Thick & Thin Part 0: Diet Plans at the Beginning

Picking a diet plan to stick with

The point of no return

I've been overweight almost all of my adult life and had always managed to avoid the issue of my weight. I've half-heartedly gone on the occasional diet (usually the type of diet which would allow me to carry on eating sugar) and then thrown in the towel whenever a birthday or wedding or weekend came up. Last Christmas I was given a DVD by a cousin showing footage from Christmas and birthday gatherings for the past 3 years or so. I was horrified. I couldn't believe that I looked like that. I had truly convinced myself that my weight problem wasn't so serious. The shock was almost too much to bear.

I had finally begun to come to terms with the fact that I had a problem, but I wasn't quite ready to change until... my boyfriend proposed. I thought about that DVD and realised that I didn't want to experience that same kind of shame and discomfort every time I looked at my wedding photos. I couldn't let it happen. Something had to change - for good.

Learning

There isn't exactly a shortage of information on how to lose weight: there's too much. As soon as I started looking I realised that there was so much conflicting information about healthy (and unhealthy) ways to lose weight and every one of them had convincing evidence to back it up. Low-carb, low-fat, low GI, low GL, food combining, intermittent fasting – they all had aspects that were appealing and they all had success stories. Obviously every one of them (even the outlandish ones) had worked for someone, somewhere. So which one would work for me?

I started doing all kinds of 'emotional eating' quizzes and reading books on attitudes to food etc. I learnt a lot about myself. I learnt that I crave novelty and can't stay on a diet plan for very long because I get bored. I learnt that I prefer structured plans to more free-form dietary changes because I'm a structured, rule-following kinda gal.

What I didn't learn was which diet would work for me in the long run. I knew my love of novelty could keep me going for a month or so with any plan because I enjoy trying and learning new things. I also knew that vague diets-are-the-devil's-work 'lifestyle changes' wouldn't work because I crave rules and structure (and frankly, I think it's pretty obvious that my good judgement can't be trusted).

So how could I give myself the structure I crave while still allowing for change and new experiences? Simple: I'd try them all until I found something that worked. I'd stick with something for a month and then, if the philosophy didn't fit, I'd move on to something else.

Making a plan

Well, now was the fun part: picking diets to try. It was so hard trying to decide which diet seemed the most plausible when I was trying to pick just one to stick to for a whole year. Now I had freedom of choice. If something sounded fun but unusual I could try it, and if it didn't work I could move on – no strings. So here was the plan:

Select a diet
Read the material and plan to implement it for 1 month
Track my progress
Evaluate my emotional and physical response to the plan
Decide: Stay or try something new

Luckily, my oh-so-supportive other half (Darius) agreed to go on the diets with me, so no two-meal cooking.

Chereen Harding

The Thick and Thin Diet Plan Series

Thick & Thin Part 1: GI Lean
I chose GI Lean to be my first diet. I knew my first obstacle would be tackling my overactive sweet-tooth so I thought it best that my first diet not permit sugar at all. I also felt that a more structured approach was best towards the beginning when my judgement compromised by cravings. GI Lean was being advertised quite heavily at the time, so I decided to give it a bash...
Thick and Thin, Part 2: The Hacker's Diet
There is something very appealing about brutal honesty. It was this appeal that lead me to select The Hacker's Diet. The diet has been floating around on the internet for over a decade now and requires no purchases of any kind.

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