Image by blacknight via Flickr
Eating better and having a generally healthier lifestyle is a nice goal, but it’s not easy.
One of the (many) problems with losing weight for me is that I need some kind of structured plan to follow. I’ve looked at various diets in the past, but I really don’t want to have to read a 300 page book before I can start a diet. A lot of the online services for tracking progress that I found were very American and referred to Imperial measures and foods that you simply can’t get in Ireland.
Some people have had a lot of success with WeightWatchers, but I’m really not interested in joining a group or making that kind of commitment, as I travel quite a bit and work odd hours.
So what other options are there?
One that I found is Tesco Diets.
It’s an online system (obviously) which allows you to provide all your details (weight, height, age) and you can then choose from a wide variety of diet plans.
In my case I opted for the Mediterranean diet, which has quite a lot of fresh fruit, vegetables and salad.
I’m going to try to stick with it for a couple of weeks and see how things work out. If the Mediterranean option isn’t optimal I can switch to one of the other plans available.
What I like about their system so far is that it’s quite flexible. If you don’t want to eat something you can edit your diet plan and swap it out for something that you actually like.
The online portal generates a weekly shopping list for you and you can easily mark off any items that you already have before generating a printable list to take shopping.
One thing that is “odd” is that while you can choose between a variety of supermarkets (and the plan supposedly adjusts for this) even choosing Tesco gave me items on the list that I simply could not find in my local Tesco. I’ll have to swap them out on the daily meal plans to compensate.
So what is the diet like?
Today’s plan, for example, isn’t exactly torture.
Breakfast was:
- Bowl of wholegrain cereal with milk (I opted for Weetabix)
- 88 g. of wholegrain breakfast cereal
- 1 serving of semi-skimmed milk (6 fl oz or 150ml)
- 1 banana (I’ve always liked bananas, but probably don’t eat them enough)
- 2 slices of wholemeal bread (I prefer mine toasted so I need to work out if there’s any way to report that on the system)
- 2 tsp of reduced sugar jam or marmalade (today was marmalade)
- 2 tsps of reduced fat olive spread (I’m not sure how close to the exact amount I stuck, but it was pretty close)
Lunch is meant to be:
- Bowl of soup with bread
- 1 bowl of soup of choice (around 200ml) (I like soup so this isn’t exactly a chore!)
- 2 slices of wholemeal bread (not sure if I’ll toast this or have it “raw”)
- 2 tsps of reduced fat olive spread
- 2 apples
- 31 g. of mixed nuts (am I meant to eat that by itself? Guess it doesn’t really matter)
- 1 tub of low fat yoghurt (125ml or 5 fl oz)
For dinner later this evening (it being Saturday my timetable’s a bit odd)
- Bowl of soup with beans on toast – soup again, but that’s ok. I haven’t had beans on toast in quite some time, so I’m kind of looking forward to this
- 1 bowl of soup of choice (around 200ml)
- 4 slices of wholemeal bread
- 1 small tin of baked beans (around 220g)
- 1 banana
- 2 tsps of reduced fat olive spread
So today will be a vegetarian day by the looks of things, which doesn’t really bother me.
There’s also an option on the “menu” for a snack of cracker and peanut butter.
I’m allowed as much herbal tea and water as I want, though there’s a limit on the number of cups of coffee I can have. This won’t be an issue at the weekend, but I’m not so sure how that’s going to play out during the working week.
