Someone the other day was going on about the so-called ‘keto’ diet and just how marvellous it was.
It appears that, counter to anything I have ever believed, a person can load up on fatty foods and nevertheless lose weight!
This sounded like my kind of diet and I decided to do a little research.
Well, as you can imagine, it is not as straightforward as it sounds.
There are lots and lots of caveats.
It is not just about eating lots of fat but reducing the carbohydrate intake so drastically that it is almost negligible.
That means no baked potatoes or chips and I like those!
It means that any curry comes sans rice and Bolognese without the spaghetti! Oh heck!
I decided that it wasn’t for me, as even if I can live without a lot of carbohydrates, I like the occasional little chip or a sneaky biscuit – even a sinful piece of hot buttered toast.
But I wanted to lose a bit of weight.
Actually, I wanted to lose quite a bit of weight.
I won’t divulge too much, but enough to say that I wished to lose roughly 10 per cent of my overall mass.
I began by accident, if I am to tell the tale honestly.
I set myself a task to start work on building a pathway which would eventually run around our little farm in Portugal and began one bright sunny morning in early August.
I started early so as the avoid the sun in the middle of the day.
I never eat breakfast, so I had risen, had a cup of tea and began wheeling wheelbarrows full of gravel around and hacking at the earth to make the trail.
By about midday I was sweaty and rather tired.
A shower was in order. ‘She who must be obeyed’ had thoughtfully prepared a salad lunch, consisting of a ludicrously healthy mixture of green stuff and a boiled egg.
I wolfed this and sat back to relax. I awoke some two hours later, having enjoyed an unintentional siesta.
So, by about four in the afternoon I had been working physically for six hours, slept for two hours and had eaten very little, unless you include the absurdly healthy salad.
I had showered and was beginning to feel a little peckish and so I chopped up a banana with some yoghurt that I found in the fridge and slopped a bit of honey on top.
That filled me up and I didn’t feel like anything else all evening.
The next day was a copy of the first and the next, and the next.
After a week I realised that I had inadvertently been missing out my evening meal.
Now I love food and I could hardly credit that I hadn’t even missed it, but it was so.
I decided to continue the regime of hard work, healthy but minimal eating and the weight has fallen away.
Here I sit, a shadow of my former self. I am 90pc of the weight I was in early August and feel very well.
I have hardly had an evening meal in three months and I eat a ridiculous amount of yoghurt.
- Mike Gaunt is a former headmaster at St Christopher’s School, Bahrain – mikegaunt@gmail.com