each meal is very important when you’re taking alli capsules. If you don’t stick to it, you increase your chances of experiencing diet-related treatment effects.
• Get more physically active: Exercise helps to burn calories, so when you’re taking alli, you can help yourself by taking more exercise.
• Remember to read the label and information leaflet that comes with the alli pack before you start.
Your Reward
Successful weight loss may seem like a big challenge, but alli can be a big help. Importantly, the alli programme provides you with useful tools to help you sustain your weight loss and commit to lasting, positive changes to your eating and lifestyle habits.
This is the first step on your journey to a healthier lifestyle. Good luck!
Chapter 2 Your Diet Essentials
Well done for taking the first steps to a healthier, trimmer you. The information in this chapter will help you learn how to eat a healthier diet, both while you are trying to lose weight and in the longer term.
Many people spend years hopping from one diet to another but are still confused about what or how much to eat. Add to this the pressure of modern living, being short of time and the confidence to cook, as well as being surrounded by tempting and readily accessible food, and it’s little wonder we find it so hard not to put on weight. There isn’t a magic solution, but you can take more control by learning more about what and how much to eat and starting to incorporate more activity into your life.
This chapter explains the background to the diet, giving you guidance about the food groups that will be part of your eating plans.
This chapter has several sections:
• The key to weight-loss success outlines the principles of energy balance.
• What can I eat? takes you through the food-group system, explaining the importance of each group and providing you with useful tips for your diet.
• Your diet goal provides a breakdown of the calories and fat that you may have at each meal.
• Your meal blueprints helps you to plan healthy, balanced meals by giving you a clear guide of what to include each mealtime.
• Food and your mind helps you to identity why you eat and provides a few tips to keep you motivated.
The Key to Weight-loss Success
Successful weight loss is about losing weight and keeping it off. To do this you need to understand how to eat and live healthily, not only while you are in your weight-loss phase, but beyond it, too. You also need to understand your own triggers to eating so that you can recognize when you are hungry, and when you are eating just because you are bored. More on this at the end of the chapter, but first some nutrition basics.
The Energy-balance Equation
Food and drink provide us with energy, which is measured in kilocalories, normally shortened to calories, or sometimes in joules and kilojoules. Our bodies use energy in a host of different ways: keeping our bodies ticking over – even digesting food needs calories; for maintenance and growth and the repair of our tissues and organs. We gain weight when we consume more energy (calories) than we use up, so in order to lose weight we need to consume fewer calories or use up more.
The healthiest way to lose weight is to use up more calories as well as consuming fewer. This is because:
• becoming more active is great for your health now and in the long term
• if you only cut down on food you run the risk of cutting out vital vitamins and minerals
• being active releases feel-good hormones, which help sustain your efforts and make you feel better
• you will improve your muscle tone
• studies have found that people who increase their activity as part of a diet maintain their weight-loss success for longer than those who only cut back on calories
• you are likely to lose weight faster.
Chapter 7 provides information on how to incorporate more activity into your daily life.
What Can I Eat?
This diet follows recommended nutrition principles for a healthier diet. That is, it encourages you to eat a balanced diet, eating foods from all the main food groups, control your calories through portion size and reduce fat intake, and also be more active.
This may not sound like rocket science. It isn’t. The diet is designed so that:
1. you achieve effective, gradual weight loss
2. you lose weight by eating ‘normal’, not ‘diet’ foods
3. you learn to take control of your eating by understanding more about foods and nutrition.
Alongside the diet you are encouraged to become more active and also to spend some time looking at the triggers that may make you eat when you are not hungry. Whole books have been written on the motivational side of eating and slimming, and it is not within the scope of this book to provide more than a thumbnail sketch with some practical hints and pointers to help you.
To start off with, you need to look at what a healthy, balanced diet really is so you can begin to make better choices from now on.
What Is a Healthy Balanced Diet?
A healthy, balanced diet contains the right amount and mix of nutrients and energy for your individual needs. Not too much and not too little – a sort of Goldilocks principle.
That sounds all fine and dandy, but who knows exactly how much energy you need or which particular vitamins and minerals you need the most? Few people do, and even then it will vary week by week. So we need a way of showing what this may be for an average healthy person.
There are different ways this can be done. Sometimes a pyramid of food and drink is used, or a basket depicting a range of food groups. The UK model is called the Eatwell Plate and represents the type and amount of different foods that should form part of a healthy diet.
The idea is to show you the relative proportion of food groups you need to eat as part of a healthy diet. There are five groups:
1. Fruit and vegetables
2. Bread, rice, potatoes, pasta and other starchy foods
3. Milk and dairy foods
4.
