07/08/2017
Check out Brendan O'Connor's journey of losing weight with us! Excerpt is taken from the article available at independent.ie:
"Enough is a concept I didn't understand
Brendan O'Connor
STARTING WEIGHT: 13st, 10lbs/87.3kgs
FINISHING WEIGHT: 12st, 7lbs/79.3kgs
So here are the basics again: The Taylor Made Diet is essentially as close as you can get to being Oprah Winfrey and have your own personal chef. Every two days all your food for the next two days is delivered. You eat nothing else. As I have pointed out this is crucial. It takes the choice out of it. You don't really have the opportunity to cheat. You just do what we all want to do underneath it all. You follow orders. All discretion is removed. Any need for free will or self-discipline is gone. You don't go shopping. You don't have to choose to be good every time you order lunch. You just eat what's in the bag.
The food in the bag is nice. There's variety so you don't get bored. There are various flavours and ethnicities. You don't feel like you are on a diet. You don't obsess about food and what you can't eat, which is the problem with most diets, the obsession with food and what you can't eat. That kind of thinking ultimately makes you eat the things you can't eat.
The diet is based around GL -Glycaemic Load, which is essentially the amount of a sugar spike you get out of various foods. Ultimately it is about sugar. When you become aware of sugar, and its various incarnations in white carbohydrates, you realise it is the great drug of our age. And the reason it is so successful is that it has that great quality shared by other evils like he**in and co***ne. The more you eat the more you want. It is a food that makes you hungry.
The other cornerstone of Ken's diet is portion size. We eat too much. We eat too much at all our meals. We eat when we are not hungry. We eat until we feel stuffed. It is presumably a Western malaise, a habit born of a world where we have too much.
So Ken's two big ideas are to re-educate our palate about sugar and to re-educate our bodies about portion size. Both of these things combine to teach us about something that I never quite understood the concept of before. Enough. Enough is a concept I have never been too good with. I think I understand a lot more about enough now.
I lost 17lb in the first six weeks. The seventh week I had four days off the diet and the eighth week, as I write, I am on holidays and thus I am gone completely off piste. The last two weeks have been the interesting part, because this is when real life has intervened.
I am in possibly the most dangerous place that I could be in for a person who does not understand enough. I am on holidays so my guard is down, and I can eat and drink as much as I want because I am in an all-inclusive resort. There is a giant row of various desserts at every meal I attend. There are chips everywhere. There are bars everywhere serving me all the drink I want.
Even at the beach, when I sit at the playground with the kids, there is a tap of beer and I can just keep helping myself, sitting on a beanbag in the sun in the early evening. There is even a patisserie opened all day, with all manner of cakes and tarts and sweets. There is ice cream everywhere, anytime I want it, for free.
And today, I will admit, was not a great day. I tasted a few desserts at lunch and dinner, convincing myself it was just to see what they are like. I was a bit too liberal with the beer tap at the playground this evening. I brought the kids to the patisserie for ice cream mid afternoon and had a coffee and a liberal helping of sweets. I had some chips with my dinner.
But the difference now is this. Firstly I haven't been doing it every day. And secondly I will right that tomorrow by having a better day. Because I understand now that you can have a cheat day as long as you make up for it the next day. Most days I've been here I have not had carbs with my meals. I have had meat and salad. That's easy when you're in the South and the lamb is delicious and the tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, leaves, olive oil and lemon juice are all like the ideal of themselves.
I have eaten no bread aside from the odd taste of flatbread. I feel no desire for it. Even when I do hit the patisserie or the huge long row of desserts I go for dark chocolate. I drink less and more consciously. I probably shouldn't drink beer but it's hot here and the beer is delicious. But I don't feel guilty. I savour the cold beers. I enjoy them consciously.
I am enjoying my holiday and I am enjoying the eating and drinking, but in loads of different little ways I have tailored my eating to cut out a load of unneccessary and pointless eating and drinking. I have what I enjoy now and I stop then. And I keep it balanced. I have not let myself go nuts for the week.
And when I come home I will do my last week of the Taylor Made Diet and I am confident I will lose whatever weight I put on this week.
After that there will be a profound change in the way I consume and what I consume. Ken Taylor has changed my life and my habits with his bags of food every two days. Now it is up to me to take those lessons back into real life and I really believe I will. Something has been reset in me. It only takes three weeks for a good habit to replace a bad one. Seven or eight weeks change habits and also cement the new ones.
And every year, from now on, before the summer, I will do four weeks on the Taylor Made Diet. It will cost me less than 500 quid. I will save a few hundred on shopping and all the other unnecessary crap I buy, and I will probably lose a half a stone.
But 500 quid is a small price to pay to lose half a stone painlessly. Think of how much you'll save in the long run with your health and everything else.
I am a convert. I am converted. In fact I am hopefully transformed. And if I go back to my old ways we will never mention this whole thing again.
taylormadediet.com
