Advising is free so...

First, if you can’t cook, you should learn. In my opinion the best way to control what you eat is cooking yourself.

Buy a good scale, and ideally one that tells the percentage of body fat. Also one meter seam to take measurements of your chest, waist and, for the girls, also hips. It's good to weigh yourself and take the measurements on the same day of the week. I usually do that the morning of the day off.

Look for a motivation to get started. It can be serious, like having had a health problem or as silly as mine, the biggest pants I had, started to not fit and did not want to go buy new clothes, well, okay now I have to buy clothes just because I have lost 3 sizes, but that’s not the point. Motivation is very important at first at that time your brain is kind of cheating telling you that you want to eat more even not being hungry. That feeling is what we have at the beginning and is in those moments where the motivation comes. Gradually the feeling goes away because your mind got used to the new portions.

Related to this, aesthetics is not a good motivation, and I say this because this issue is too dependent on people’s opinion. Yes, many people will tell you that you look better, but some people will not notice the change at all and that can frustrate a lot if that’s your motivation. Felling leaner, more energetic, or needing to use smaller clothes, are more objective indicators and much more motivating.

Set reasonable goals for short terms. Start with something like "lose 5 kilos," "reach [insert here the nearest] kilos, thinking in small amounts makes more difficult to see how long the way will be and lose motivation.

When cooking, do it without being hungry. If you wait until you’re hungry to prepare food, it's much easier to start saying "nothing happens if I do it once" and cook fries as side dish instead of the boiled potatoes that were planned.

Prepare (see first tip) just your portion. From personal experience, cooking for several people and trying to calculate your portion at a guess does not work, plain and simple. And this extends to trying to go to restaurants because you don’t want to bring food from home, and pretend it to be the same. Well, you don’t control the portions, the sauces, the salt, so it does not work.

Do not sacrifice more than you can bear. You need to slowly get used to the diet. Feeling it as an obligation is very bad. That's what the two free meals per week are about. As I explained I usually do in one day, but that’s just my way, you can do it differently. And if you want a Tuesday dinner out and get you a plate of pork ribs, go ahead. Yes, well, you just have a free meal less for the rest of the week.

In another post I will give some advices about sports and work outs. But you can imagine that the first one is about starting to exercise, walk, dance classes, anything that makes you get up of the couch.

Tomato and tuna salad

New Recipe.
This one is very easy, it’s a simple salad. I really think this one is more appropriate for dinner, it’s probably lighter recipe I prepare.

Recipe 2: Tomato, cucumber and tuna
Ingredients:
- 1 can of tuna
- 1 cucumber
- 250 grams of tomato

Preparation:
Wash and chop the tomatoes. Peel and slice the cucumber. Add the tuna and mix everything in a bowl and season as you want.
Serve it with a slice of bread and 2 kiwis.

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!