Day 1

Morning!

Everyone has done a 'Day 1' of a diet, haven't they?  That day where you wake up at 8am and think in Take That style 'Today this could beeeeeeee the greatest daaaaaay of my life'.  You waddle downstairs, pour out your Bran Flakes into a bowl (They aren’t Coco Pops - how good am I being!?)  Only half full mind because a quarter of the box isn’t really the tablespoon sized 30g portion Kelloggs recommend.  Agh, no skimmed milk in the fridge! That’s ok; I’ll use a little less whole milk and won’t have sugar.  I'll chop a banana up and have that on top because diets seem to add a banana to everything.  You sit and eat it and think ‘I can do this, this isn’t so bad!’ 

Next, you decide to plan.  You go online and sign up to a myriad of forums and weight loss guides and follow every blog under the sun talking about diets and sit there for 2 hours ‘reading up’ rather than ‘getting up’ and doing some exercise.  After some strenuous reading, you think ‘Aha! Lunchtime’ because food now has a ‘time’.  Screw eating when you are hungry on a diet, you have 3 meals a day and snack on fruit.  Thems the rules.  You haven’t had a chance to get to Tesco yet for healthy grub so you make do with what is in the cupboards, hence, lunch is a soft old Ryvita left over in the cupboard from last year’s diet, some Philadelphia ‘cos that’s healthy, innit? The girls eating it on the advert are always skinny, right?   A couple of cherry tomatoes thrown on the plate and it doesn’t look much so you fill the dinner plate up with another 3 Ryvita and Philadelphia and because this is ALLLLL you are having for lunch, you are ‘allowed’ about a quarter of a tub of soft cheese on each slab of rye based cardboard.

You scoff down your lunch because you are famished having waited longer for ‘Lunchtime’ than your body wanted you to and think at the end, I’m still hungry’ and torture yourself by telling yourself you are never going to be able to diet if you are this hungry only half way through the day.  To take your mind off it, you go back online and scour the forums and find something called ‘My Fitness Pal’ Oooh, it counts your calories and tracks your food and OMG this is going to really help me on my diet so I will track my breakfast and lunch and it comes to 1000 calories with all that cheese and milk and I only have another 200 for the rest of the day.  Sod it; I’ll never be able to make it to bedtime on that.  I’ll start again tomorrow.

For crying out loud

Sound familiar?  I realise I exaggerate here, but essentially it is the same old story.  Other ‘diet breakers’ include 1. Someone offering you birthday cake and you can’t say no, because it is their BIRTHDAY. 2. Mindlessly popping a sweetie or the kids’ leftover fish finger in your mouth. 3. Not completing Davina’s workout DVD in its entirety at full pelt on the first go so you will NEVER look like Davina so what is the point in trying? 

The difference with this diet was that it was the first time on any diet I didn’t say to myself ‘I can’t do this’.  This time, I thought, I can do this for a day, then I’ll see how I feel, if it works for me or not and see if I can do a week.  If I had thought ‘I need to stay on these powdery packs for 7 months at least in order to lose nearly 10 stone’ I would have run straight to the biscuit tin.

So, Day 1 started with me making a banana milkshake up.  When I say milk, I mean watershake as you have no dairy on the programme until further in.  So, I shook the powder into my shaker, added ice cold water, shook it up, poured it into a glass and then drank a smooth, cold gorgeous milkshake that was just like a Maccy D’s special   forced down a watery, insipid mess that was like drinking bathwater with lumps of snot in.  Graphic, but true.

Bloody hell. Really?  I can’t do this for 7 months, I can’t do this for 7 months, yes you can, don’t give up, you can do it.

 

Packs of doom

The other packs, namely Chocolate Milkshake, Shepherd’s Pie and a Vegetable Soup weren’t much cop either.  It was like the Lighterlife science bods had gone into their laboratory, taken a pot Noodle, taken the noodles out, taken the flavour out, taken the little fun sauce sachet out and left you with the ‘pot’, namely smushy soya pieces with random herby flavourings.  They were grim.  Over the months of the plan, I grew to love the packs and actually enjoyed them, but there was always the feeling of ‘Not quite as good’.  You know you have Coca Cola and then Asda Smartprice Cola and you drink it but you know it isn’t ‘proper’ Coke? That right there is what the packs are.  You have a Minestrone Soup and think, ‘this is nice Minestrone Soup, but it isn’t Heinz’.

Water, water, everywhere

I drank 5 litres of water that first day and must have piddled about 7.  I felt like a pregnant 93 year old with bladder control issues. I daren’t sneeze.  Because you aren’t getting the water through food, you need to up your water intake considerably, by treating your body as a water wheel so slow and steady, not downing two bottles of Buxton in an hour because that is how you DIE which a lot of people pointed out to me when I started on Lighterlife YOU WILL DIE BECAUSE OF THE WATER!!!!  What water? THE LADY DIED! One lady died? Out of thousands? She died because she didn’t do what she was told to do and drank 4 litres of water in an hour? I’ll take my chances. (I don’t mean to be flippant here, that was an extremely sad story that did make me think carefully about joining, but the Daily mail sensationalism of people ‘advice’ really got my goat).

So, what with the astronaut food, copious amounts of water requiring the loo every 5 seconds and people chucking their tuppenceworth at me, it wasn’t the greatest day of my life. However, it was the first step towards what would be.  I bloody did it.  I carried on tomorrow, instead of starting again.