Sunday 13 May 2007

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.

3 comments:

The Dieter said...

Hi Guinea
I hope your weight loss journey goes well
I will add a link to your blog from mine!
I have done LL before with some success however I find cambridge tastier and half the price!
Good luck buddy.
What camerra do you use? I am just getting into digital photography myself
feel free to email me using the link from my blog
regards
Alan
www.thebigdiet.blogspot.com
Keep at it

Lesley said...

Hi Guinea. Nice to see a newbie and a bloke at that. Will be interesting to see how your issues compare to us girls.

One thing - you're not really starving yourself as you're getting all the nutrients you need from the 4 packs. You're just depriving yourself of calories which you then get from your stored resources. I prefer thinking of it like that 'cos then I don't feel that what I'm doing on LL is a bad thing or unhealthy.

I've been doing it since Jan 11th and have never felt better or healthier and I'm sure I would have felt terrible had I been "starving" myself.

Semantics....Sorry.

Anyway, feel free to check me out on www.livetoslim.blogspot.com for a longer term story with photos. I'll be very jealous though as I bet the weight drops off you even faster than it has off me...grrr

Lesley x

Guinea said...

Hmm, I thought I'd replied here, but I can't find my comment. I wonder which random blog has my answer...

Alan, I use dSLR - a Canon 30D with a tack load of lenses flashes and tripods. It's amazing how much money gets spent over time on photography. Beware!

Lesley, thanks for the support. Here's hoping the weight flies off us.