The diet. A quick explanation

The idea is to eat in a controlled way during 6 days and have a day off. This day off is when you can eat whatever you want and as much you want. The explanation is similar to the same idea that of drinking a lot of water (I drink between 2 and 3 liters a day), to avoid the body to retain more than necessary. Especially at the beginning, the body "realizes" that you are taking fewer calories than usual, so it tries to keep as much as possible, and that would cause weight and fat loss much slower. This day of we cheat our body to it doesn't keep anything that is not needed. This “cheat” day can be adjusted, the idea is to make at maximum 2 or 3 "uncontrolled" meals per week. I usually do it in one day, it helps me to have everything under control.

The portions, for the controlled meals, usually are around 60 grams raw rice or pasta, around 100 grams of meat and/or fish, plus another part of vegetables and/or fruit. Throughout the blog I'll show the different recipes (you saw the first one already), there´s Spanish omelet, spaghetti ala carbonara, Cuban rice, rice with cod, rice with chicken, pasta salad, and some other recipes that I “created” by myself. But as you see, all these recipes are quite usual (at least in Spain). But the portions are what they are.

I have eliminated fried foods, refined sugar and refined flour products. So, I don´t eat sweets, cakes or sugary drinks, and always whole-grain bread. The latter helps to make the digestion slower, so it takes longer to feel hungry. So breakfast is no longer based cakes, cereals and now consists of a chicken, or turkey, breast sandwich. In brief I’ll talk about the possible breakfast.

Between meals I take a handful, 20 units if you don’t know how much is a handful, of toasted almonds. They are very easy to prepare, but it can be also raw almonds or some nuts, or a yogurt. The idea is to eat, just a little, every two or three hours. So that the stomach is constantly working (burning calories), and we’ll never feel hungry, the great enemy.

Extracted from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Almendras_tostadas_sin_piel.jpg

And finally, it is good to always carry the same schedule. This is easier when you are working, at university for example it was a bit more complicated, because every day I had a different schedule. As an example, here is my schedule:

•     8am - 9am Breakfast
•     12h            Lunch
•     15h            Portion of almonds
•     17h-18h     1 yogurt
•     20h-21h     Dinner

In short, the second recipe or the breakfasts, we'll see.

The diet. Instructions and first recipe.

This post is going to have a different style that the one I intend to give this blog. The idea is to have a little story about my "journey" to get fit and adding the dishes included in my diet. But this post is to explain the system itself. It is very simple:

- Choose 12 dishes for the week (6 lunches and 6 dinners). Any recipe serves both lunchtime and for dinner. It is recommended not to repeat any dish.

- Choose a breakfast and a snack each day. It can always be the same or change every day, it's up to you.

- There is a day off, AKA cheat day. It's useful to cheat the body to not store more than necessary when it "realizes" the change in the diet. There will be a post about this.

- Drink plenty of water. I drink between 2 and 3 liters of water a day.

As you can see, it's very simple, and when you see the list of dishes, perhaps you will recall the maintenance phase that most of the diets have. So basically, this diet is about eating healty, with variety and suitable proportions. When you reach the desired weight, it´s only needed to change slightly the quantities. 

The recipe

Well, let's go for the first recipe. One of the tips which I will mention is that if you do not know how to cook, you have to learn. And one of the reasons is that I can cook but  I can't write recipes, I put salt at my will, also the oil, I cut the vegetables however I feel like in the moment. That´s why I could not write a prescription for someone who can not cook. And I've tried, I assure you. What I will do is writting the amount of the basic ingredients of the recipe and a brief explanation.

Recipe 1. Spirals with chicken.

Ingredients:

- 60 grams crude spirals (or any type of pasta).

- 1 chicken leg.

- 1 small onion

- 1/2 yellow pepper

- 1 cucumber with salt as accompaniment.

Explanation:

Boil in salted water, the pasta for about 8 or 9 minutes. The cooking time is usually written on the package.

At the same time prepare the onion and pepper in a pan with a little, more or less a table spoon,

of oil. When they are cooked, add the chicken, cut into pieces, and mix everything until the chicken is done.

Add the pasta to the pan and cook all together for a couple of minutes.

Pasta with chicken

Almost all recipes will meet these proportions, so if you want you can go on creating your own recipes, varying the types of pasta or rice, and changing the chicken by another meat or fish.

Bon appetit!

A little story

Well, first I will explain a little bit the story of how I found this diet. In the presentation I explained that I actually began in summer 2007, then I returned to the old ways and it didn’t go well. But let's go to June 2007. One of my friends was on a diet, a strict one, so I started to think about it too. I told my parents about that and my mother suggested me to go to a pharmacy in my town (Pharmacy Yañez in Montornés del Vallés, in Barcelona, I’d put a link to their site but it seems they don’t have it) that were preparing customized diets (I can’t remember if it was for free or I had to pay some money in the first visit, but it certainly was not like going to a private endocrine). So I went there, I filled out a form about my eating habits, food that I like and I don’t like and food that I wasn’t willing to stop eating. A week later I had a list of about 20 dishes, I had to pick 12 per week (a day off, remember), there was also a list with a few breakfasts and snacks to choose from, and a conversion table if I wanted to vary the ingredients of a dish. So I started, and I was going every Thursday to took my weight every, and also to receiver new recipes in case I wanted a change. When I started the diet, in June, I weighed about 86 kilos, the last check I did, around October, I weighed 68 kilos, those are 18 kilos lost in around five months. Not bad, right? One thing that helped a lot is that I started at the end of exams in the summer, which basically meant for me to work 8 hour shift, plus that summer I was working all summer, so I was much more active than during the period of study.

From that moment I made the first failure, stop weighing myself every week, and sometime later I made the second mistake which was start eating every day in the restaurant at the university. And I told you already what happens when I have food on the plate, the plate will get clean in five minutes (which saves water while cleaning it, isn’t it?). A year later I was about 75 kilos, but then I stayed in that weight for quite some time, because I went to take food from home and that helped me to regain control again. And I was like that for a couple of years, until I began to go to restaurants for lunch again. So in April 2011 I was there again with 83 kilos. The first try was to join Taekwondo to do more exercise, but 3 hours per week of exercise just don’t make a difference... I had to go back to the diet.

Coming soon...

Presentation

Well, let's see where do I start ... Welcome! Yes, I think this will be enough.

Hands-on, the idea of ​​this blog is to show a series of recipes and exercises that helped me get fit and lose so far, around 16 kilos and 10% my body fat level in 7 months. Yes, you read that right, 7 months, I don´t know if it seems a lot or few, it seems a reasonable time for me, considering the time that I can spend doing sport, which is limited and because of this I’ve gained around 8 kilos of muscle mass (which weighs more than fat). The goal is to get fit, not to become a professional athlete in 4 months, so I think that the time spent exercising is adequate.

First, some people are able to control what they eat, I know people who get bored while eating, if it wouldn´t be necessary to live, they wouldn´t eat in the whole day. Well I am quite the opposite, I like eating, it´s a pleasure as any other, the problem that if you eat too much, you get fat, that´s the negative side. Another problem I have, I don’t control when I’m eating, I’ll eat everything in the plate until is clean. What is the result of this behavior? That the next thing I want to do is lie on the couch to sleep or sit anywhere because I can´t move ... until I’m hungry and I go back to eat again. It's a vicious circle. I remember ironically, at lunchtime, my grandmother used to point me as an example because I ate everything. Two hours after I was blame for not going with my cousins ​​to play outside and stay at home napping or reading. Well I thing all this comes from family, two sayings I always hear to my mother, "you have to eat little to walk lighter" and "better more than less” (Personal translation from to Spanish sayings “Hay que comer poco para andar ligero” y “mejor que sobre que no que falte”). One of them is what "people say" the other is what we apply at home. Guess which one. Well, now you know a little more about me, and you could understand why I had to make a change in my diet and from having a sedentary lifestyle to a much more active one. Let's talk about the current situation.

I returned to the diet, June 1, 2011. I’m 1.69 m high and at that time I weighed 82.2 kg with a body fat level between 25% and 27%. Today I weight 66.6 kg (nice number, right?), and the level of body fat now ranges between 15% and 17%. Why I wrote that I returned to the diet? Because I began with it in 2007 when I got to weigh nearly 87 kg, I think at some point I reached 90 kg. I lost 20 kilos and then I gained again around 6 kilos and stayed stable for some time. Why so many kilos were gained again suddenly in 2010 and mid-2011? Well, I started for lunch to restaurants and stop following the directions and tricks that I’ll write here.

The diet is not for losing weight. It’s just a very balanced diet, where I can eat everything I want but ina controlled way. Why do I lose weight then? Because the portions are much smaller compared to what I ate before, and because I've gone from doing no exercise at all to practice sport 5 days a week.

As I said welcome to the trip I'm doing to get back as when I was 18 and I used to do athletics.