Dieting that works

I have been overweight for most of my adult life. When we lived in Brisbane in the late 70s, I managed to lose 20 lbs over the summer, when I was doing a Father Christmas job! I stopped eating snacks and dessert, and ate a lot of rabbit food, and the heat helped!

But since then I have steadily gained weight, and have not seriously tried to diet.

For the past 4 years I have had an enjoyable, but sedentary job teaching piano, and ended up weighing 99 kilos, and finally did something about it, when my wife, Joan, decided to diet.

The most helpful thing for us has been writing down what we eat in a diary, which doesn't give you much room! We got ours from Alan Borushek and also bought his Pocket Calorie Counter.

We haven't bothered to sign up for his diet club, but the simple act of writing down what we eat and weighing ourselves each morning has been beneficial.

So far I have lost 10 kilos and about 8 centimetres around the waist. This is as much as 3 large drink bottles of juice. I can't believe I was carrying that around all the time!

We have done this gradually, by cutting out fats such as butter, drinking less juice and eating less fat-free or fat-reduced food, which is usually loaded with sugar and often contains only a tiny bit less calories than the non-fat reduced stuff!

We have reduced the amount of food we eat, such as having 2 franfurts isntead of 3, or 2 slices of bread instead of 4.

We have stopped having desserts, and eat a piece of 2 of fruit instead.

We also drink more tea, more water and less fruit juice, which seems to have about as many calories as soft drink!

We have not found exercising to be a good way to lose weight: in fact taking up skipping was fun, but soon gave me a very sore knee.
I previously tried to lose weight by doing a regular walk, but only managed to reduce by a couple of kilos.