Free Minimize Me: 10 Diets to Lose 25 Lbs in 50 Days by Andy Leeks

hour in bed to rest and didn’t have to get involved in the daily grind of
the morning and evening commute. I am fully aware of how lucky I am to have
such a flexible working arrangement. I also know that without that flexibility,
it’s likely I would have thrown in the towel by now. So when this challenge is
over, I won’t just have my wife and children to thank for their support, I’ll
be indebted to the company I work for too. It goes to show that dieting isn’t
just about willpower or determination – there are other outside factors to
consider which could end up being your downfall.
     
    I battled through day five of the Atkins
diet, longing for it to be over so I could get back to having bread, pasta and
potatoes. I found that I had missed carbohydrates so much that I started
concocting crazy recipes in my head featuring more than one source of carbs.
Jacket potato, filled with chicken pasta bake, topped with breadcrumbs... Yum!
After another carb-less meal, I stepped onto the scales the following morning
fully expecting to see a small amount of weight-loss. As good and as strict I
had been, everything I had read about the Atkins diet had made it clear that
the induction phase should be followed for around two weeks. Could five days
really make that much of a difference? Well, no, as it turns out. The scales
revealed that I had lost 1.5 lbs. I wasn’t too disappointed – I had managed a
huge amount of weight-loss in my first four diets, so I was expecting it to
slow down at some point. Whether this is my body clinging onto the fat in a
desperate bid to slow the weight-loss process, or whether it’s a slight failing
of the Atkins diet itself, I’m not exactly sure. For me, I suspect it’s a bit
of both.
     
    Summary:
     
    The Atkins diet is a diet which can
often sound appealing given the basic facts. I suspect that the idea you can
still lose weight while chowing down on bacon and eggs topped off with a
generous serving of cheese is an extremely appealing one to many. The reality
for me, however, is that once again by drastically limiting the food groups I
could consume I became bored, dejected and uninterested. The sheer lack of
sugar on this diet left me with major fruit cravings, so much so that I found
myself salivating whenever anyone at work made a fruit tea! If you happen to be
a big cheese, meat and fish lover then I would recommend the diet to get you on
the right track as there’s no doubt that it can work for a period of time. I
wouldn’t recommend doing it in the long-term though, as there seems to be a lot
of evidence to suggest that you could end up damaging your body.
     
    Starting Weight: 14 stone 9 lbs
     
    Finishing Weight: 14 stone 7.5 lbs
     
    Weight loss: 1.5 lbs
     
    % of body weight lost: 0.9 %
     
    Faffiness: 6/10
     
    Difficulty: 5/10
     
    Would I do it again? No
     
    Total weight lost: 20.5 lbs
     

    These two photo’s show the difference
after five diets

Diet 6 - The Raw Food Diet
     
     
    Friday 14th November to Tuesday 18th
November
     
    Weight: 14 Stone 7.5 lbs
     
    When I first came up with the concept of
the 50-day challenge, the single most important principle was that each diet
should be available in the public forum. It was extremely important to me that
all of the diets were membership and cost free. My aim here isn’t to prove
whether Weightwatchers, Slimfast, Rosemary Conley or Slimming World work (they
each have their own marketing departments telling you that they do and that
theirs is in fact the best). My aim is to try to prove that you can lose weight
without expensive diet plans and memberships, and that perhaps changing diets
is the way to achieve longer-term success. That’s still for me to prove, of
course.
     
    I always knew that the raw food diet
would test my principle to the max because of the restricted list of foods and
the ridiculously strict set of rules dictating the way the food can be
prepared. I knew that just a day or so in I would be longing