What I've learned so far

Last night I lay in bed having a read of the Dukan Diet book. I managed to get through all the conceptual information and found it a refreshing read.

Dukan (a French doctor) talks about how obese people (yep, that's me!) can never have lifelong success of plans like Slimming World and Weight Watchers, as us fatties need to have a permanent structure in place re our eating. There's a reason we got fat in the first place after all... eating too much! Lose the weight following a structure, abandon the structure and return to old habits. Do it too many times and you become "immune" to diets. This is me!

The doc started the diet plan by accident it seems, but has since fine tuned it to a 4 phase diet. In simplistic terms:

Phase 1 - the attack phase. This is your "wow I can really lose weight" phase, it's super strict (am yet to read how strict and what's fully involved, but in a nutshell is eating as close to pure protiens only). This phase is the motivating phase we all look for when starting a diet and can be from 1 day to 10 days depending on how much you have to lose really.

Phase 2 - the cruise phase. This is where you start to add vegetables into the plan and you alternate between a pure protien day and a protien and veg day. You do this for as long as it takes to lose the weight.

Phase 3 - consolidation phase. This is where you return to "normal" eating following a set plan of introduction and is designed to slowly get your body used to all the foods again after being purged of them. Dukan says that it is this phase were other diets fail, your body is hell bent on revenge for the purging so stores everything you put into it - hence the weight gain! Makes sense, no?

Phase 4 -  stabalisation phase. This is the rest of your life! The only rule that applies that is one day a week, on the same day every week, you have a protien only day. By all accounts it allows you to eat what you want and resets the clock.

If you want to find out how long your phases would be have a look here http://www.dukandiet.co.uk/

My phases, unsurprisingly are long ones - goes with the territory of "morbidly obese" it would seem.

I will add my chart on the day I start, as it changes dependent on the day you start. Once Lydia is at her friend's tonight and the boy is in bed, I will be reading much more and will share what I find. It's all a learning curve! Oh, and if anyone fancies a go I got my book off ebay, but you can also buy from Amazon for about the same price.