Dieting is never easy but it can be

"Hmmm..your HbA1c is a bit high at 6.5%, you had better come back and see me in 3 months. If you can't improve it we may have to increase your medication" .. These were the words of my diabetes nurse last December. My heart sunk she was correct, I had let myself go yet again. Since I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes 8 years ago at the age of 64 I have struggled to contain it by reducing my weight and becoming fitter. At first it worked great. I started a weight watchers diet using a little app on a Palm. I managed to shed 21 lbs over a period of 7 months. I took up cycling fairly seriously joining the CTC, buying a Mountain bike and touring bike and doing some touring in the Hebrides. It worked, my glucose readings came back to normal and all was well. But, the weight crept back on and I yo yoed over the years. So, in January I resolved to do something about it permanently. The idea of taking more pills, the risk of blindness amputation and an early death meant whatever I did had to be permanent.
Over the years I have tried all sorts of diets. Some of them just fads like Atkins, F Plan, 5:2 ,  and many others. The only one that ever really worked for me was keeping a food diary on a weight watchers plan. I started looking around for a solution. If you went with weight watchers you had to join a group and I didn't want to do that. Looking at Google Play on my Android tablet threw up an App called My Fitness Pal. This looked ideal because it combined calorie counting with exercise recording. The App runs on a tablet and phone and a PC, and automatically synchronises itself between all the devices you put it on. Using the App you could consume food up to a set level and it calculates the calories expended in exercise which can be set against the food, thus allowing you to eat more and yet still loose weight. Actually, what I did was to eat up to the level of a 1 lb a week weight loss and use the exercise to shed even more weight. This ultimately led to a 1.3 lb a week average weight loss. Great for me because I am impatient.
One feature of fad diets, particularly stupid diets like Atkins 5 : 2 etc, is that when you reach your goal you probably wish to eat normally like everyone else.  These diets havent transformed your eating habits which any decent diet really should. I was determined to just modify my eating habits which were actually quite reasonable, but eat less and through exercise become really fit and healthy again.
Before dieting I usually ate muesli and a banana for breakfast, mostly a salad or sandwich or couple of rolls for lunch and a pretty normal evening meal of one sometimes two courses. The bad thing that I did was eat cheese and biscuits late at night, probably drank more than I should and ate fairly big portions of everything. Thus the answer was to modify my diet to loose weight without changing it much. The steps I took were:-

Reduce portion sizes to reduce calorie intake to My Fitness Pals recommendations
Add in a very low calorie soup to evening meals to reduce evening hunger
Always have a lowish calorie desert of some sort
Control the booze
Leave room for treats like chocolate, steak and chips etc so that it didn't feel like a rigorous diet
Make sure that each week there was several thousand calories of exercise thrown in to speed up weight loss.
I was very lucky because my wife saw that I was making good progress early on and decided to join me. This made dieting very much easier for me and ultimately she lost almost as much weight as me.
To make sure that I stuck to my diet I told friends and family what I was doing which was an added incentive to stick at it. Ultimately I reduced my weight from 15st 6lbs to 12st 1 today, a total weight loss of 47lbs over 36 weeks. At 5ft 10 my BMI is in the region of 24. My waist has decreased from a tight 40 to 34. I may possibly go on to loose another 1/2 a stone to place me more comfortably in the normal BMI range. Its now easier to climb hills on the bike, tie my shoelaces and walk without my knees aching.
The exercise I did was 70% cycling, 20% walking and in the cold weather a bit of rowing on our rowing machine. I try to do at least 25 minutes walking on the days I don't cycle which is three days a week, 11 or 22 miles at a stretch with some decent hills.
If I wanted to I could stick to this diet for ever, but I would turn into a stick. My Fitness Pal allowed me about 1500 calories per day and I should consume about 2000 to 2200 to stabilise my weight. I have yet to work out how to do this, but I think it will consist mainly of what I now regard as treats, an extra glass of wine, an extra piece of chocolate, a chippy, a takeaway, extra restaurant meals etc
Now for a few details of what I actually ate:-
Breakfast
40g Muesli, 25 g frozen berries, smallish banana coffee
Or..
1 egg, 1 slice of lean bacon, two tinned plum tomatoes, smallish banana
..About 260 calories
Lunch
A gammon ham salad with 60g ham, rocket, tomatoes, red onion, cucumber, sweet peppers, radish, salary, beetroot, pickled cucumber, and 100g of cold baked beans, plus a small apple or pear some days.
Or..
A single roll about 200 calories with ham, slim slices of cheddar and salad stuff plus a large tomato.
..About 300 to 400 calories.
Dinner
A filling, low calorie soup (details follow)
Meat or fish and 2 veg with potato rice of pasta, chilli con carne, curry, liver and bacon, stewing beef etc etc all the things normally we eat in England except that potatoes are limited to 150g, rice noodles and pasta are just 50g.  This is much less carbohydrate than we used to eat and much less than most overweight people eat. Its not necessary to eat a lot really I now realise. You don't need lots of carbohydrates and lots is bad because we found it only makes you hungry later.
A dessert of fruit, often fresh pineapple, rhubarb, etc with one desert spoonful of ice cream or two of low fat yoghurt.
400 - 700 calories generally, sometimes more offset by exercise when taking you over the limit
In addition to the above I drank about 6 or 7 cups of tea or coffee with skimmed milk every day and always a glass of wine or whisky.
Once a week we always have a treat. A 6oz sirloin steak, 100g of 5% fat oven chips, fried onions, and mushrooms. We also have a 150 calorie chocolate bar, but never more than 2 a week. To maintain a diet you have to have some relief. For us its this treat, the odd restaurant meal, the wine club we go to once a month, and our diet period was actually 40 weeks, but we were on holiday eating whatever we liked for 4 weeks of that. You have to give yourself these breaks if you want to succeed.

The soups
1 onion, 1 stick of celery, 1 400g tin of chopped tomatoes,  2 large carrots small handful of red lentils
To this you can add basil, or curry powder or paste or any other low calorie flavouring you fancy. Don't cook down the onion and celery just put it all in a saucepan with water salt and pepper and boil if up for 20 minutes. Don't use any oil, no need to sweat onions. Then whizz it up in a liquidiser finally adding water to get the consistency you like. This will make about 6 portions.
Or..
1 large leek, 2 large carrots, 200g potato, 10g butter, water, seasoning
Again boil for 20 minutes and liquidise 6 portions
Or..
1 onion, 1 stick of celery, 100g of peas, 1 large bag of spinach, veg stock cube, seasoning. Boil for 10 minutes and liquidise. 4 portions.

My Fitness Pal

This App takes a bit of setting up initially. You can put in your own recipes. There is a database of millions of foods and all the normal stuff from British supermarkets is already in there. There is also an incredibly easy barcode scanner. Just scan a barcode and it will recognise practically anything and give you the calorie value and nutrition details. If you put in your favourite breakfast as items you can save it as a meal that you can then retrieve with a single click. The brilliant part is that it draws your attention to high calorie things and makes you modify your intake to stay within the calorie limit you need to observe to achieve your weekly weight loss target. There is also a weight tracker which gives you a graph of your progress, a great motivator. Your nutrition can be observed in the form of pie and bar charts. You can link it to Strava and other things like that too that will pass in your exercise calories.
In conclusion..
What I am very pleased with is that I managed to diet on meals I enjoy and never had to resort to starving myself by fasting or eating mountains of fatty foods instead of carbohydrate foods that I really enjoy. I have reached my diet goal in a measured way over a reasonable period of time without any anguish, seldom feeling hungry or deprived.
Our local Sue Ryder home now has 5 dustbin liners full of my old clothes and my wife now look terrific. Its been a great experience for me personally. I am no longer ashamed of having an overweight fat bellied shape and I am fitter and healthier. I went to see my GP who congratulated me on my HbA1c of 4% and told me I no longer have to take any diabetes medication. The diabetes has gone! Just shows what you can achieve when you get in the right frame of mind.
Being overweight is not much fun. I really hope that these details of my diet and exercise programme helps anyone that reads it.l