Atkins Diet: Motivation to get you to goal

I found this video on YouTube today:

"I was just asked today how do I prevent from cheating. "I am having problems staying strict on the diet." For me, I had to do what I advocate in this video. It was black and white for me. I either had to be one that was progressing towards that goal or working towards that proverbial one million dollar prize or I was the guy who giving it back. I had to make it that concrete for me. That was also why I think Atkins worked so well for me.

The diet is pretty black and white in the Induction and Extended Induction phase. You are either following the rules or not. If you follow the rules, you'll get to goal. If not, well you are on your own.

I fully admit others can do their own plan or take off days, and STILL get to goal. I am not one of those people. I don't do things "sort of" or halfsies well. I am much more likely to quit in that situation.

Good luck to everyone doing low carb, and you guys are doing great! "

Latest weigh in update on the Low Carb diet.

I had my latest weigh in on the Tesco ediet on Thursday morning and I'm please to say that I lost 4lbs this week which makes 10lbs in all in just 11 days.

The menus this week have been pretty similar to last week with scrambled eggs, frittata or fried eggs for breakfast with sausages or bacon. I've had a problem with the afternoon meals though as many of them were not really the sort of foods to put in a food flask so I have been making up a salad with a bit of french dressing and some meats eg chicken, grilled bacon, bacon lardons and even a sliced up hot pepperami in with a bacon salad. I usually make sure that all of the ingredients are mixed together in my bowl and then I grate some parmesan on top. I am generally also having a mixed selection of Kiwi fruit, melon and grapes mid morning which happily is brought around on a trolley around the office for just £1.50. You can buy similar products from your local supermarket.

I dodged a bit of a bullet on Tuesday as that was my the day of my twice monthly lunch at the Thai Restaurant/own brew pub. Great food and great beer what more could you ask for? Well going through the menu it was clear that anything with rice, noodles or Thai fries was out and that some of the curries had potatoes in them anyway which is not good. In the end I went for Grilled Neck of Pork which was served on a bed of beansprouts. This came with some Tamarind sauce which I just lightly drizzled some onto the meat. All in all it was very nice but it has to be said it was a few pounds more expensive than the Yellow Curry meal deal that we normally have. I have say that I did sin a bit though as I had my only pint of beer since starting the diet.

Last evening I had some zesty sea bass with asparagus and tomatoes which to be honest I wasn't too hopeful about as I don't really do asparagus or cooked tomatoes but I have to say I was really surprised and the zesty lemony sauce on the fish sort of made everything go together really well. I shall definately have this again which is more than can be said for some Avacado, Broccoli and Turnip concoction on Thursday. The avacado has joined smoked salmon on the banned ingredients list!

I've generated the recipes for the coming week and going through the ingredients list I don't think that I need to place an online order this week. The eggs and meat I will source locally and the small amounts of salads and vegetable shall be covered from either our weekly delivery of a farmers box from Riverford or a trip to Aldi.

Like last week I am planning to go for a walk around Spalding which I have now planned on Map My Walk which is a great site for working out distances and planning your walks. If you put in your height, weight, distance walked and time the walk was completed in then the site will show you how many calories that you burned on the walk. It will also show this if you walk, run etc. After running last weeks route through this web site then distance last week was 4.16 miles rather than the 4.5 as advertised but still not bad. I have also gone for a walk around the block in our village which I have also plotted in the map as 1.25 miles so I have done a couple of short walks as well as the longer one. Using this website though I have managed to plot a nice 3.6 mile walk around the village so I might have a go at that one tomorrow.

Saturday update to the new Low Carb diet

Just a quick update as to the state of play since Thursday.

If you recall I was to take sweet potato and smoked salmon to work in a food flask so that I could have them at the office. This ended up a dismal failure as the vegetables were cold by the time I came to add the salmon and cream cheese. I managed some of it but to be honest the amount of salmon that I was supposed to have was far too much and as I don't really like it that much then it was a bit of a problem.

Luckily I had taken a chicken salad with Parmesan shavings on it as that was the snack on my Tesco ediet. I'd not really had Parmesan like this before and you know the salad was really nice when I came to have that in the afternoon.

For the evening we had Thai Fish cakes which were made from whitefish and some of those fish sticks that you can get. I saw the fish sticks on offer so I bought a couple of packs and then realised that in fact they look better than they taste! Instead of wasting them though I had some of them put into the fish cakes that were served with stir fried veg. These fish cakes were top notch and I will definitely be having them again.

Friday morning was supposed to be warm strawberry and cream cheese danish but the strawberries that were delivered at the start of the week were starting to look like they were not going to be any good by Friday so the rest of the family had them whilst they were still good earlier in the week. I replaced that breakfast therefore with bacon, sausage, egg and tomatoes. I grilled 5 slices of bacon and 2 sausages and when done I placed them in a pan which I was heating up a tin of chopped tomatoes. I let the bacon and sausage intermingle with the tomatoes whilst I fried one egg and I then had the egg with just 2 of the bacon slices and 1 sausage and some of the tomatoes. The remaining bacon, sausage and tomatoes were put into the prewarmed food flask for the mid day meal.

This time the flask worked fine. I think as there was more food in the flask and instead of warming the flask with hot water I used boiling water that there was a big difference. I also had the food after just 4 hours instead of 7 and whilst it was not piping hot it was warm enough to be pleasant.

I also took a similar chicken salad as yesterday but this time used some spicy chicken pieces. I had this mid afternoon and this came out really good as well.

For the evening meal we went off the recipe list and had some pork chops with spinach, chilli and sweetcorn which came from one of the Atkins books. This was a favourite of ours last time I did a diet and it made use of the spinach which would otherwise have been thrown away.

This morning we are back on the Tesco eDiet recipe with Burger scramble which is effectively minced beef and onions fried until cooked and then beaten eggs added and the whole mixture is mixed to give the scrambled egg burger effect! I added the remaining chilli from last nights meal to give a bit of an extra burn!

Exercise is my achilles heel and I don't really do any but today I went for a 4.5 mile walk around our town which took me about 1 hour 40 mins. I could have done it quicker but as I was following the rivers around I took my camera to see if I could get any decent shots of the route and of the town.

For lunch today I again went off the recipe sheet for the day but I did have a recipe from a previous day which was Quorn with stir fried veg. I've not had Quorn before so that was a new experience and I am not averse to having it again as it tasted pretty much chicken like.

Its the first weigh in on the Tesco eDiet

Its the first weigh in on the Tesco eDiet today. I signed up to the program last Thursday and the diet officially started on Sunday although I was fairly low carb on the days prior to that so the result in not entirely the diet but nevertheless I had had alcohol on the days to Saturday and none since so there has been a change of sorts.

My result is 6lbs off in the first week which is pretty good and is ahead of the plan so I'm happy with that. Going forward if I can stay to plan and be 2lbs ahead each week then that would be great. As well as being 6lbs off my BMI has decreased by 2 points - OK we're still in danger levels but we're moving the right way.

From today though things get more tricky as I'm back at work and a lot of these recipes require cooking. I've bought a food flask so I am going to try smoked salmon and sweet potato, courgette and asparagus. Hopefully it won't be a disaster! Todays snack is a chicken salad so I'll be taking that as well.

When I get home from work I will then review the recipes for next week and swap them around where necessary and then place my Tesco order so that it all of the ingredients I don't have will be delivered on Saturday or Sunday.

Day 3 of Low Carb Teso eDiet

Its day 3 and we have another day where we have gone out and therefore have had to manage one meal 'off the Tesco eDiet plan'.

I started OK with the Greek Breakfast of eggs, feta cheese, tomatoe, cucumber and olives. Well I say I started OK but I really cannot stand olives and the jar of olives in brine looks remarkably large considering Ijust need 2 for this meal. The ingredients had olive oil dribbled over it and then salt and pepper added. I decided that I could manage the olives if I cut them into small pieces and had them combine with something else and thus I managed to get through the meal.

You have to record daily the number of fruit and veg portions each day so I have been having some fruit but looking at the site this evening I note that fruit is not necessarily what they are after in first stage of this diet. Thats a bit of a blow as I had an apple before we went out.

We ended up at Ferry Meadows in Peterborough for a picnic and we had had visit to Sainsburys on the way so I had a packet of sweet chilli chicken pieces, a mixed fruit selection (naughty!) and 40g of cheddar cheese that came in those small selection bags. The meal that I missed whilst we were here was a Turkey or Chicken sausage & courgette frittata with salad. I have the chicken sausages in the fridge so hopefully we will use them later in the week.

For a while it was quite hot and after we finished flying our kite or to be more precise after we demolished it in a crash we ended up at the watersports bar for an ice cream! I had a Solero which seemed to be the best of what was on offer at just 98 calories.

The evening meal was Thai coconut chicken curry which included a portion of green beans. The recipe provided by Tesco eDiets didn't say to add any spice to the curry so I added a small touch of Thai red curry paste to give it some pizzaz and instead of rice or noodles I had a cauliflower rice substitute.

I haven't had the snack for today yet either so depending on how it goes this evening I may or may not have the Tuna salad.

I must admit I'm not looking forward to stuffed avacado tomorrow so I'm hoping that once the beef, onion and tomato get into it it'll be alright. I must take more notice as to what is on the menu next week and swap out the meals that I'm not too keen on before ordering my recipe list!