Metabolic Balance diet: final results

So here we are, I’ve completed the first two phases of the Metabolic Balance diet: 2 days of mild detox and 14 days of a strict diet. 16 days, which I thought would be hell and which I wasn’t completely convinced would impact on my weight.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Let’s start at the… end (once in a while it won’t hurt). I wasn’t convinced I would lose a lot of weight because, frankly I don’t have much to lose. Before someone shoots me down, I didn't say I had the perfect body but that, looking at it objectively, in terms of health, I don’t need to lose weight. I’ve got plenty of wobbly bits, thank you very much, my body housed two children for 9 months, I ain’t 20 no more, and Vogue wouldn’t give me a second look. However my BMI at the start was 19.7, so hardly overweight (that’s between 25 and 29.9 in case you wondered). I wanted to do the diet to experience what it was like so that I could really help my clients when they go through it, I know what it feels like, I know the obstacles and I thought about the solutions.

I know the diet works, plenty of people have lost a lot of weight on it, especially in the first 2 weeks, but was it going to work for me too I wondered? Is it just something for those would are really overweight or could it also help those who have a few kilos to lose too? You know, those last few kilos that you just can’t shift despite your best efforts.

I’m sure you can see it coming by now: the answer is yes. Despite me being at the lower end of the BMI spectrum I lost weight.

Here are the stats for my second week:

Weight: -1.3kg (2.8lbs)

Waist: -1cm

Hips: -1cm

Thighs: -2cm

As I explained last time, 1.3kg in a good is pretty good going and what it’s interesting is that when I look at all the data from my scales you can see that this weight loss is fat loss. You can see that because my hydration level is the same and my muscle mass hasn’t changed. The only thing that has changed is my weight and my body fat percentage, which has dropped to a very low 15.9%. 

1.3kg of fat lost in a little more than 1 week without any exercise is astonishing!

Over all in 16 days this is what happened:

Weight: -2.5kg (5.5lbs) of fat

Waist: -5cm

Hips: -2cm

Thighs: -3cm

My metabolic rate is also higher than when I started, my visceral fat is at 1 (healthy range is up to 12), and as far as the scales are concerned, I’ve got the body of a 20 year old (woohoo!).

So, I’ve lost quite a bit of fat and my body has become better at burning fat, isn’t that amazing?!

The best bit is that it wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it was going to be; as I said, I was expecting hell for two weeks. Now, it was no picnic but certainly not hell either. At first, you have to get your head round everything and you do get a bit hungry but it really doesn’t last very long and to be honest it was a good think to feel hungry. Being hungry is good because it shows you that you can actually cope pretty well with hunger, hunger isn’t to be feared, you need to tame it in a way and realise there are different hunger levels. I think too often we eat at the first signs of being peckish for fear of getting too hungry later or because someone told us to eat little and often. How many times did you say “oh my, I’m starving!” when it got close to lunch time? You’re not starving, you’re body won’t let you starve, or at least there’s quite a bit of margin before that happens. You’re just a bit hungry and you can wait for lunch. Trust me, if you wait until you’re properly hungry, food will taste even better.

I’ve also learned that even my portion sizes are sometimes too big, it turns out I can cope quite well with a lot less food. I think that often we eat until we’re full up when really we need to stop when we’re no longer hungry.

Cutting out sugar altogether was also interesting, as you can imagine I’m not someone who has a lot of sugar in her diet but even cutting out natural sugars such as bananas and dates made a major difference to the balance of my hormones. I really ought to dedicate an entire post on this because it’s so relevant to my practice (most of my clients report being “addicted” to sweets and chocolate and never buying bread or they can’t stop eating it) and really so easily fixed. Job for next week: post on the addictive nature of sugar and how Metabolic Balance can help.

I need to stop for today because I’ve started to ramble and probably lose half of my audience (Dave, Kate and Stu – are you still here?), but just to sum up, this experience has been an eye opener and the benefits have been much greater than just weight loss: I’ve got more energy, I sleep better, my skin is brighter, my moods are much more even and I had no PMS whatsoever.

Happy Sunday everyone!

Metabolic Balance diet: days 15 &16

Sorry, I didn't blog yesterday. It was partly because nothing really happened, it was just another easy day, and partly because I was busy doing stuff for the school Christmas fair.

Today is officially my last day of phase 2 and I have mixed feelings about stopping. Everyone stops phase 2 after 2 weeks and then people should move on to phases 3 and 4, much more relaxed phases, but the plan is for me to stop dieting after these two weeks, as this was an experiment, not really a weight loss effort.

What I was expecting was for those 16 days to be hell and then be relieved to be done so that I could eat more "normally". What I wasn't expecting was to feel so good; I mean, I feel much better than when I started and I don't really want to stop feeling great. Yet, I know I've lost weight, I can feel it, my trousers yesterday looked frankly ridiculous (I don't know exactly how much weight I've lost, I want to do the experiment properly to the end so I will weigh myself first thing tomorrow morning and report back), so I need to stop. I don't want to lose anymore weight but I want to keep feeling great so what I'm planning on doing is to keep applying the basic principles of Metabolic Balance in order to keep my insulin low but I'll increase the quantity of food and I'll reintroduce fat at every meal so as not to lose anymore weight.

Metabolic Balance isn't exclusively a weight loss programme, it's a hormone balancing programme so it's perfectly ok to do even though your goal is to put weight on. You will lose weight in the first 2 phases but if your aim is to put weight on, the plan can be adapted to your needs and after that you will put weight on in a healthy way.

I don't want to lose weight or put weight on so I will resume my habitual eating but embrace the metabolic balance philosophy.

I've been up since 5am for the 4th day in a row, I need to go to sleep I think... I'll report the sats tomorrow for those who are interested so stay tuned!

Metabolic Balance diet: day 14

I haven't got much to tell you about today, it all was again effortless, it's almost as if the few principles I have applied for the last couple of weeks have become second nature. I start getting hungry around 5 hours before a meal, I enjoy my food, I'm satisfied without being overly full and have no cravings whatsoever.

Well, actually that's not totally true. I'm not craving the usual things that most people crave i.e., carbs and especially sugar but the last few days I've been feeling like eating meat. This, for those who know very well, is quite odd. I used to be vegetarian (for ethical reasons) and that for about 15 years, and back then I would never have thought that I could crave meat, ever. We've all heard stories of die-hard vegetarians who suddenly start eating bloody steak but I would never have thought I could be one of them. Mind you, I'm no longer vegetarian since I eat poultry and fish but I don't eat any red meat or pork duck etc. It's not for nutritional reasons, simply because I can picture the piglets, calves, geese etc.

And yet, the last few days I've been drooling at the thought of fish and I've been thinking that I'd like to try meat, that I really would like to. And my head is totally confused over this, I can still see the cows but I couldn't help thinking that the mince I bought today would be rather nice with some caramelised onions, crunchy slivers of carrots and a bit of avocado all wrapped in a large lettuce parcel.

Now you're probably thinking that the diet has gone to my head and that the lack of food is getting to me. But you now what I think? I think that now that my hormones seem to be more in equilibrium (given how great I feel), my body is now tuning in and telling me what I need to eat, on a pure physiological level of course, my body couldn't care less about the piglets.

This is called physiological hunger and as bonkers as it may sound, it is actually a physiology cue that occurs through a genuine need of the body. Before we were told what to eat and not eat (by the media, food industry, nutritionists) we had to make a decision for ourselves in order to survive - we needed to decide. Some say that this is why humans don't tend to be attracted to bitter foods a signal of potential poison.

You probably have heard cases of pregnant women with pica who eat non-food substances such as chalk (to palliate to a calcium insufficiency). It’s also common for people who are really stressed and run down to crave salt, as the level of the hormone aldosterone drops. Aldosterone is normally in charge of re-absorbing salt from the urine back into the blood, low levels of aldosterone means lower than needed levels of salt in the blood, hence the salt craving trying to palliate to a shortage. 

I used to travel a lot with my former job in publishing and every October we’d go to Frankfurt for 5 days where breakfast was in a hotel, lunch a quick sandwich in between clients and dinner in a restaurant washed down with wine every night. Every year all I wanted on my return was simple green vegetables, water and very little coffee, it had all been too much for my body to take and now that the trip was over it was telling me to go back to simpler and cleaner foods. You might think that this has never happened to you and only a "certain type of people" can genuinely want to eat green vegetables but I would argue that with a bit of training we can all learn to listen to the basic needs of our body. You might also argue, how can the body know what it needs? Well the body is a carefully run machine and it is possible that it learns by a process of recognition that meat contains protein, that bananas contains potassium, kiwis vitamin C etc. After all how do animals manage?

My body seems to be pushing me towards protein as opposed to sugar and so I'm guessing that the ideal diet for me is one slightly higher in protein and lower in sugar - not necessarily carbs, I'm having a fair amount of carbs at the moment and I feel totally fine.

Now the question is: am I going to be able to eat meat?

Metabolic Balance diet: day 13

Another day today when everything seemed to fall into place, everything was effortless, almost like second nature. No cravings, no hunger pangs, tons of energy and a good night sleep.

It was in fact so seamless that I was surprised to discover that my period had started (sorry if it's too much information for you, this is pure physiology, turns out this happens to most women every month). I was amazed, as I didn't see it coming one bit.

I fall in the category of those women who don't suffer terribly from PMS and I'm convinced that this is largely due to my diet, as many years ago I did experience some of the telltale signs of being premenstrual such as: acne, tender breasts, tiredness, difficulty sleeping, digestive complaints (bloating, constipation, diarrhoea), headaches, backaches, appetite changes, food cravings, joint or muscle pain, difficulty concentrating, irritability, mood swings, anxiety and depression.

Alarmingly, most of my female clients report suffering from them all.

I don't really get those, apart from a bit of acne even though I never suffered from it in my teenage years (how unfair is that has been my thinking: wrinkles and acne?!), and being absolutely ravenous roughly a week before my period is due. I don't crave any food in particular, I'm not more interested than usual in sweet things but I'm noticeably more hungry than normal. It doesn't particularly worry me because I can make good food choices, because I'm not overweight and because my appetite regulates itself soon after my period has started but I've always suspected it was something to do with a degree of hormone imbalance.

Changes in hormone levels have been blamed to be the cause of PMS, as up to two weeks before the period starts the hormone oestrogen starts declining while progesterone rises. However, I think that this in itself isn't the cause of PMS, this hormonal change starts impacting on us when other hormones are out of whack and especially when insulin is out of whack, which I suspect is the case for 98% of the people I see (men and women). Our insulin levels are all over the place because we live off a processed diet that is way to high in refined carbohydrates and because we're constantly eating.

High carbohydrate, especially high sugar diet and constant snacking worsen PMS symptoms by increasing insulin levels, which messes circulating sex hormones.

The idea behind the Metabolic Balance programme is to balance out your hormones by lowering insulin levels, so it's no surprise really that this went completely unnoticed. More than simply having gone unnoticed, I chose to start the diet right at the time when my oestrogen was falling and progesterone rising and I didn't have a clue I had entered my premenstrual phase. I haven't been that hungry, I experienced no headaches, no mood swings, no digestive complaints, I slept really well and had tons of energy.

I was expecting weight loss but Im getting much more from this and I'm thrilled!