The ingredients in the fat free range of Activia (taking the top entry on the web site – blueberry – as an example) are: fat free yoghurt with Bifidus ActiRegularis (Registered Trademark) (this time only “skimmed milk, skimmed milk powder, yoghurt cultures” are declared); blueberry (5.4%); blackcurrant; fibre (oligofructose); stabilisers (modified maize starch, guar gum, xanthan gum); acidity regulators (sodium citrate, calcium citrate, citric acid); flavouring; colour (grape juice concentrate); sweeteners (aspartame, acesulfame K).  The other varieties all look pretty similar in terms of ingredients.

The ingredients in Natural (Live) Yoghurt are: yoghurt!

Ideally have just plain NLY from a supermarket own brand or from a health food shop. If you must have Activia, go for the ‘natural’ option – which has more processing than is necessary, but could be worse. Don’t go near the fat free/fruit options, if you are trying to follow The Harcombe Diet.

p.s. Bifidus ActiRegularis – puh-lease?! Did some marketing people sit down and try to make a manufactured ingredient, to stick in yoghurt, sound like Latin for something that will imply active regular bowel movements?!

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The ingredients in Actimel Original are: Yogurt (Skimmed milk, Skimmed milk concentrate, Yogurt cultures), Water, Skimmed milk, Dextrose, Stabiliser (pectin), L.casei imunitass® cultures, Flavouring, Sweeteners (aspartame, acesulfame K).

The ingredients in Forest Fruits Actimel are: Yogurt (Skimmed milk, cream, skimmed milk powder, yogurt cultures), Skimmed milk, Liquid sugar (sucrose 8.4%), Fruits of the forest 2.1% (strawberry, blueberry, blackberry, raspberry), Dextrose, Stabiliser (modified tapioca starch), Flavouring, L.casei imunitass® cultures.

The ingredients in Natural (Live) Yoghurt are: yoghurt!

Bottom line: Don’t have the original or flavoured versions of Actimel, if you are trying to follow The Harcombe Diet.

p.s. Danone have another registered trademark ® (there is one in Activia also). What is L.casei imunitass?! Do we need it in our bodies?!

p.p.s check out those sugars (dextrose) and sweeteners – even in the original version.

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This study was a larger study – 5,000 people, including 3,000 dog owners. The Butchers study (see the Butchers Study here) gave statistics on how far dog owners walked vs gym goes. This study was more about the time spent doing exercise. The findings were:

- the average dog owner exercises their animal twice a day for 24 minutes each time – a total of 5 hours and 38 minutes per week. On top of that, the average dog owner takes their dog out for 3 long walks each week – adding a further 2 hours, 33 minutes to the total.

- those without a dog spend an average of just 1hour and 20 minutes a week exercising. The bigger issue is that 47% of non dog owners do no exercise at all.

We have a rescue dog and we walk her 3 times a day (Andy and I share the walks) for 20-30 mins each time and we also do longer walks a couple of times a week. We haven’t been to the gym since we got her (not that we went that much before)!

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A study of more than 1,500 dog owners and gym goers found that the average gym goer covers 468 miles per year and the average dog walker does 676 miles per year. That’s 208 more for the dog walkers! Dog owners apparently walk the equivalent distance of Bangkok to London over their pet’s lifetime.

Dog owners are also more likely to stick to their routine, as the dog doesn’t let up until you take it out!

If you can offer a good home to a dog and commit to walking him or her regularly, this could be the biggest win win ever – for your stress levels and overall health and for that of your new best friend!

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They also found that 1 in 7 non-fatal heart disease cases could be attributed to being overweight of obese. Other risk factors were noted smoking, high blood pressure and raised cholesterol levels (put cholesterol in on the search box on this page and you will see my view on this one!)

The study found that patients who were obese on the BMI scale (over 30) were 4 times more likely to die of heart disease than those of normal weight. The researchers also looked at waist measurement (this is a good idea to use alongside BMI, as many professional athletes can be deemed at least overweight on a BMI scale, but their waist measurement will confirm that they are solid muscle).

Where men had a waist measurement of 94-102 cm, they were classed as overweight and more than 102cm was deemed obese. For women, the waist guidelines they used were 80-88cm as overweight and over 88cm as obese.

Heart and circulatory disease is the biggest killer in the USA, claiming  more than a third of all deaths.

As I often caution, we need to be careful about association and causation. This study is strong evidence that people who are overweight or obese are more likely to be those suffering and dying from heart disease. It is likely that there is a causal relationship, but we cannot conclude this. It may well be the case that both obesity and heart disease are caused by something else and are therefore observed together/associated with each other, but that weight does not cause heart disease.

My personal view is that it is both likely that there is a causal relationship between weight and heart disease (not least for the pure physical strain that extra weight puts on the whole body and internal organs) but I also think that we may come to realise that another substance may have played a part in both obesity and heart disease – sugar, for example.

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1) the Hollywood cookie diet- eat 4 calorie counted, expensive, cookies a day and not much else;

2) the ‘caveman’ diet – eat meat, fish, berries & nuts and no modern foods;

3) the alternate day diet.This was described as eat whatever you want every other day and virtually nothing for the day inbetween.

You can imagine my response!

1) = too low calorie, full of sugar/wheat/crap – don’t go near it!

2) = jolly good idea – you will lose lots of weight and feel a bit rubbish short term (caffeine/sugar withdrawal and Candida die-off) and then probably feel better than you have done for ages.

3) I actually replied “I used to do the alternate day diet – only it was called bulimia back then”! (I think they printed that one!)

Imagine my surprise therefore when this diet was all over the UK press w/c 23/11/09! I found out a bit more about the diet, from the newspaper articles, but I still stand by my Bella comment. This diet is all about having good days and bad days! I know all about those – I just don’t have them any more! 500 calories a day on the ‘good’ days (that’s my breakfast porridge and then nothing more for 24 hours) and then “you can eat as much as you want on the alternate days but don’t binge.” Sorry – but when I had an eating disorder, there was no difference between eating as much as I wanted and bingeing!

No surprise that the ‘brains’ behind this diet is an American neuroscientist who has been playing with rats in labs for the past few years. (Dr Mark Mattson). Dr Mark (probably a really nice guy) needs to get out more and meet a few food addicts!

Even funnier was that the British Dietetic Spokesperson – Catherine Collins (Registered Dietician) – who thought this was a good diet. “It sounds absolutely fine” she says. “It would certainly make it easier to stick to a weight loss programme” How so?! Are dieticians really the people we are supposed to turn to to solve this obesity epidemic?!

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America joined WWII in 1941 – by which time Europe was already experiencing rationing and food shortages. A couple of years later, an American doctor, Ancel Keys, realised that it would be crucial to know what would happen if the war did not end soon and rationing turned to starvation. He set about one of the most ambitious health experiments ever undertaken – to provide the definitive study of hunger and re-feeding. Keys achieved this goal and also, unintentionally, he provided one of the most crucial insights into dieting and weight loss to this day.

The “Minnesota Starvation Experiment” started with an advert, posted across America in May 1944. “<em>Will you starve that they be better fed?</em>” Two hundred conscientious objectors volunteered, as an alternative to war, and Keys and his team of researchers whittled these down to 36 men. The men (all aged 20-33) were chosen for their physical and mental resilience. The results, 1,385 pages in total, were published in “<em>The Biology of Human Starvation</em>” (1950).

The year long experiment was split into four phases:
1) <strong>The Control Period </strong>(12 weeks): The key goal of this period was to determine the calorie requirement for the men. It was established that the men maintained their weight at approximately 3,210 calories a day whilst walking 22 miles each week – an average of just three miles a day (45-60 minutes walking).

2) <strong>The Starvation Period </strong>(24 weeks): The fact that the study was referred to as a “starvation experiment” is so interesting, because the six-month ‘starvation’ was actually a calorie controlled diet of approximately 1,600 calories per day (more calories than many modern diets allow). The meals were made up of foods typically available in Europe during the latter stages of the war: potatoes, turnips, bread and macaroni – i.e. starchy carbohydrates. Ancel Keys set out to try to induce a 25% weight loss in each man in 24 weeks.

3) <strong>Restricted Rehabilitation Period </strong>(12 weeks): The men were divided into four groups of eight (four had been dismissed for stealing food and binging) and given different calorie, protein and vitamin levels to see what would best re-nourish them back to health.

4) <strong>Unrestricted Rehabilitation Period </strong>(8 weeks): For the final period, the men could eat as much as they wanted and the research team carefully recorded what they did in fact eat.

This invaluable study tells us the following about dieting and weight loss:

1) <strong>Hunger is comparable with war in terms of the devastating effect it has on humans</strong>. Many of the volunteers came to believe that military service would have been an easier option than their chosen path.

Keys put 36 physically and mentally healthy men on a calorie controlled diet, with a moderate amount of exercise, and, in a matter of weeks, he turned them into physical and emotional wrecks (bulimics to all intents and purposes).

Physically, the men reported incessant hunger, weakness, exhaustion and they lost 21% of their strength in the first 12 weeks alone. They experienced dizziness, muscle wasting, hair loss and reduced coordination. Several withdrew from their university classes, because they simply didn’t have the energy or motivation to attend.

Psychologically, the men became obsessed with food, meal times and everything to do with eating (a number became chefs after the experiment; such was their interest in food). They had to ‘buddy up’ to avoid breaking their diets, as their drive to binge was so enormous. Before the buddy system was put in place, a couple did get hold of some forbidden food and binge and suffered extreme guilt and self-loathing as a result. (It is fair to assume, therefore, that, had this not been a confined experiment, all men would have given up on their ‘diet’). The men reported extreme depression, irritability, a sense of deprivation and they lost all interest in sex. (They actually lost all interest in anything other than food – such is the human drive to overcome hunger).

2) You may have heard of the saying “To lose 1lb of fat you need to create a deficit of 3,500 calories.” <strong>The Minnesota experiment alone renders this statement invalid</strong>.

The deficit, in Keys’ study, was 1,630 calories a day in ‘eat less’ and 3,009 calories a week in ‘do more’ . The average weight loss of the men was 37lbs – 1.5lbs per week. If the 3,500 formula were correct, during the 24 weeks, every man should have lost at least 95lbs in fat alone and more on top of this in water and lean tissue. The lightest man in the study should have ended up below three stone.

3) <strong>The less you eat, the less you must continue to eat to have any chance of losing more weight </strong>and weight loss will stop, at some point, whether you like it or not.

As Keys showed, the men needed 3,200 calories, on average, to maintain their weight. As the men were given 1,570 calories a day in the ‘starvation period’, they lost weight and their energy need fell and therefore the calorie level needed to fall, to maintain the deficit.

Interestingly, Keys rejected the 3,500 formula from the outset and relied instead on adjusting the calorie intake every week to try to induce his desired weight loss of 25%. Keys found he needed to limit some men to 1,000 calories a day to try to induce further weight loss (the men should have been losing over 5lbs per week, at this calorie intake, having created a deficit of almost 2,500 calories a day from their original calorie need. In reality the body had adjusted energy need to resist any further weight loss).

All reached a plateau around week 20 and further weight loss could not be induced. At least one diary recorded weight gain in the final month of the ‘starvation’ period.

4) <strong>The body will do whatever it takes to reverse the effects of starvation/dieting</strong>.

During the restricted rehabilitation period, the four different groups of men were given 400, 800, 1,200 or 1,600 additional calories per day. Within each group of eight men, some were also given additional vitamin and protein supplements. Ancel Keys concluded that the only thing that determined the speed at which the men recovered was the calorie intake. The body didn’t respond to vitamins or protein – it just wanted the energy (calorie) deficit to be reversed.

It can be no surprise; therefore, that when given free access to food, in the final two months, the men overate and binged to correct the calorie deficit they had suffered. One man managed to eat 11,500 calories in one day and men still felt hungry consuming twice the number of calories that maintained their weight in the control period. They all gained all their weight back and approximately 10% more than they weighed before the experiment. Men who had previously shown no awareness of body size and image reported ‘feeling fat’.

Surely we have just observed the pre-requisite for an obesity epidemic? Eat less, get hungry, slow the metabolism, increase the desire to consume energy, reduce the desire to expend energy, put on weight, try to eat less and so on. We have certainly just described the Western World, since we started our obsession with calorie counting.

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Zoe BUPA April 2008

If I cared at all about cholesterol, my worry would be that mine is too low. In the largest and longest ever study on cholesterol and total mortality, the Honolulu study (published in The Lancet 2001), the key conclusion was “Our data accord with previous findings of increased mortality in elderly people with low serum cholesterol and show that long term persistence of low cholesterol concentration actually increases the risk of death. Thus, the earlier that patients start to have lower cholesterol concentrations, the greater the risk of death.”

Yes – that’s right – the lower your cholesterol, the more chance you have of dying. Just goes to show how important cholesterol is for our health and wellbeing. When you see how many functions cholesterol performs, you realise just how vital it is.

Hunter/gatherers apparently used to have cholesterol levels around 2.5 – so mine may just be low because I’m healthy. I hope I’m not about to drop dead! If I do – tell everyone why!

Bye for now – Zoe p.s. spot the left handed doctor who must have gone through the results with me!

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Breakfast: …is porridge just about every day. Made with whatever milk is in the fridge (usually real stuff) or boiling water. The amount is large – approximately 100g of dry oats. (WATCH OUT: Having the same thing every day can tempt food intolerance unless your immune system is good).

Lunch: … is usually a huge salad – lettuce, cucumber, peppers, cherry tomatoes, celery, fennel, beetroot, alfalfa sprouts, bean sprouts and then the calories (energy) come from farm shop cole slaw (no sugar), 3-4 cheeses (e.g. cheddar, edam, ementaal cubes, feta – whatever is in the fridge) and cottage cheese in the middle. With 3-4oz cheese and at least 3-4 table spoons of olive oil, the calories should be more than 700-800. This is a great Phase 2 fat meal. (Andy took a photo on 26/8/09 of our normal lunch salad – see below). I weighed the bowl before and after and the actual food weight is 500g (just over 1lb). In the winter we tend to have the same salad, but with a bowl of soup as well – to warm up. We have the salad first and then the soup, or it doesn’t work!

Every now and again I really fancy bread and Andy and I will share a whole loaf of farm shop granary, or whole wheat, bread and one of the recipe book soups. No butter though – dunk instead. (WATCH OUT: Wheat intolerance is the most common intolerance that I come across – you will do better staying off wheat altogether until you’re close to goal weight and then only cheat with it rarely after that).

If I’m out – I’ll have a sandwich, like a brown bread cheddar ploughman’s. If I want to avoid wheat and I’m out, I’ll have a decaf whole milk cappuccino from a coffee shop (the real milk is so much more satisfying) and 100g (85%) dark chocolate and/or a sugar free, wheat free, sweetener free cereal bar (there are a couple).

Dinner: … is sometimes a black tie meal out (I’m on a few boards). I always make sure they know I don’t eat meat (mostly I’ll tick the veggie box and sometimes just the non meat eater box – I do struggle to eat any animals!) I may get a goat’s cheese tartlet and then risotto and then a decent chocolate torte – anything tasty and healthy I will eat. I don’t eat things like white bread or boiled potatoes – they’re tasteless – what’s the point?!

At home I do tend to have a fat meal or a carb meal (I’ve just got so used to not mixing). A carb meal would be a large bowl of brown rice and stir fry veg or pasta (usually rice pasta) and a home made veggie sauce or nut roast (the version with brown rice in the recipe book). Portion again is c. 100g dry weight of the rice or pasta and then loads of veg and loads of olive oil. If I have a fat meal, it could be fish (which I have started trying to eat for my health). Andy usually cooks fish in butter. Or I have a veggie fat meal, which would be a cheese/eggplant/olive oil/tomato/zucchini kind of concoction – all very Mediterranean therefore. We have loads of extra veg with whatever main meal we have – whatever comes in the organic box we get delivered each week from our neighbour, Paul.

I’ll sometimes ‘mix’ for a main meal – e.g. crispy baked potato (or two) & cheddar cheese or pasta with a mushroom cream sauce. Andy (I often get asked this too) is a passionate carnivore by the way! He loves his lamb, steak, pork chops, kidneys, liver and all sorts, which I happily buy for him from the local butcher – I don’t object to meat in any way – I just personally don’t want to eat meat. The cat and dog also eat meat and fish (and anything else they can get hold of). They love living in a house that has cream in the fridge at all times!

Other: I drink 4-5 large decaf coffees during the day and 3-4 beakers of water. At home the coffees are black and instant. If I’m out, I’ll have decaf whole milk cappuccinos from a coffee shop.

Here’s the fun bit – I eat at least 100g (550 cals) of 85% cocoa dark chocolate every day. Sometimes I have been known to eat 2 bars! I tend to have some mid morning (WATCH OUT: Avoid snacking if you want to lose weight) and then a couple of squares after lunch and dinner. If I’m working late in the evening I can get through a second bar!

I rarely have any desire for anything before bed. If I do, I’ll have some full fat live yoghurt. I sometimes have fruit first thing in the morning before the dog walk (I walk about 30 mins a day and swim about 3 times a month) and I’ll have fruit late afternoon if there is something in season that I really like (usually berries or cherries or English apples when they first come out).

Things I never eat: Meat, biscuits, cakes, sweets, confectionery/milk chocolate, sugared cereals, bread with more ingredients than are necessary, tins of things that should not have sugar added (chick peas, kidney beans, tomatoes etc), 99.9% of things in packets! I also don’t drink alcohol, as I never managed to acquire the taste and it all tastes like vinegar to me! (This is not why I am slim – if you drink more calories than I eat in chocolate, you should be in a clinic!)

Things I never choose to eat (but I will eat at a dinner party/function, for example) are white flour, white rice and white pasta.

What I eat if I want:

Crisps: Kettle chips with two ingredients – potatoes and olive oil (not even salt) – as is recommended for Phase 3 in the book.

Ice cream: Haagen-Dazs vanilla, which has (in order) fresh cream, skimmed milk, sugar, egg yolk and natural vanilla flavouring – as is recommended for Phase 3 in the book.

ChocolateS: As opposed to chocolate. I will get really high quality chocolates, ideally hand made from individual shops, which use cocoa, cocoa butter, vanilla and other natural flavourings, real cream, nuts, coffee beans etc and minimal, or no, sugar or sweeteners.

Luxury dessert: The chocolate mousse recipe in the recipe book (p435) is my idea of heaven! I change the recipe to only have sugar to stiffen the eggs (not in the egg yolk part of the recipe) and I use only 85% cocoa chocolate bars – not even 70%.

Other good products: oat cakes (ingredients only need to be oats, olive oil and salt). Gillian McKeith cereal bars are pretty good (handy if you’re on the run all day). Bananas – if you’re not very carb sensitive, the banana is nature’s own little gem in a wrapper. I do like dried apricots, but they are too high carb for people with Candida, or Hypoglycaemia or trying to lose weight.

Supplements: I take one Centrum Performance multi vitamin and mineral tablet whenever I remember. In the week before my period I eat more dark chocolate! Supplements are not necessary, but I think of them like an insurance policy – have one just in case. I’ll try and scan in my last BUPA MOT results. When they analysed my diet they were horrified by the fat content and when they saw the blood test results they suddenly went quiet! I’d love to tell them I used to put on weight eating 1000 cals a day!

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I have so many communications with people who say they’ve gained or lost a pound overnight and they are either pleased or upset and I advise people NOT to weigh every day because natural variations in the body’s weight are so common, that you are not getting an accurate picture. The best option for weighing is once a week – at a regular time of day and, ideally, naked. If you have not lost as expected, try weighing again the next day to see if this was a short term variation, but weight loss should only be even close to accurate from one week to the next.

To illustrate how much someone of even normal weight – not on a diet – varies, I decided to weigh myself every day for a month. I have been 7.12-8 stone for c. 15 years and therefore consider myself a pretty constant weight. When my beloved cat died I lost all interest in eating for a few days and dropped to 7.9-7.10 and then returned to 7.12-8 stone as soon as we got another rescue cat and I fell in love with him. Andy and I went to Jamaica for our wedding/honeymoon and the resort happened to be holding an epicurean food festival at the same time. What luck! I ate some of the best food I have ever tasted in my life, didn’t worry much about keeping fats and carbs separate and returned home a couple of pounds over 8 stone and then returned to normal within a couple of days. This is the whole principle of the natural weight – something that your body naturally tends back to.

So, here we go! (I have a set of Tanita ‘serious duty’ scales – for clients – so this is as accurate as I can get. All dates are for September to October 2009):

Thur 17 September 7.13.0 (last day of my period)
Fri 18 September 7.13.4
Sat 19 September 7.12.4
Sun 20 September 7.13.6
Mon 21 September 7.12.6
Tue 22 September 7.13.2
Wed 23 September 8.00.0
Thur 24 September 7.13.8
Fri 25 September 7.13.8
Sat 26 September 7.13.0
Sun 27 September 7.12.6
Mon 28 September 7.13.2
Tue 29 September 7.12.6
Wed 30 September 7.11.8
Thur 1 October 7.12.2
Fri 2 October Away – sorry – there’s never a month when I’m not away for a couple of days
Sat 3 October Away
Sun 4 October Away
Mon 5 October 7.13.2
Tue 6 October 7.13.8
Wed 7 October 7.13.2
Thur 8 October 7.12.8
Fri 9 October 7.12.4
Sat 10 October 7.13.8
Sun 11 October 8.00.2 (first day of my period)
Mon 12 October 7.13.2
Tue 13 October 7.12.8
Wed 14 October 7.12.4

Extra test on one day:
On Thur 8th October, I braved the cold weather (in the interests of research!) to strip off every 2 hours, to show what happens during the day:

7am 7.12.8
9am 7.13.4 (after breakfast and going to the loo!)
11am 7.13.2 (had another large decaff coffee after breakfast, but wee’d lots too)
1pm 8.00.2 (after lunch – the food weighed c. 1lb)
3pm 7.13.6 (lots of water/decaf coffee and wees in the afternoon)
5pm 7.13.4
7pm 8.00.2 (after dinner – c. 1lb of food again)
9pm 7.13.8

Results:
There was only one occasion when, by sheer fluke, my weight was the same 2 days in a row (24-25 September).

The lowest weight could possibly be ‘explained’ by the day before being unusually warm and sunny in the UK and I worked on my PC outside and could have dehydrated a bit.

The highest (non time of the month) weight is likely explained by me going to a black tie event on Tue 22 Sept and the veggie option was a pie – no kidding! About half a kilo in weight, this thing was the size of a normal dinner plate (there was no room for veg at all) and it was a white flour, pastry pie filled with cheese and spinach. The calorie/energy content was probably 1000-1500 calories. It was only moderately tasty but I ate the whole lot because I was hungry – after all the speeches we didn’t get scoff until after 9pm. I probably still had most of this pie in me when I weighed the next morning!

A woman’s hormones fluctuate more in a month than a man’s do in a lifetime! Hence we do vary at different times of the month – hormones affect water retention, appetite and all sorts. I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t ‘gain’ 1-2lbs, or more, just before her period and I am no exception. It drops off within a day or two or starting – that’s just part of being a woman. We get shoes and multiple orgasms so, hey ho!

The average weight, across the whole month, is 7.13.0. In the books I say that my weight is 8 stone (nice round number). I am more typically 7.12 – 8 stone, as the above shows, so the average weight during the month is bang in the middle of this range. The variation from this is + or – 1lb. This is less than a 1% fluctuation in a month (and it’s similar every month, every year and has been for years now). I think this is remarkably constant, but some of you see similar fluctuations in your own weight and tell me you’ve gained or lost a pound. I really hope this helps show that you haven’t.

Are these fluctuations normal? Absolutely! The scales (good as they are) are probably not that accurate to start with (I did learn something I didn’t know – the scales don’t bother with odd numbers for fractions of pounds. It’s always 13.2 or 12.4 or 11.8 etc – never 12.7).

What drives them? Quite simply – food and drink going in and waste products going out. The daily recordings (Thur 8th October) show how you can eat a good size meal and gain 1lb (because you have put 1lb of food into your digestive tract) and then ½ lb has gone in fluid extracted by the body from this food even a couple of hours later.

Did I feel any different on the highest and lowest days? Not at all during the month – none of my clothes felt any different (all this food in and out stuff is taking place largely in the digestive tract and that has no impact on the waistband). I felt a bit dopey after the white flour pie and the late night, but felt completely ‘normal’ again after a healthy breakfast. I do feel a bit different just before my period – I am aware that I am holding water on my thighs and boobs and really close fitting clothes can feel a bit too snug, but it comes and goes so quickly.

Moral of the story?
Don’t weigh yourself every day!

Please don’t take into account half pounds and 0.4 of a pound etc. This is anorexic style behaviour and doesn’t fit with having a healthy and balanced attitude to food and weight. Please don’t be that obsessive – it makes me want to hug you and say “start living your life, not recording your weight to within an ounce!”

Don’t panic if you ‘gain’ a pound – if you are following the ‘rules’ of The Harcombe Diet, you are so unlikely to have actually gained weight – this will be normal fuel and waste product ins and outs going on in the body.

Be prepared to plateau on any weight loss journey. The idea that weight loss follows a predictable formula is complete and utter nonsense (but you know that or, following a c. 1000 calorie a day diet, an average woman should lose 104 lbs each year, every year, year in, year out! That’s 7 stone 6lbs every year. Most of my clients are trying to survive on 1000-1500 calories a day and haven’t lost a single pound in years – the “to lose 1lb of fat, you need to create a deficit of 3500 calories a day” is a fairy story – and you know it.

Hope this helps!
Zoe x

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