Sometimes you just have to take a long hard look at yourself. This photo of me convinced me that the time had come to do just that. Not that many years ago I was a lean, fit hill walker but slowly, over the years I’d put on pound after pound. Just a little at a time and I’d been telling myself that my trousers kept shrinking in the wash. I’d been conning myself for years that I wasn’t that overweight. In my mind I was still that fit walker and climber, this photo showed me the reality.
I started puffing up hills but realised that exercise alone wasn’t going to be enough; I had to do the one thing I dreaded, diet! A friend of mine has lost two and a half stone on the Dukan diet and I decided that if he could do it so could I. At least that was the theory.
If you have never heard of the Dukan diet it’s one where you start off by eating almost entirely protein. It’s a little like the Atkins diet although I think it’s way better thought out. Did you know the inventor of the Atkins diet died morbidly obese? Oh the irony.
Well three weeks in and I haven’t eaten a potato or a slice of bread for as long as I can remember. Chocolate is a distant memory. I have, however, lost 5 kg. I’m not quite the blob in the photo. I also ran 6 miles a few days ago, further than I’ve run in years. I’ve lapsed on the diet now and again and I have a few glasses of wine that aren’t on the diet sheet. One is human after all. But I can testify that the Dukan diet works, I’ll be on it for the next six months or so, in one form or another.
Next time I go up a Scottish mountain, it’s not going to be so far to the top!