This is going to sound like I’m stating the bleeding obvious, but you lose weight by eating less of the stuff that makes you put on weight. As I’ve blogged about previously, the problem is for me (and the many friends of mine who have given low carb living a go and consequently lost weight) we didn’t realise that some of the stuff that was supposedly good for us, such as fruit juice, pasta, bread and rice, was making us put on the weight, in the quantities we were consuming. And then of course there’s the stuff we know isn’t great for us, like foods with added sugar, fried food, crisps etc, which we should avoid. The problem of course here is this list of food to avoid is incredibly tasty and addictive so what to do about it – I mean, the way to losing weight and keeping it off can’t be to never eat any of these things again, can it? Wouldn’t that make life boring?

I have to agree – I’m Italian, I was brought up eating bread with every meal, pasta once a day, pizza on occasion. And I love this stuff. I also have a soft spot for cream cakes, donuts, crisps, chips, burgers, breaded chicken, shortbread and ice cream to name but a few things, but fortunately not so much for sweets and milk chocolate. I also love Chinese food, which is not great for low carb living because many of the sauces contain lots of sugar, there’s loads of rice and noodles, much of the meat is battered, and of course there are all the pancakes with the crispy duck. There was little chance, practically impossible, that I could spend the rest of my life without at the very least on occasion eating these “fattening” foods without fear of falling off the wagon.

So I deal with this in two ways. Firstly, back to the original obvious point of eating less of this stuff. Portion size really does matter – the problem is that most of the above foods haven’t historically been sold in small portions. Until recently, there’s been a march towards “super size” portions, as ably demonstrated by the grotesque film “Super Size Me”. And given the addictive qualities of these types of food it’s really difficult to limit yourself to small portions when there is lots of this type of food in front of you. My favourite example here is the yum yum donut. I am really happy to have found in Marks & Spencers a mini pack of 2 half size yum yums for sale, around 10g of carbs each. I have a general principle that for most days, I don’t consume more than 20g of carbs in any one hit (although I’m in the lucky position now that I don’t want to lose any more weight, so I can manage about 100g per day).

The fact these yum yums are sold in such small portions means I can quite happily buy a pack of 2, come home and have a cup of tea with my wife, and share the yum yums. No mad sugar rush, no insulin spike, just a delicious little treat. Before I discovered these in M&S, all I would find is 4-8 packs of much larger yum yums, and despite my best efforts, if I bought one pack with the intention of keeping them for a week, they’d be gobbled up in a couple of days. That for me was the problem for a lot of my “fattening” foods – I couldn’t just eat a little bit, so the obviously solution was buy smaller portions, or if you buy bigger portions, eat a small bit and throw the rest away.

Similar thing with crisps – I actively search out small packs of crisps with small amounts of carbs; Monster Munch for example has around 12g. Again with bread, I buy the small half loaves – not only are there fewer slices, but the bread slice itself is smaller, so fewer carbs once more, around 10g. So it’s possible to have the odd treat without feeling guilty. What’s encouraging is that there are products arriving in supermarkets (as seen in the M&S example) which are deliberately targeted as small portion snacks, so the tide is starting to change from “super size” portions towards “mini size” portions.

I’m timing out for now, but my next post will be about “the cheat day” which is my second method of allowing myself to indulge in these types of food, and in particular how I can still indulge my love of Chinese food.