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A Friends Great Weight Loss Story Part 1

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Hi everyone, by now you’ve figured out that I am pretty much anti sugar.  I’ve been screaming my anti sugar message for a fair while now and slowly its sinking in.

Today I’m going to share with you one of the many truly amazing success stories I hear about all the time.  There are a number of things that make this story amazing, one of which is the fantastic results this woman has experienced so far.

(This is only part 1)  What I like about this is the power of Social Media and the Internet to reach far further afield than what we could normally achieve in our small little world.  So without further ado, let me introduce you to Toni Robins.

I first met Toni in 1985 (which is 27 years ago). Toni’s husband Neil and I joined the NZ Police together and when we graduated from the Police College, we worked at the same Police Station in South Auckland.  One time, Neil’s car was stolen from outside the station and my team of officers and I worked 27 hrs straight to catch the thieves.  I’ve not had much contact with Neil since I left the Police but Toni and I connected via Facebook and she’s been following my blog for a while now.  So I’ll let Toni pick up on her amazing weight loss story….

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mrs Toni Robins!

quitting sugar weight loss story“Hi, my name is Toni and I have a sweet tooth. Not a great way to start a weight loss story I know, but let me explain.

A Little Bit About Me

From a young age, sweet things were given as a treat. Pocket money day meant walking to the dairy and buying a 10c bag of mixed lollies. My mum used to bake lovely cakes and biscuits for afternoon tea.  Ice cream was a favorite for dessert.

Now there was nothing wrong with our childhood. We were skinny little kids and it was a normal upbringing, but the ‘need’ for something sweet became a daily requirement, which I now see as an addiction to sugar.

Fast forward 35 or so years and I’m now a 44 year old mum of 4 teenagers.  I managed very well with my daily addiction to sugar right through my 20’s and 30’s, returning to a nice weight of 62kg, (I’m 172cm tall), even after the births of all of my children.

I never once considered what I was eating and considered myself lucky to have a great metabolism. Then I hit my 40’s!! Wham, suddenly I was 73kg, tired all the time, and was so addicted to sugar that I thought I needed a sugar fix of a chocolate bar whenever I felt tired.

Sometimes I would get the shakes and think I needed some chocolate!

A couple of times I managed to lose a little bit of weight but I didn’t really change my eating long term ( I really love chocolate and salt and vinegar potato chips!), so it always came back on. Losing any amount of weight was a struggle.

At one point I joined a gym, and despite flogging myself 4-5 times a week,  and watching what I ate ( I thought) at the end of a month I had put on weight, so I didn’t go back to the gym. I gave up.

Ok, so here’s the confession: I was one of those mugs (for want of a better word) who funded the lucrative weight loss market. I admit that I tried the lemon detox diet, some other ‘miracle’ weight loss concoction and most recently, African mango pills. What an idiot!

I did lose a couple of kilos but the  accompanying meal plan was too complicated – too much like hard work, so I gave up (again) and the weight returned really quickly. I decided that anything else I tried had to be free (or cheap) and simple. Simple was the key.

Ouch, Time For A Change!

Just before Christmas I read an article on Pat’s website about the toxic nature of sugar. Great, I thought, I’ll cut out sugar and I’ll lose the weight.  My daughter actually started before me (it was Christmas after all!) and lost 4kg within a few weeks.

She has now been 113 days without sugar and she was a bigger sweet tooth than me, but something still wasn’t right. I wasn’t as strict with my addiction and by the time my husband and I went on our 2nd honeymoon to Rarotonga in March this year I was 75.4kg. Ouch! Something had to change.

I did some research around sugar and discovered that the body turns things like potatoes, rice, pasta, and even fruit into sugar and uses that energy before burning any fat.

So I thought I was eating healthily and burning fat at the gym, when all I was doing was burning sugar! At the same time I ran into a friend who was doing the Dukan diet and had lost lots of weight, but I didn’t want to go to that extreme (although I wanted to further investigate the principle of protein being the key to burning fat).

Another friend had joined a well known company with a meal plan and specific food (though it still included pies, chips and pasta – go figure!) but I couldn’t afford it, so I decided to devise my own eating plan.

Now I work a fairly busy and stressful job dealing with mortgages and insurances and I found a book called ‘The Happiness Advantage’ by Shawn Achor that I thought might help with being more productive at work, but as luck would have it, I found an interesting bit of advice to help me with my weight loss.

This is a brilliant book by the way. In the chapter ‘The 20 second rule” he says that it doesn’t take 21 days to make something a habit, he says that you can only make something a habit if it is easy to achieve, ie. in less than 20 seconds.

His example was about getting up in the morning to go for a run. Most days he would go to bed making a decision to ‘definitely get up to go for a run in the morning’ but when the morning came around he laid in bed thinking ‘perhaps I’ll do it tomorrow, if I do it today I’ll have to get dressed and get on my socks and shoes, etc etc…’, so he decided to go to bed in his (clean) running gear. Now all he had to do was get up and go, and hey presto, he got up every day.

Hmmm? Ok, so if big weight loss companies have success by having meal plans tailor made to their clients, then I need to tailor make my own. To make it easy to achieve I decided that I needed to make a plan to eat the same things every day at the same times, with 2 possible snacks if I got hungry, and I needed the food to be pre-prepared and ready to go, plus I needed to increase my intake of water.

This would beat my ’20 second rule’ and would hopefully be easier to achieve. So, with everything I had learned, I figured that the key would be to cut out sugar (including potatoes, rice, pasta, white bread) and increase protein.

If my body didn’t have sugar to burn then surely it would burn fat? And if I increased my protein, then maybe I would burn it faster.

This is what I decided to eat:

Breakfast – Cup of white tea and my normal bowl of Wheat Bran Flakes with 2-3 slices of tinned peaches. ( I didn’t mess with my breakfast. I need the fibre to keep my system regular and I have never eaten more than this, so I needed to do what worked for me)

Morning tea  (around 10am) – Another cup of tea, half a carrot chopped into sticks with a big teaspoon of hummus, and a pot of yogurt ( I’ve been using Yoplait De-Lite because it is 99.9% fat free with no sugar added)

Lunch – small salad made of about a cup of lettuce, quarter tomato, quarter carrot (in sticks) 6 or so sugar cube sized pieces of avocado, 2-3 olives and a 95g tin of tuna (you can get lots of different flavors to make it interesting, but I squeeze most of the oil out). Then 6 or 8 grapes afterwards for my something sweet.

Afternoon tea (around 2.30pm -3pm) – 250ml of Calci plus milk and just under 2 dessert spoons of a good protein/whey powder from a health shop after discussions with a naturopath/dietician. This fills me up until dinner, but if I do get hungry then I might have a cup of herbal tea.

(Please note – I have never been a good water drinker, but I drink water all day long during this)

Dinner – Meat (whatever is out for dinner! But usually chicken, with red meat maybe a couple times a week. I haven’t even been taking the skin off the chicken!) and the rest of the plate green veges, corn or carrots or salad.

Supper – Cup of tea. Because I like it! And I wanted to be happy during this meal plan.

I did also allow myself 2 small glasses (about 100ml) of red wine during the last 12 days.

My Emergency Back Up Plan!

Now if I get hungry in between (and I’ve been doing this for 12 days and have only gotten hungry 4 times!) I drink some water first, if that doesn’t work I allow myself some cheese the size of a small matchbox, or a small amount of popcorn, or maybe another cup of herbal tea.

But as I said, I am not usually hungry at all. In fact, Friday in our office is usually Sushi day, so I went off and got my 6 pieces of healthy sushi for lunch (uncertain whether I should deviate from my plan) but I could only finish 5 pieces, and that was at a push! I felt like eating less food, after only 7 days.

Do you notice that there is no real sugar in this meal plan at all? And I’ve always been a sweet tooth.  I think that, because I cut out fizzy drinks, lollies and cakes, etc at the beginning of the year, it has been easier to cut out everything, so I haven’t had any cravings or headaches.

I don’t miss sugar at all. Even at the supermarket, if I’m stood in the queue and look at the chocolate bars by the counter my initial thought is ‘yum’, but then I just smile to myself and think ‘no, I don’t want it’. I haven’t slipped up once.

This weekend though, is my daughters’ 21st birthday and I will allow myself to have a small piece of cake, though I have a feeling that I won’t be able to finish more than a mouthful.

So, the results So Far!

Well, in 12 days I have lost 3.4kg!

I’m down to 72kg and back in my ‘skinny’ work pants because my ‘normal’ ones were falling off me. I haven’t really changed my exercise plan – I walk most days, and I do enjoy yoga for the stress relief, and although I know I would benefit from using some small weights to tone my arms, I haven’t gone mad with pushing myself.

I have fibromyalgia so I do have to be ‘nice’ to myself and know my limits.

My 18 year old daughter who is, and always has been, ‘curvy’, and who has been essentially sugar free for 113 days, also refined what she has been eating and upped her protein intake, but she has an apple for her fibre, she doesn’t like tuna or salad so she has chicken and veges for lunch and she has lost 2.4kg in 5 days.

I want you to know that this has been a breeze. After years of trying to lose weight it has ended up being easy, because I cut out sugar and junk food, increased protein and made sure I had the food all ready to go so that I didn’t just reach for something easy (and not healthy) to eat.

I have more energy, I’m not hungry and I have not snacked on anything not in my plan. I even still have chocolate in the cupboard and haven’t touched it!

If I can do it, you can too. It doesn’t matter how much weight you have to lose.  It’s about what you put in your mouth. Exercise by itself won’t work. And the change has to be long term, not just to lose weight.

I want to lose about another 5-7kg so I’ll let you know how I get on….

To Be Continued…

Part 2 of my weight loss story

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