making progress

The photo on the right is me in February of this year. The photo on the left was taken at the end of May this year. Total weight lost: 11 kg or 22 pounds.

Eating out

Eating out is one of the hardest parts of my diet. Choosing a dish that will fit into my eating choices and not cause the chef to personally come to my table to murder me is some times tricky. Thankfully i found some tips i thought i'd pass on.

The website Low GI Diet has some great tips. It is SO worth your time. It has easy to follow basic instructions (like avoid or have small portions of high GI foods like potato and rice) and has great specific instructions for when your eating a specific food type, like Indian.

The other thing i add to this, is that i allow myself a little bit of splurging. I try to limit my eating out to less than once a week. Therefore, I'm allowed relax some of my 'rules' but i try to not relax them so far i have to pay interest on the pain it causes later. So while i may allow myself to have rice noodles with vegetables, i tend to skip the desert. Or if i allow myself a desert, my dish is just vegetables.

first step advice

A few things i learned in the first two months.

1. When changing your diet, do NOT cut out things you love. For me, chocolate is something i just don't see myself ever doing without. So instead of cutting it out, i changed to 70% cocoa. It kept the chocolate i loved and helped me cut down on how much i was having. I also saved it for special times.

2. Don't try to change your diet to something radically different from what you already have. choose to cut out some things, but try to replace the things you've cut out with a healthier alternative. If you love fruit juice, start juicing your own fruit. The amount of extra work it takes to get a little juice will help you appreciate and limit your intake.

3. Increase your vegetable count. If you feel like you can't eat that many veg, juice them. There are lots of great juicing recipes online. experiment and keep the amount of vegetables you're ingesting to the highest amount you can.

4. Add fresh herbs to as many dishes as possible. I like parsley because i feel really good afterwards. I've heard it has a detoxifying affect on the body. About 1/2 a cup in a dish seems to really do wonders for me physically and mentally.

5. Speaking of detoxifying the body, add Chia seeds to everything. If you have hot cereal, add a table spoon to your bowl. If you have a cup of tea, add a teaspoon. This stuff is fantastic for helping you get read of fat soluble toxins. If your body can't expel a toxin, it covers it in fat to protect you from it's affects. you can get rid of these toxins by helping them bond to something that your body will expel. Chia seeds will bond to them and exit them out your body safely.

first steps run together

I heard somewhere that your body's natural state is healthy. Everything it does is to protect you and keep you safe. The problem is that we don't understand how to work WITH our body to achieve our desired goals.

When i first questioned my belief that I'm happy with my size, i realised that i was actually ignoring my body. I was telling my body it wasn't part of who i was and i wasn't going to care for it. The message i was trying to send myself was that i don't need to obsess about my weight. So i took a long hard look in the mirror and told myself that I (mind, spirit, and BODY too) were going to get healthy. No matter where that took us, we were all going to get there in peace. It took me a few weeks of saying this to my reflection before i started believing it.



While my new outlook was sinking in, my doctor had proscribed me Diaformin which i was dutifully taking and increasing by 1/4 a capsule every week or so. I was also keeping up with my newly found love of bike riding. Every weekend my family would go for anywhere between 1-2 hour long rides. Other than that, my physical activity was limited to keeping up with a toddler.

My next step to getting me healthy (i took at the same time as my first) i started listening to people talk about what makes your body healthy. As a vegetarian, i have a natural bias towards believing that fruits and veg are good for me. So I was more willing to believe this. One of the strongest things that influenced my choice of diet was the documentary called "Hungry for a Change". It was a good place to start but not particularly great for originality. I've tried a few of their suggestions and i'll only be sharing what i found worked for me. I chose to start by increasing my vegetable intake by about 50%. You may think a vegetarian already eats a lot of vegetables, i didn't. I liked fruits and i liked sugar.


My first diet
-No white processed sugar (AT ALL)
-Anything that had more than 3% sugar on the label was banned
-Whole grain pastas and breads were IN, but only 3 times a week.
-Lots of vegetables! If i wouldn't eat them, i juiced them.
- No white potatoes. Sweet Potatoes were a fine substitute.
-No fruit juices. Water and milk were fine for drinking. (along with my veg juice)
-Instead of focusing on a daily diet, i meal planned by week to make sure i was getting the foods i needed on a weekly basis (your body works SO much better on weekly planning than by day)
-my last rule: if i went to a party i was allowed 1 slice of any kind of desert i wanted. ANY KIND!

By the end of my first month i'd dropped 5kg (or about 10 pounds). My body and I had set out at a breakneck speed. I was flying high. little did i know this speed and ease wasn't going to last forever.

getting started

With the revelation that my body was not working correctly, i took it as my personal mission to read everything i could get my hands on about how to beat Insulin Resistance. I knew that i would need to lose weight or else risk it developing into Diabetes. Diabetes runs strong in my family and as far as i was concerned, it IS the dark side. I made up my mind from the first moment i got the news, that i was not going to turn to the DARK SIDE.


I read every article i could find on the web about diet and nutrition.. I read books, i watch documentaries, i researched every facet of information i could find. I even picked up  health textbooks from the library and read those. In the end i was left with one conclusion, No one had the answers i was looking for. And why didn't all this information have the keys to making me whole? Well, there was multiple reasons.

1. The nutrition profession hasn't been around for all that long. The first vitamin was discovered in the late 1800s and we didn't start figuring out what these vitamins really do until the 1900s. This means, while astrology, math, and biology have been being studying for hundreds even thousands of years, how we thrive off of what we eat hasn't rated a real study until someone could start making money off it.

2. There are lots of books on diets out there. Most of them have at least *some* truth in them. Wading through all their research is hard and often not worth doing because the research they are basing their diet on, was funded by a company who had a stake in the results coming out a certain way. Thus, their research is biased and thus, can not be fully trusted as totally scientific.

3. With all the different diet books and health research, there is a growing amount of conflicting information. It is really difficult to figure out who to believe.

In the end i decided to piece together things that i found motivational for me, and were particularly helpful in helping me to get healthy. This doesn't mean it will be a miracle cure for you. It is simply meant as a place to start getting physically and emotionally healthy.

where the passion started

I am a smart woman. I don't need to qualify that statement to make it true. You will just have to take my word for it and decide for yourself if my 'smarts' are worth your time.



Growing up, EVERY adult woman i knew felt they were too fat. Half of them were on diets, the other quarter had given up (seemingly) and the last quarter were constantly exercising to force their body down to some magic size of 'thin'. But i didn't know anyone (adult women) who believed themselves thin. As i hit my teenage years, I would hear these women talk about how much they needed to loose here or there. Still, no one ever seemed to hit the magic size. I assumed they were all wanting to be the same size as the models and actresses i saw in magazines and tv...but that was all fake...i knew, because you could practically smell the plastic through the tv screen.

I was reasonably well read, so i had an idea of what it would take to be cast in a movie. I was also well read enough to know that the incident rate of anorexic death in the entertainment industry was enormously high compared to my little community.

So thus was birthed my conclusion. I'M HAPPY WITH MY SIZE. This was first thought when i was around 16 and wearing size 12. I was not a skinny mini, but i decided i didn't need to be.

As i got older, my conclusion grew into a belief. I saw how hard everyone worked to reach a 'prefect' size and it seemed that very few were reaching it, and the few who did, didn't seem particularly happy to be there.

So i continued to just be happy with who i was and not worry about my body shape.

When i turned 30 (wearing a size 18), the doctor diagnosed me with Insulin Resistance. Suddenly i was questioning my belief.