Guest Post: How My Diet Helped Me Loose 100 lbs

Chris's story is very inspiring.  He made the decision to take control of his life and eating habits and received a fantastic result.  Below is his story.  Please note he is not a dietitian or nutritionist. His diet plan is what worked for him.  If you would like to learn about nutrition, please contact Nic's Nutrition for guidance and advice.


That’s me over there, the charming chap in the glasses with the rubbish, half-hearted beard.  I’m a little tiny bit overweight according to the BMI scale (like a pound or two), but I’m not too concerned about that.

Why? Well, about a year ago, I was more than a hundred pounds heavier than I am now. That’s the weight of a child, or a really big dog.

People ask me how I feel, and I say to them: imagine carrying a really big dog around with you, then putting it down. How good would you feel afterwards? Pretty good, I’d guess. Well, that’s how I feel – and I’m going to share how I did it with you.

My old diet wasn’t great, I’ll admit that. I’m a life insurance writer by day, and have spent years working in the industry telling people how to reduce their life insurance quotes by losing weight, getting healthy and the like… so I thought it was time I followed my own advice and did it.

First off, I decided that all the fatty, additive packed things that made up an upsetting amount of my diet simply had to go. Pringles (1000 calories a tube!), takeaways and fatty fried food all went out the window, and I completely re-wrote my diet into something not hugely dissimilar to Paleo diets you might have heard of (But not deliberately, I’d never even heard of Paleo before I started my diet!).

Basically, my diet consisted mainly of fruit, veg, and lean meat, combined with Fibre and calcium rich foods (my usual choice was Ryvita with diet cheese triangles (the only processed, non-natural things I ate); and I did this for quite a long time.

A standard day might look something like this:

Breakfast:

Fruit: Apples, Banana, Grapes, Pineapple… Whatever I fancy, pretty much. The sugar helps to get you up and going, and your body can process them really efficiently, meaning that while it’ll keep you going until lunchtime, when lunchtime rolls around, you’re ready.

Lunch:

A jacket potato with salad. I usually go for lettuce, peppers, sweetcorn, onion, carrot and cucumber, but there’s nothing stopping you from chopping and changing things if you prefer other things in yours. This is usually accompanied with a little sweet chilli sauce, just to stop the whole thing getting too dry.

Dinner:

Go crazy. Grilled meat, piled with veg, accompanied with rice or pasta. Make your own sauces from chopped tomato and stock, or season tuna steaks and grill them. With the tiniest forethought you can make incredible meals that everyone in the family will love – making a Bolognese or something from scratch (and I don’t mean emptying a jar into a pan) is a great experience and a great skill to have – believe me, I was no cook before my diet, now I wouldn’t give it up for the world – and I’m 100lbs lighter to boot!

Chris Spann works in the Marketing Department at Moneysupermarket.com.