I am 5’4″ and started at 10st 8lbs. Am about 11 weeks in, 8st 12lbs this morning with a reset target of 8st 10lbs after smashing my optimistic 9st initial target (I only thought I’d reach 9st 4lbs).

Not a veggie – I eat fish – but the revelation on this is the full fat dairy, cheese especially.

I would recommend
Getting an app like MyFitnessPal
Logging in your food and checking the nutritional values
Keeping carbs low – I’ve been doing 20-30g per day as that really seems to kick-start the weight loss for me. People here have success on 50g or less.
Using the MFP as a meal planner and weighing out your food so you know what you’re eating and get a feel for quantities. (Pain at first but so worth it)
Check measurements and target clothes not just weight. Often weight plateaus.
Drink loads

With regard to carb loading for exercise it sounds as though you may be carb addicted so may have carb flu symptoms (weakness etc) as you come off and force your body to get energy from the fat cells not easy access refined carbs.

But once you get through this, you will get much increased energy and will be able to exercise without carb loading.

You should keep an eye on it once you’ve settled down into this way of eating.

Hope all that helps. Keep asking questions if you need to! 🙂

This egg fried cauliflower ‘rice’ recipe is lovely – it mentions bacon bits for the top, but obviously you can leave that out 🙂 I made this and it was delicious. If you haven’t got coconut aminos (it’s what some people use as a soy sauce substitute) just use soy sauce – I did and it turned out delicious 🙂 And I didn’t have the coconut vinegar either (what even is that??) so I just used fish sauce (which doesn’t have any fish in it, apparently) and soy sauce. Even my boyfriend who usually hates veg thought this was tasty!!

http://nomnompaleo.com/post/3195098303/asian-cauliflower-fried-rice

Talking about soy sauce. Kikkoman do a gluten free soy sauce. I had to get some in for my brother and it’s all I buy now. I didn’t realise how much crap was in soy sauce until I read the ingredients! The kikkoman gluten free one is simply water, soybeans, salt and vinegar.

When you compare that to normal soy sauce it’s amazing how much junk is in it!

Hi
Thanks for your advice. I’m doing the Shrewsbury triathlon, well, I’ve opted for the Quadrathlon which has an added kayak bit 🙂 I did a tri in Chester this month too. I stick to the short sprint distances, I never have enough time to train for the longer distances :/
Good luck for the Blenheim, how far is that one? Sounds like a fab setting.

Thanks for clearing up the carb issue, that makes sense. I think I’d got it in my head that I couldn’t have any carbs, arghh!

Cheers

Thank you everyone for your advice.

I’ve been using My Fitness Pal for years but have reset it now with 800 and going to make a clean start.
Yesterday went ok, although I caught my kids cold on the same day, so now a big sniffly mess. It turns out I had 100 spare calories yesterday so maybe I was too strict, could have had a chocolate (ha ha).

I have a headache this morning, which could be the cold or this diet. I have been drinking loads of fluids though.

My head was playing lots of games yesterday, trying to say that ‘one snack’ will be ok, I have a feeling the next few days will be tough. I find planning ahead difficult too, but really need to sort that out so that meals are ready, rather than my usual chaotic approach!

Three good things yesterday – I started on this; I did some painting; Played Monopoly with my littlest.