The 7-Day GL Diet: Glycaemic Loading for Easy Weight Loss

Fast and GL-friendly is Tina’s mantra!

The Seven-day Veggie Friendly Plan

This pretty much does what it says! Vegetarians are so often forgotten about when it comes to weight-loss plans, but not here. We have a mixture of quick, tasty recipes and one or two that take a little more time. The most important thing is that they taste fantastic – no more ‘vegetarian lasagne’ every night for you. Our recipes use clever ingredients, imagination and lots of variety to keep you nutritionally balanced and happy with fabulously indulgent food that’s good for you and your waistline.

The Seven-day Foodie Friendly Plan

This is for the keen cooks amongst us. Deborah is a fantastically experimental cook who thinks nothing of starting preparation for a dinner party three days before anyone arrives – she’s our domestic GL goddess.

Although you might not have quite as much passion as Deborah for cooking, this plan was designed for people who enjoy winding down at the end of the day by taking a little time to prepare dinner. The recipes aren’t complicated but don’t rely on convenience and time-saving tips. While they are all delicious, don’t be fooled into thinking they must also be full of calories and luxury ingredients. We’ve kept a beady eye on our Deborah and have made sure these recipes will achieve the same weight-loss results as the other two plans.

Just in case you are wondering, I fall somewhere between Tina and Deborah when it comes to being bothered to cook – and would be the perfect example of someone who would mix and match from one plan to another throughout the week.

Activities!

OK, you know which plan you want to follow, or how you are going to combine the plans to suit your routine, so what else do you need? Ah yes, an activity plan. Don’t panic – this is going to be so easy but we do think it’s a really important part of your success.

If we asked whether you were prepared to find 30 minutes a day to get to your goals, what would you say? Just 30 minutes or 1800 seconds every day will do so much to move you towards your goals:

It will encourage your body to make new lean muscle tissue – that means your metabolic rate will speed up and you’ll burn more calories even when you are asleep.

It will exercise your heart muscle and improve your overall health and wellbeing.

It will help you tone up as well as lose fat.

It will improve your quality of sleep.

It will help relieve stress and tension.

It will improve your overall physical and emotional fitness.

It will increase your results and make them even easier to maintain.

Every Second Counts! The 1800-second Challenge

Here’s the challenge to get you moving about more and shedding those excess pounds. All we want you to do over the next seven days is find either one block of 30 minutes (1800 seconds), two blocks of 15 minutes (900 seconds) or three blocks of 10 minutes (600 seconds), and when you’ve got them we want you to walk for Diet Freedom. That’s it! It’s as simple as that – chuck on your trainers and start walking. Every step you take will lead towards your own personal Diet Freedom, and you will start to feel the benefits we’ve talked about very quickly. Your body will soon notice you’re asking it to do more than usual if you are doing this every day, and that’s when the changes will start to happen.

We find the best way to fit in those 30 minutes is to look at your routine and see where you could walk instead of drive or take the bus, or just take some of the time wasted sitting down watching television when you could be out and about.

Could you?

Walk to work, or part of the way?

Walk the kids to school?

Cancel the papers and go and collect them yourself?

Get out of the office at lunchtime?

Take a walk when you get in from work?

Get the kids away from the television or computer and walk with them?

Walk the dog or someone else’s dog?

The choices are endless. You might find it useful to have a couple of circuits in mind which will take you 10, 15 or 30 minutes, then you don’t need to worry about where you are going to walk. Make sure you feel safe walking your circuits, and if you are worried about becoming more active check with your doctor first.

If you already go to the gym, take an exercise class, swim or whatever, that’s great. But we want these 1800 seconds a day to be on top of what you already do.

Do this for the next seven days, then write a list of all the good things about getting more active – the pros. After that write another list of all the not-so-good things about getting more active – the cons. Which outweighs the other? We challenge you to come up with more cons than pros. If you do find some cons about your activity plan, look at each one in isolation and see if you can come up with a way to make it a good thing or a pro. Here’s an example:

Pros and Cons of Getting Active for Seven Days

How Do I Know if I’m Walking Hard Enough?

That’s an easy one. The ‘talk test’ is a really simple way of judging whether you are walking fast and hard enough. While you are walking, start talking (even to yourself!). Yes, people may stare but that’s their problem. If you can talk away as normal you can probably go faster or include more of an incline on your circuit. If you can still talk but need to catch your breath you are spot on and can keep going. If you can’t talk, have turned purple and keeled over, you are probably trying too hard.

Seriously, don’t go mad. Start gradually and build up to a level that just gets you feeling a little warmer and increases your breathing rate. At some point that level will feel quite normal and will require little or no effort. That’s the time to see if you can go faster, harder or longer.

So what’s stopping you? Rise to the Diet Freedom walk challenge – we know you can do it!

Now you’ve got everything you need to get started: you know how the diet works, you know how to make the 7-day plans work for you a week at a time, and you’re ready to start walking towards Diet Freedom – congratulations! Of course you have already taken the most positive step of all by starting to read this book – so well done!

We’d love to know how well you’re doing, so please do log on to the forums on our website and let us know.

PART II WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON? (#ulink_70d6df78-5e06-59ba-8096-ea665da72176)

There’s a lot more to permanent weight control than just knowing what to eat. In this section we address getting your head in the right place to get started and KOKO – that’s keeping on keeping on once you’ve reached your goals. We also challenge you to find 1800 seconds a day to change your life forever …

You’ll find:

How to prepare your mind for the 7-day GL diet

How to set goals, achieve them and keep on keeping on – KOKO

How to get active – don’t panic! It’s easy!

“Finding Nigel Denby’s GL diet book in a tiny village bookstore was my happiest ever accident. At 55, I’d just started GI dieting after failing on two of the main ‘group-attendance’, point-counting UK diets. I wanted the dieting Holy Grail, enjoyable as well as easy to understand, without counting or crazy nutritional principles. In GL I found my freedom, as if a burden had fallen off my back.

Armed with Nigel’s clear explanation of nutritional principles and a few recommended new habits, I took baby steps in healthy eating rather than dieting, helped by the recipes and by learning from experience. I started to lose weight gradually and feel much better. I found the message-board on the website very supportive. The research team were responsive to my queries and uncertainties, and the shared wisdom, support and experience of many ex-dieters, now Diet Freedom Fighters, was invaluable. To us, the future is GL – a healthy, enjoyable way of life and weight management, easily shared with family and friends – rather than glum solo dieting.”

Marie M from Cambridge

Chapter 3 IT’S ALL IN THE MIND (#ulink_8ec962a5-3639-5ff5-9c72-ae21b9c91315)

Why do diets fail? Well, we’ve all been there. We’re all fired up and ready to go. It’s Monday morning, another weekend of overindulgence behind us, and it’s D-day – we’re about to start the diet!

Later that week, or even that day, things start to get a bit dodgy. Perhaps work is stressful, the kids are playing up, you’re tired, hungry, disorganized or a multitude of other reasons and it’s all too easy to decide the diet is just too hard or too much hassle. It then slips by the wayside, leaving us feeling lousy, disappointed, guilty and like a failure.