Diet Trials : Paul McKenna

I am now determined to get back on track this week. On Friday I had it all planned in my head that I would have “good, healthy proper meals and some extra exercise.” Well things didn’t quite go according to plan.

On Saturday I went to by niece’s 2nd birthday party and that involved kids party food… you know sausage rolls, sandwiches, sausages on stick, biscuits and cakes. Not what I would call a proper meal. But then again, even though it was hard to eat consciously with young kids raving about around you, I didn’t stuff myself as much as I would have done a few weeks ago before I started on the Paul McKenna diet.

I then arranged for a family meal at my house in the form of a huge Chinese take away. This was a big treat for everyone, all 10 of us, as we haven’t had a Chinese meal together for years. I really just couldn’t help myself having 2 helpings as the food was gorgeous. I think we all felt that we had eaten too much when we had left the table.

This week though I am determined to follow the Golden Rules strictly and make sure that I don’t mess this week up. I don’t know whether me having some failings is helping any of the Diet Trials readers? Maybe it makes you feel better when you slip up to know that someone else is also making a few mistakes. Paul McKenna did say that he would expect a few mistakes to be made, but the crucial thing is not to feel really guilty about them, but to know that your shouldn’t have really done it but then to move on with a fresh day.

So it’s now Friday morning and for the last few days this week, after the final Paul McKenna show on Monday, I have slipped a bit with the diet and the Golden Rules. When I started the diet I was so motivated about the diet, and was so inspired by the Golden Rules that I was able to visualise myself losing weight and reaching my goal. I think it is so easy to slip back into old habits and revert back to eating quickly and when you are not really hungry. When I eat I know that I am starting to eat quickly again without doing it consciously and slowly. A few times this week I have found myself getting to the point of feeling too full and just eating because food was there. I will get back on track as I can see that it is working for me and this is the best way to lose weight that I have found.

I am now totally against dieting in the form of stopping certain food groups, whether it is stopping fatty foods or cutting out carbs… I think we all know now that this only works for a certain period and the weight loss isn’t permenant. I have to get my mind set as it is in a naturally thin person and treat food in a way so that my body gets what it needs and not what I think it might need. For instance the jam doughnuts I ate at work the other day… I wasn’t hungry when I ate them, I’d only just had my lunch, but I must have had a craving to eat them. I should have stopped myself, either by a tapping or spinning technique, or just asked myself whether I was actually hungry.

I am going away for the weekend, next weekend, with my wife to meet up with a group of search engine guys like myself, so I could do with really focusing myself this week to shed a few more pounds. Then while I’m away I will have to remember the Golden Rules. As this week is nearing an end, I am definately going to make sure that this weekend is planned to involve good, healthy proper meals and some extra exercise.

The last Paul McKenna show was mainly to do with increasing exercise but also to do with some more visualisation exercises to help you keep motivated and to continue with this life change. I was more interested when I was watching it, to find out how much weight people had lost in the studio audience. When the series started, all of the audience were weighed….there were maybe 200/300 people there. Each week the same crowd came back to share their experiences of the diet so that we can follow them through the weeks. The audience were all weighed again to see if the weight loss experiment worked, and in total the audience had lost 80 stone. This made me feel very positive as I haven’t weighed myself for a while, but I also don’t want to get dissappointed when I do get on the scales again.

The average weight loss should be about 2 pounds a week, but people lose weight at different speeds. Some will drop a lot of weight and then level off for a bit and then lose some more. I think the hardest thing is to not compare your own weight loss to someone elses. For instance in the audience there was one woman, who I must say was huge. She had lost the most weight over the 3/4 weeks of the show, at a staggering 27 pounds. Others had lost about 7 pounds, others around a stone…so it really does vary.

One valuable piece of advise that Paul McKenna gave was that we have to remember that it is not important where we stand but the direction that we are moving in. So as long as you are losing weight steadily, and making the changes to the way we view food then we will get there in the end. I do not expect to be down to my ideal weight instantly… but I hope that by the summer I will be nearly there.

Paul McKenna in last night’s show was focussing on increasing our exercise levels. During the diet I have felt myself get more motivated to exercise, even to the point of thinking about dusting off the exercise equipment that I bought a few years ago and never used. The exercise that you do during the day doesn’t have to be strenuous, just enough to make your body need extra energy and therefore speeding up your metabolism. Paul McKenna presents his show in such a good, down to earth way and doesn’t set goals for people that are unrealistic. The best exercise to do that is simple is just walking. Aslong as you increase your exercise to do more each day than you were doing before you started the diet the better it is. He suggested that a pedometer is a good way to analyse how much or little exercise that you do in your normal life. I know that for instance my wife does more exercise than me, just in the amount of times that she runs up and down the stairs after the kids.

I started today a new regime. At work I will go outside for a quick cigarette and normally stand around chatting to whoever is around. But today I thought that I would use this time to fit in some exercise. So instead of just stood smoking, I decided to walk and smoke, walking to the end of the car park and back. It’s not very far, just far enough to smoke a cigarrette, but it is about 200 strides for each trip. So yes, even though I am combining smoking with exercise which don’t really go hand in hand, I have done an extra 1000 strides so far today and this has increased my normal daily total.

Well the final show was aired last night …

NO I hear you cry, well it’s ok Paul Mckenna has a Weight Loss System you can buy online ( just click the picture )

You can also buy the “I Can Make You Thin” book by Paul Mckenna as well .. phew.

Well on Friday I am going to publish my results … so hold tight

I have a test that I will be carrying out over the next week or so when I get the opportunity to have a MacDonalds meal. Before the diet I probably would have had a MacDonalds every few weeks, mainly if we were out somewhere with the kids at the weekend and we would take them for a Happy Meal. It is certainly not a regular meal for me. One of the main complaints that I always have when I eat a MacDonalds meal is that they would never fill me up. This is something that I have heard a few people say especially men, who may end up having to order an extra burger or some more fries just to feel like they have eaten enough when they leave the restaurant.

So the test will find out whether the rules of the Paul Mckenna diet will change my outlook on having a MacDonalds. I reckon that the reason that the meal does not fill me is because I always eat a MacDonalds really quickly. It’s just something about opening the box up and smelling that juicy burger, you just can’t help stuffing it in as fast as humanly possible. So I will eat my next MacDonald consciously making sure that I smell my food and chew it properly and slowly, taking into account all of the flavours and textures that are part of each bite.

I strongly suspect, knowing that my meal portion sizes have been reduced by eating consciously that the MacDonalds will be able to fill me up if I eat it conscioulsy. I am more concerned to find out what a MacDonalds really tastes like. You are certainly more aware of salt levels in food when you chew it a lot…so I may even find myself being totally put off eating a MacDonalds!

My temptation got the better of me…

Last night I went out to the pub for a few drinks as on a Thursday we have a baby sitter which allows me and my wife to have a night out. We were hungry when we got to the pub and we often eat there on a Thursday. I scoured the menu for a meal that would satisfy my hunger and the only thing that kept jumping out at me was haddock and chips. I just had to do it.

They were delicious… plus the bonus being for the fat levels in the meal, (even though that fat isn’t an issue on this diet) that they were freshly made at the pub with real potato chips (none of these frozen chips). It wasn’t a greasy meal which I think would put me off a bit now that I am eating consciously. Anyway they were gorgeous and I remembered to follow all of the Golden Rules of the diet. It’s great being able to eat what you want and know that you will be losing weight in a steady and controlled way.

This afternoon I am very pleased with myself. At lunch time one of the guys in the office had gone and bought fish and chips and the smell of them was wafting through to me. It would have been dead easy for me to go and get myself some as we were all sat in the office drooling over the greasy chips and that smell of salt and vinegar. My wife was saying to me that if it was what I wanted to eat ,we should just get in the car and go and get some. As long as I was eating when I was hungry and that I ate consciously and stopped when I was full, then there wasn’t a problem. The main thing about the Paul McKenna diet is not to forbid any sort of food even if you would class it as a food that on most normal diets you would have to keep well clear of.

I would normally not have thought twice about it but when I thought about what I actually wanted to eat I knew that my body didn’t really want fish and chips…I just thought I did. I opted for a walk in to town and a sandwich from my local Deli shop. I found that I enjoyed the walk and my lunch. So I have done well today in enjoying the bit of exercise and doing my fat intake some good by not getting drawn into fish and chips.

I just couldn’t help myself.. I had a little voice in my head telling me to do it…

I simply got up this morning, my wife was already dressed, so I commented to her if her clothes felt any looser on her. To be honest she is thin anyway, but reckons that she needs to lose just half a stone to lose that bit of weight that she isn’t happy with. Plus I suppose that if you only normally weigh 8 and a half stone, an extra half a stone is similar to me putting on another stone. Anyway her clothes did feel more comfortable on her. She then asked if my clothes felt any better on me… but for some reason I have decided that I am just going to be a slob at work so I have only been wearing tracky bottoms and t-shirts so it’s hard to tell.

Then I get the “Well, why don’t you just weigh yourself then?” remark…. the temptation was there then. I was pretty much convinced that I wouldn’t have lost anything…but at the back of my mind I really hoped that I had lost some or else what would I do next if this diet that makes so much sense wasn’t working for me. But Paul McKenna said not to weigh yourself…hmmm I wonder why, is it because his diet doesn’t actually work and he’s just trying to get enough book sales from the SkyOne show before people realises he’s a fake?? Or was it so that you stop yourself being obsessed about every ounce and pound?
Anyway to my surprise I was down to 17 stone 9lbs, which I am very pleased with. I may only have lost 5 pounds in 2 weeks but if this is a lifestyle change that I will stick to, it will enable me to lose weight gradually and keep the weight off long term. Whenever I have been on diets before, most recently the Atkins diet, you do get fast weight loss but you know that it can’t be healthy for you and certainly isn’t maintainable without the lifestyle change as well.

The next part of the Monday night show was all about self image. Many people, whether they are fat or not probably, have a negative self image. There will be something that they don’t like about themselves and would like to change. It just doesn’t make sense walking around all day feeling negative about yourself. You were born with what you have got and you have to accept it. Unless of course you have the time and money to undergo extensive plastic surgery. But changing the external appearence may not necessarily make you happy unless you work on the inside as well. We are harsher about ourselves than we are to others and I do find myself critisising my appearence and getting down about it.

Paul Mckenna made a very good point about self image, that if we critisise ourselves every day for the way we look, then all of these comments start to add up. We have to reverse this habit by creating a positive self image. He said what we need to do to start this, is when we feel ourselves wanting to say “I’m so fat and ugly” when we look in the mirror, we have to say it in a stupid voice, therefore you can’t take it seriously.

What you must therefore start to do when you look in the mirror is not to say all the bad points that you used to be able to see but, “I accept my face, I accept my chin, I accept my stomach, I accept my legs etc etc”. You must say this in an assertive voice and you will start to feel better about yourself and accept your body.

There are also other ways to improve your self confidence such as to imagine that you are inside the body of someone you aspire to, then look in the mirror. Imagine how they feel when the look in the mirror each day. One thing we must remember is that even though celebrities have very toned, trim bodies, who is to say they like themselves and have a great life. It is just how they are portrayed when they walk down the red carpet. In reality most of the top celebrities are messed up. You have to also imagine a time that you have been paid a compliment and remember how happy and confident you felt.

This is all to do with making sure that when you get up in the morning and look in the mirror that you must associate good memories and good positive feelings with who you are, rather than putting yourselve down all of the time. I’m certainly going to give this a go.