The Ellie Diet

Gosh, well done you two……I’m impressed by your will power on the fasting diet, keep it up!

As my fellow CWs know I had a wonderful dietary experience last year which began in a NEXT changing room early one January afternoon. I had taken my daughter to buy a few bits and bobs (short skirts, topless tops and million, billion lash double black mascara) when I saw a rather lovely, cosy looking jumper, perfect for hiding the weight under, if you know what I mean. Having not been clothes shopping for a long time because I felt so huge I grabbed the ghastly thing off it’s hook and bolted into the changing room a la Usain.

Having removed my clothes to try on my new best friend, I found myself staring, virtually paralysed with horror at my mirror image, the rolls of fat on my back, the shoulder flab squashed mercilessly by heavy straps, boobs spilling out of a perfectly correctly sized bra were surely not my own I thought, there must be some mistake??? Then, out of nowhere I had an epiphany; an unfamiliar voice inside my head shouted “ELLIE, GO HOME AND LOSE WEIGHT NOW, YOU CAN DO IT AND I WILL HELP!” let me tell you I was out of that tiny room, lined with a hundred mirrors, in less than one minute and not tomorrow, not the day after, but that very afternoon I started my own diet plan and stuck to it religiously for two and a half months, during which time I lost 19lbs and felt absolutely incredible. (Just imagine putting nineteen 1lb packets of sugar in a carrier bag; you would barely be able to carry it!)

I have now put back on 7lbs of the weight that I lost but I know that I can lose it  when I want to, it’s not so easy to get back into the zone though!! Having already experienced the NEXT changing room treatment it doesn’t seem to work in quite the same way a second time but what does work for me is knowing that I’ve managed to lose the weight before; believing I can do it again is a great push forward when I need to get rid of a couple of extra lbs and I simply put the same dietary rules in to place for a week or two.

If you are interested in the diet that I created for myself simply because I could never follow anyone else’s, it was the following:

1. Absolutely NO WHEAT PRODUCTS (look at the labels, even soya sauce has wheat in it)

2. If you have to drink alcohol make sure that it doesn’t contain wheat, which a lot do!

3. Absolutely nothing to eat OR DRINK apart from water after 6.30 – 7pm

4. One fast walk per day

5. One manic dance to a 3 minute tune on Radio 1 per day when NO-ONE is watching N.B close curtains so the neighbours don’t catch a glimpse.

6. Weigh yourself naked every morning before eating or drinking anything and write the result down on a piece of paper, the information is great for those days when you may not lose much because you can look back and see how far you’ve come. Don’t expect to lose more than a pound and a half maybe two each week, it doesn’t seem like much but when you’re not doing an awful lot to achieve it the results seem fair to me!

The dog got a bit confused by the morning weigh-in ; I kept the scales downstairs in the laundry room where he sleeps at night so that the children didn’t know that I was dieting (silly I know, but that’s another story); a naked me standing next to his basket at 6.30am every morning probably wasn’t very nice for him.

And that’s it……that’s it, 19lb lost in two and a half months eating as much as I wanted to, BUT YOU HAVE TO STICK TO THE BASIC RULES!!

GOD, IT FELT GOOD and still does.

Ellie xx