If I can do it, ANYONE can.

Yes, even you. Especially you! (If there's anyone reading of course!)

You can all see the "fat" photo at the bottom of the blog, and it should give you some clue as to just how bad my eating habits were. Think family size takeaways, huge bars of Dairy Milk chocolate and slabs of cake! And that was just for dinner ;)

In all honesty, my eating habits were ridiculous. I ate excessively, unhealthily, and quite frankly I was just plain greedy. I believed, and to some extent will always believe, that food equals happiness. But whereas now a little treat can cheer me up, no matter how much I ate it never actually made me happy. The habit was a comfort, the clothes shopping tears and embarrassment at my size after were most certainly not.

In the two years it took me to lose the four and a half stone I learnt so many things about myself and about the relationship I have with food, and I know that the most important element of losing weight and keeping it off is changing your habits. It does take time, and to some degree you must fight those old habits and learn new, healthier ones. But it can be done.

To really demonstrate just how much my diet has changed I'm going to list my typical daily menu before and after. The important thing to remember here is that whenever I am hungry, I eat, and I have at least one treat a day because food still makes me happy and my mind still thinks about it most of the time!

                              Then                                                   Now
                          Breakfast                                           Breakfast
4 slices white toast with margarine & cheese       Bagel & low fat cheese
                            Snack                                                  Snack
                Bag of Walkers crisps                             Special K cereal bar

                           Lunch                                                   Lunch  
   Pasta n Sauce, sandwich, chocolate bar            Salad/cous cous/chicken,
                                                                                  low fat yogurt
                            Snack                                                  Snack
             Chocolate or cake/flapjack             WW cake/biscuits and coffee
                          Dinner                                                  Dinner
                  Chinese takeaway:                               Chinese takeaway:
                        Fried rice                                               Boiled rice
         Sweet and sour chicken (battered)               Vegetable chow mein
              Chicken with mushrooms                      Handful of prawn crackers
                       Spring roll
                          Chips
                      Before bed                                            Before bed
          Half a 250g bar of Dairy Milk                      Options hot chocolate


To be honest it's hard to remember exactly what I'd eat in a day, I'd take a lot of trips to the kitchen cupboard if I was sitting at home so it'd probably be more than what I've listed. But you can see that I'm still eating a lot, just not a lot of rubbish!

I hope all that is helpful to someone.

My tip for today is recognise your habits. Once you know where your weakness is, fight it! Find a way of substituting if you need to - I substitute chocolate with Options when I know I haven't really been good enough to eat chocolate - and soon you'll be out of the habit.

Control your habits, don't let them control you :D