How to plan for that weight-loss programme

Do you know how much weight you want to lose? Is it achievable?

If not, let’s find out. Measure your height, weigh yourself and now use the healthy-weight-range table on the previous page as a guideline. This is only a guideline but very useful for getting you started.

Now that you know how much you want to lose, decide on the following: What worked in the past for you and what didn’t. If a high protein diet was effective, plan your meals accordingly. If you followed a weight-loss programme that worked, go back to it. Search high and low for those diet cookbooks that didn’t make it to the jumble sale.

When creating a meal planner, keep the following in mind:

• Make it easy by knowing what you are going to serve every day, create a weekly planner
  
• As Simon would say: “Keep it simple”
  
• Plan your meals around your family and don’t cook two different meals
  
• Go for the quick and easy meals. Those are normally the ones preferred by your family anyway
  
• Cook today and relax tomorrow. Cook a meal today that you can use tomorrow, for example a leg of lamb. Serve it as a roast today and tomorrow as cold meat with salads
  
• Make every meal count. You can do this by doubling and even tripling your ingredients and then refrigerate or freeze meals.
  
• Plan your shopping list and try to shop only once a week. By doing this you can avoid those aisles with all the temptations
  
• Stay away from pre-cooked and “diet” meals. They don’t taste like home cooking and they’re also darn expensive

I am not going to provide a meal planner as you will be following your own weight-loss programme and consequently need to plan specifically for it.