Tis the bikini season

Oh er it seems many of you are equally gripped by the idea of honing and toning without resorting to celebrity style constipation over a diet, courtesy of the Make Do Diet. I was quite touched by kind comments and would like to reassure anyone who thinks I might be delusional that I do have 5 kilos to lose which is the equivalent of 11 pounds. This is truly fat not my imagination. I am not one for body dimorphic tendencies as I've always loved my curves. Trust me when I say it is pure fat!

The wonderful Rachel has kindly written a stage one on losing those pounds which are presenting a problem. From now on there will be an update every week - and next week I'll include some pics to make it more visually pleasing but for this week it is all about getting down to it!! Remember no money is required and no diet book to buy.

The Beginning - first week of the Make Do diet

Day One – ok, let us try to make a start on the whole dark art of “losing weight”. First things first, your body is made up on many things, and the weight that you weigh on the scales is the total sum of that – so we need to be smarter in our desire to change body shape, by listing it all.

Date

Total Weight

Bust 1 Fullest part

Bust 2 Under bust

Waist 1 narrowest part

Waist 2 across belly button

Hips 1 on hip bones

Hips 2 widest part of bottom

Thigh 1 top

Thigh 2 middle part

So, fill in the details – you can measure and weigh either all metric or all imperial. We will repeat this every week.

Secondly, we need to remove temptation.....interestingly, a study showed that if there was a box of biscuits on your desk, you would keep eating each time you saw them, you ate less if they were on the desk across the room, and even less if they were in the cupboard out of sight. So, step one, is to remove from your view all of the calorie-laden-no-nutritional-value stuff that we like to pick on when feeling fed up/bored/L’Oreal advert (cos I deserve it moment)....mine will be crisps....

Even more interesting is the psychological study done on “wanting” something...so, if there were 2 jars of biscuits, one with only 2 “special” biscuits in that you were not allowed to eat, the other full to the top with biscuits, us humans, would crave to have the “special” biscuits...and would sometimes even reject the normal biscuits! So, be aware. So don’t be surprised if you crave the thing “you can’t have”. It is like being dumped by your boyfriend...you will be pining for them. Be kind to yourself – distraction techniques work to a certain extent so phone a friend, take a bath go for a walk etc etc.

Whatever, please, allow yourself a treat at least once a week, but make sure that you exercise the total quantity of the item (s) you wish to consume on that day (and in addition to your other exercise). However, if we do eat things that are close to hand, please make sure that you have a bowl of fruit somewhere obvious where you will walk past and pick one up, that you have a bowl of chopped veg in the fridge right in front of you as you open the door (put in as many colourful veg that you can – peas in their pods, green beans, red or yellow peppers, radish, cherry tomatoes, carrot sticks etc). Nuts and seeds are also good for trace minerals, so a tub of them (with a lid on so that you don’t eat too many...) out on your kitchen top.

The third and final bit of day one will be to do some exercise. We know that even a single bout of exercise can immediately change the level of fat swimming around your body, and that repeated bouts of exercise will let you access your fat stores quicker and for a longer. So, wake up your body’s fat burning potential by doing some exercise – the good bit is that it can be anything, as long as you enjoy it – and try for at least 30 mins.

Day One Summary

1. Weigh and measure
2. Remove all temptation that will encourage hips from hell and replace with heavenly hips temptations...
3. Kit-kat workout – work out how much exercise for a treat and burn it off before you get it.
4. Exercise for at least 30 minutes

That's all folks on the diet front. More next Monday and a big shout out to all the diet followers across the globe, America, Spain and Australia as well as the UK.
Tomorrow, I do a product reveiw....