Most of my life I’ve been underweight but I made massive gains after 45. I buried my head in the sand and I don’t think I’ve weighed myself in years.
This year, when none of my winter coats would button up any longer, I began to wake up to the reality of my size and when I saw a neighbour who was almost unrecognisable with a new healthy and slim body, I followed her advice. I started the Cambridge Diet at the beginning of January and have lost 2 stone so far. I hope to lose a further 2 stone in the next 3-6 months. It’s a meal replacement diet (yuk) but I’m sure it can’t be unhealthier than carrying 4 stone extra around with me. It’s also remarkably easy and within about four days, your appetite goes down and you don’t have to keep calorie counting across the day. I’ve had surprising amounts of energy and I can fit into so many old clothes already. I sound like an advertisement for the diet.
The only down side is that if you like healthy homemade food, the meals are far from gourmet and I yearned for farmers market greens and organic chicken. From the second week I moved to having one home cooked meal per day with 2 further meals and a snack from Cambridge packets.
With all the talk of obesity and it’s cost to people’s health and to the nhs budget, I don’t know why the nhs does have a meal replacement diet on prescription. Perhaps they could bring out their own.
Written by
Sunshine501
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Unfortunately, although losing weight may happen on a meal replacement plan, maintaining that weight loss is a different matter, as I'm sure you've seen with Pauline Quirke, who was the poster girl for the Cambridge Diet, but put the weight back on. Yoyo dieting is more unhealthy than being overweight.
A healthy and sustainable lifestyle is the way to lose the weight and keep it off, as many of us can attest to.
Follow this link to our chat thread and a list of all the activities we run. We've found active participation to be key to success, especially with our weigh-ins and Daily Diary
The NHS does have an ultra-low-calorie meal replacement plan: it's prescribed for diabetics. It has mediocre results and a high drop-out rate.
While you're clearly happy with your results, you could have achieved exactly the same effect by eating proper meals with greens and chicken from the farmer's market. Many people have done exactly that (including moreless there, and myself). This modern idea that keeping slim must be difficult and unpleasant is fundamentally incorrect, and I can't help wondering how many people have been driven to eating disorders by increasingly desperate attempts to lose weight.
Heyy are you going to join our summer challenge and pledge to achieve something in 10 weeks? Drop a dress size, fit into an old outfit, lose an inch or get fitter? Im going to pledge hitting 20,000 steps on my fitbit, beating my personal best x
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