be really good at subconsciously spoiling your plan by encouraging you to take a shortcut here, or make a slip there. Make sure the person you choose is really committed and of a similar mindset to you.
Sometimes well-meaning friends and relatives just don’t support us in the best way. Nagging, bullying and humiliating are thoroughly unhelpful, and guaranteed to make you stick two fingers up at the world and abandon your diet. Decide if you want to tell people you are trying to lose weight. If you do, decide what they can best do to help you and ask them for what you need. If you don’t want them to eat biscuits in front of you, ask them not to. If you want them to ask how you are getting on once a week rather than every five minutes, or if you’d prefer them not to mention it at all, ask them. If you want them to query whether you should be eating certain foods, ask them to phrase the question in a way that doesn’t sound accusing or patronizing. Decide on the kind of support you want and will respond best to and ask for it! If you prefer your support to come from people less involved with your day-to-day life then you can log on to our website and get an abundance of really helpful support.
A Word about Goal Setting
Take some measurements before you begin the diet so you can see how much weight you lose.
It’s useful to know your BMI (body mass index). No weight-for-height charts are perfect but we prefer the BMI because it gives you an indication of the risk to your health from your weight. It’s also useful because there is a wide range for each classification, and for people with a lot of weight to lose it’s really helpful in setting staged targets. It’s important to remember, though, that the BMI is a guide, not the Holy Grail.
For your reference there is a BMI chart on our website. There is good evidence that having a BMI of 20–22 has greater health benefits than a BMI of 23–25. However, we wouldn’t recommend that you try to achieve a BMI of less than 18.5.
If your current BMI is between 20 and 25 then you really don’t have a huge amount of weight to lose. You can probably expect a weekly weight loss of about 2lb as it tends to be slower the less you need to lose. If your BMI is between 25 and 30 you’ll lose a little more each week, and if your BMI is above 30 then it wouldn’t be unusual to lose more then 5lb in seven days, especially if you are able to be more active than usual, but check this first with your doctor.
It’s also a good idea to take some body measurements such as your waist, hips and bust or chest. Use a tape measure and make sure you measure the same spot each time. Keep the tape measure straight for the most accurate result.
To measure your waist – measure around the naval or belly button
For hips – measure at the widest point of your bottom
For bust or chest – measure around your nipples
If you are working on increasing your day-to-day activity levels then measurements will be especially important. You may well change shape and lose inches faster than you lose weight. This is because as you increase your activity level, you replace some fat with muscle, which weighs more than fat. Physical measurements, especially around the waist, are just as meaningful as actual weight changes. Besides, if your goal is to drop a dress size or get into jeans two inches smaller than your current pair, does it really matter how much you weigh? No, of course it doesn’t!
The more you move about, the less you’ll wobble
There’s more information about goal setting coming up in the next chapter.
Chapter 4 KOKO – KEEP ON KEEPING ON
We talked in Chapter 3 about the importance of planning before you start your diet. Well, an integral part of the planning process is deciding what it is you actually want to achieve.
You might be thinking at this point: I’m reading a diet book, so I guess I just want to lose weight! I suspect that if we look a bit more closely at your motivations, we might find you’ve got quite a bit more to gain as well, and you can set goals for these outcomes too. You might want to feel more confident, be able to buy clothes more easily, lower your risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer or other diseases, or improve your fitness. Of course your goal might be as simple as just wanting to get back into that dress or suit you haven’t been able to wear for ages.
Whatever you want for yourself, the art of goal setting is keeping it real and achievable, and also having performance measures or milestones along the way to let you know you are heading in the right direction.
We’ve been very careful throughout the book to keep our promises real and achievable, and we really want to encourage you to do the same with your expectations of yourself. If you set unrealistic, unachievable goals for yourself you also set yourself up for disappointment and failure, and we all know what that feels like from our past experiences of diets, don’t we?
Weight-loss Goals and Measuring Your Success
You may wish to find out your BMI (Body Mass Index) from the chart on our website. Remember, people with a BMI of between 20 and 25 should expect to lose no more than 2lb per week; people whose current BMI is between 25 and 30 could lose between 2 and 5lb per week; while people with a BMI higher than 30 may lose more than 5lb.
Weight loss is never consistent. No body loses the same amount of weight every week. So these guidelines are very much that – guidelines. A better way to look at weight loss, and the way I prefer to measure success with my patients, is to look at monthly weight loss. Taking three or four weight measurements during the month, and then averaging them over the full month, gives a much more accurate picture of what’s going on. This method also evens out those weeks when weight loss is disappointing with those when you’re walking on air because it’s all going so well.
Each time you weigh yourself, it’s important to use the same scales, and to weigh yourself at about the same time of day. This will prevent inaccuracies and also limit false weights from changes in fluid balance – we can weigh up to 4lb more at one end of the day just because we are holding more fluid – so same time, same equipment is a golden rule. When it comes to setting long-term targets for yourself, there are literally hundreds of options. We’ll look here at a few of the most important.
Weight Loss for Health
If you are quite overweight – let’s say your BMI is over 30 and you are dieting primarily for health reasons – then to set a goal of reaching a BMI of 20 might not be realistic. It may also be a goal that seems too far away right now, so it may not be that helpful in keeping you motivated. What might be more achievable would be to aim first of all to reduce your weight by 10 per cent. Let’s say you currently weigh 16 stones (224lb or 101kg). A 10 per cent weight reduction would be 1½ stones or 21lb or 10kg. The 10 per cent bit is very significant: good-quality studies have shown that reducing your weight by as little as 10 per cent significantly reduces your risk of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and some cancers – not to be sniffed at. Once you get to 10 per cent, aim for the next 10 per cent and so on. The health benefits just keep on coming.
Measurements
Measuring your waist, hips and bust or chest is another
