In 1990 I decided to become a vegetarian. Well, Pescetarian to be exact: I continued to eat some fish and shellfish. My reasons were mainly because I felt more and more uncomfortable cooking and eating meat and I didn’t like the idea of ​​killing animals. I had also become very active in the new age movement at the time and the environmental cost of meat production just didn’t make sense. It wasn’t long before even the thought of eating meat became distasteful to me, and since then I’ve never been tempted to eat meat.

However, I began to put on weight and have continued to struggle with my weight for 25 years. When I changed sex and started taking hormone replacement therapy it got worse. I’ve tried the Weight Watchers diet, the lemon diet, the grapefruit diet, the 5:2 diet, the Mediterranean diet. the Beverly Hills Diet, the Cabbage Soup Diet, the Ayurvedic Diet, the Atkins Diet (really challenging if you are a vegetarian), the Paul McKenna Diet, the Think Thin Diet, and many more that I have now forgotten about.

At the time, the only diet that worked was Sure Slim: This is a very complex and also very expensive diet based on metabolic type, low glycemic index, low fat, low carb, and personal food preferences. The diet includes blood tests and an in-depth interview followed by regular weekly and then bi-weekly consultations. Each meal has to be meticulously weighed with ingredients selected from a rather restricted list. I lost about 4 stones in six months, and then gained most of it back in the net six months.

Every year since then I have decided to lose weight again and every year I give up after a few months and the weight comes back. The problem is that I had to follow a complex diet even to maintain my weight and that made it almost impossible to eat out, eat at a buffet, eat something when I was traveling or go to a dinner.

I’m sure most of you reading this article will have had similar experiences, and the older we get, the more difficult it seems to be to lose weight and maintain good health.

However, I am not giving up and have recently started looking more closely at low carb and low GI diets to see if I can find a way to simplify this process and find a more acceptable long-term diet that works.

There are a few books that have contributed to my growing understanding of diet over the last decade. Rose Elliot’s Low Carb Vegetarian Diet is great, although you must enjoy eggs and tofu to follow that diet in the first 14 days. That being said, she is one of the foremost experts on vegetarian food and her explanations of the basis of the diet have really helped me better understand the principles of the safe and lean diet that worked.

Chris Woollams The Rainbow Diet is primarily about how to beat cancer by eating healthier with a version of the Mediterranean Diet. But if you can beat cancer by changing your diet, it’s the same process and diet to beat heart problems and diabetes and put you on the road to Perfect Health. The book has really helped me understand how nutrition and the body works and what our diet can do to make it work poorly or work better. Why my doctor hasn’t read this book, I don’t know.

Finally, a book I found over 20 years ago that is now out of print but available secondhand is The Food Addicts Diet by Tish Hayton. In helping her son overcome a major problem with allergies to many foods, Tish came to the conclusion that many of us suffer from food addiction and the foods we are addicted to are wheat, potato, milk and the sugar. When I first read it I didn’t want to believe it even though I knew it made sense. These four foods are the foundation of all prepared foods. Between them they account for around 80% of everything we eat.

Putting everything I’ve read from these and many other books together, I’m beginning to understand why a diet worked and why I put the weight back on. I am beginning to understand how to simplify my diet so that I can lose weight and keep it off. I haven’t managed to do it yet, but what I am doing is recording all my progress and I will write more articles about my journey towards achieving perfect health.

My problem has been an addiction to foods that encourage my body to store fat. They are the reason diets fail because as soon as we go off a diet we inevitably go back to foods that encourage us to store fat.

The food industry knows this too, but profits so much from this food addiction that it’s not even prepared to try to tackle the problem. Instead, we have been scammed and lied to for decades. They have convinced us that the villain is Gordo. So we’re all obsessed with low-fat foods and diet drinks loaded with sugar substitutes like aspartame.

But it’s not the fats in food that get stored as fat in the body, it’s the carbohydrates, particularly the simple carbohydrates in grains and sugars. It’s not just wheat and sugar. Our bodies need glucose for energy that comes from carbohydrates – any excess carbohydrates are converted to fat as a reserve for times when we don’t have enough. In the past, this was quite common, but now we in the west just aren’t that hungry.

No matter how much you cut back on food, if you give your body more carbohydrates than it needs, it will store the excess and not burn fat. The only way to get your body to burn fat is to deprive it of carbohydrates. Cut out grains, sugar, and even starchy vegetables.

I’ve been eating a healthy diet of fruits and vegetables for years thinking it would help me lose weight, but it doesn’t. Many fruits and vegetables are high in carbohydrates.

So the first step to losing weight and keeping it off is to face the number one villain, SUGAR, wherever it comes from. Sugar, honey, fruit, corn syrup, maple syrup, etc. Sugar is sugar, it breaks down quickly into glucose. So my first tip for tackling weight gain and making a permanent change in your diet is to lose your sweet tooth.

The more you restrict your sugar intake, the less you will crave it until you finally find sugar sickening. It’s not going to be easy, but if you value your health and want to get to a comfortable long-term weight, your enemy will be sugar and it has to go.