A Bit About Me

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It's now 70 weeks since I decided to change my eating habits for good. I started at 148.5kg (23st5lbs), and in those 70 weeks I have lost 56.3kg (8st12lbs), with a bit more to go.

When I started, I was 61 years old. I was taking three types of medication to control blood pressure, and statins to control cholesterol levels. I had painful arthritis in both of my knees, and I could hardly walk, even with a stick. And I was getting close to pre-diabetic. It was beginning to look like I was in for a painful, unpleasant and short old age.

My doctor sent me to a physiotherapist for help with my knees, and the physio said she could give me some useful exercises, but she could guarantee that if I lost 10% of my body weight, I would experience a big improvement. I knew I could do that, because I have lost 10% of my body weight quite a few times in my life (until I gained it again), but what I had to do this time was keep it off for good!

My wife had used Nutracheck, and she suggested that I could give it a try. I liked the emphasis on sustainable changes, and so I dug out the kitchen scales, and bought some bathroom scales, and got started. I like measuring and recording, so NC was right up my street – I measured absolutely everything I ate, and weighed myself every morning. I immediately saw that if this was going to work, I would have to be able to eat big meals, because I am always hungry.

So I started using portion control, but with a twist – the lower in calories something was, the more of it I ate. So I started to eat huge portions of lettuce, celery and green beans, but very small portions of cheese, garlic bread and chips. In fact this was good fun, because I really like cooking, and it was a daily challenge to cook big and interesting meals containing few calories.

I began to do some exercise. At first, all I could manage was walking round our car park once, and with my stick – 30 steps. But very gradually I increased that until I achieved what I had thought was impossible – 2,500 steps in a day! As my weight went down, the steps got easier, and I bought a pedometer to count them for me. Again, gradually the steps increased until I now average about 12,000 a day.

The result of these changes is that my BMI is now about 27 (I started at over 43) and I have stopped taking statins, and two of the three blood pressure tablets. The threat of diabetes has gone. I have no pain at all in my knees, and my wife and I can go walking in the country, which we used to do a lot, half a lifetime ago. We are now planning a long-distance footpath holiday (the last one of those we did was in 1983!)

I am sure that this would not have been possible without Nutracheck. The discipline of weighing everything and weighing myself every day has given me a full-time focus on my body weight. So I'm really delighted to have been asked to write a regular blog on the Nutracheck website, and I hope that you will find at least some of it useful.

The last thing to say is that the biggest challenge of all is yet to come – keeping the weight off, once I have reached my target weight. I have lost weight before (often), but I have never kept it off. So now, more than ever, I want to have Nutracheck by my side, to help me do that.