500 Calories

This is a no brain diet. There is no thinking required. All the food is supplied at your weekly counselling session. You just eat four packs a day and drink four litres of water.

Each Lighterlife pack contains 125 calories. In a day, that's 500 calories. They also contain the recommended amount of all the nutrients required for healthy living.

500 calories is low. Very low. That's why they call it a Very Low Calorie Diet (VLCD). Men need 2550 on average per day, women 1940. This leaves me a shortfall of 2050 which my body has to make up. It does this by getting its calories from fat.

A man on the Lighterlife diet is expected to lose 3 stones every 8 weeks. That's a huge amount. Women lose the same amount in about 12 weeks. Men lose weight faster as they have more muscle and therefore burn calories faster.

So, basically I am starving myself down to my target weight in a controlled manner. This does sound drastic. People have said that it could lead to eating or metabolism problems, but let's face it, I wouldn't need to do this if I wasn't double my recommended weight. I already have those problems. I'd rather face these issues from a healthy size that ignore them and eat myself to death.