Diet week 2 – Food diary on the alli diet pills
This is an update to Diet week 1 – A little help from alli weight-loss pills.
I’ve reached the end of my 2nd week and managed to lose a further 2lbs. Not quite as much as I hoped for, but at least it’s still going down so I’m quite happy with that.
Food Diary
For the last two weeks of the diet I’ve been keeping a food diary. It’s certainly been helpful at the start of the diet whilst I’m getting used to the amount of calories and fat I’m allowed, but I’m not sure whether I’m going to stick with the hassle of maintaining it all the time.
I’ve created a PDF of the diary from the last 2 weeks.
I will publish the spreadsheet in next weeks update (I want to include some more food items first).
Fat and Calories
Keeping within the fat content is fairly easy, but effectively means that there is certain food items that I can not eat. I had to get down to the maximum fat intake immediately due to the risk of side-effects (more details of potential side-effects in my earlier alli diet post), but I’m still decreasing my calorie intake slowly so as not to be too much of a shock or to demoralize me due to feeling hungry.
Cheese has a very high fat content and even the half-fat cheese meant that the quantity allowed was incredibly small. It’s certainly given me an awareness of the fat content of cheese that I never really appreciated before.
Another of the food products that has been restricted is oily fish. Generally considered to be quite healthy the amount of fat means it difficult to eat much on this diet. I have managed to have some smoked salmon, but only in small quantities. It is of course okay to eat white fish and non-oily fish (depending upon how it is cooked).
Generally though most food products are still okay (although in small quantities) or there are low fat equivalents.
I haven’t logged everything into the food diary, but the ones I have no included have practically zero fat. This includes drinks (all diet / sugar free) and some fruit and vegetables that I’ve had but not listed. These could add up to 100 kcals as I do often have a small glass of fruit juice.
Five a Day
One thing is that before I started the diet I normally had at least 5 portions of fruit or vegetables. I have reduced this now as I have reduced the amount of food I’m eating, but I am still getting in between 3 and 5 portions a day (need to count fruit juice, max 1 portion, and the salad that I’m sometimes adding to sandwiches etc.).
I may still try and cut down some of my other treats and replace with some more fruit, but the treats are helping to keep me motivated at the moment.
Snacks / Treats
The alli diet allows for a snack of up to 3g of fat per day. I have been using it as an opportunity to have a treat of low fat chocolate bar or something else nice. This is helping me feel as though the diet is less of a chore. I’ve also been having low fat desserts with a lot of meals.
Ready Meals vs. Home Cooking
Although I have made some of my own meals I find that healthy eating / low fat ready meals are convenient and easy to keep track of the fat and calorie content.
The fresh ready-meals also taste a lot better than ones used to in the past and are far closer to the ingredients that you may use at home (with no hydrogenated fats etc.).
When making home made food then the ingredients have to be worked out weighed properly. Alternatively it’s possible to follow a recipe from a low fat cook book, such as The Alli Diet Plan book
I will be trying some more home cooked food in the forthcoming weeks.
Food labelling
Food labelling is now much easier as a lot of food includes a visual guide on the front of the pack. The one thing to check for is the portion size as sometimes it may only include a certain amount (eg. half a pack).
Another thing to be careful is in the labelling of fats. Most display the actual total fat (per portion) on the front, but weight-watchers food can either display the total fat or just the saturated fat. I find this can be confusing. I could understand this if it was all their items that were labelled with just saturated fat along with a diet programme that restricted saturated fat, but the way it stands at the moment is very confusion.
Eating out
It’s very hard when eating out to know the actual number of calories or the amount of fat in a meal; even when it is a healthy eating food it may contain cheese and even a salad could have an oily dressing.
I ordered BBQ chicken with jacket potato. I removed the skin from the chicken, but there was butter on the potato as well as in a pot (perhaps melted onto the jacket potato due to it’s proximity), and there was dressing on the side salad. Therefore I skipped taking alli for that one meal so as to avoid the risk of side-effects if I exceeded the maximum amount of fat.
More Information on my diet progress
- Alli diet – About alli weight-loss tablets
- Alli diet – Food diary
- Alli diet – Useful tools and websites to help with the alli diet
- Alli diet – Wii fit for weight-loss and getting fit
- Alli diet – Eating out on the alli diet
- Alli diet – Dieting whilst on holiday
- Alli diet – Dusting off my dancing shoes
- Alli diet – What is your BMI?
- Alli diet – buying Alli weight-loss pills from an on-line pharmacy
- Alli diet – How to avoid the Alli-oops!
- Alli diet – Food review, what tastes nice, what’s low in fat
- Diet and fitness – Coming off the Alli weight-loss tablets
- Diet and fitness – Wii Dance Hotest Party Hits 2
- Diet and fitness – Final review of 6 month diet – before and after photos, weight loss chart and summary
I’m tweeting my progress on my personal twitter account (@stewartwatkiss) or you can follow the @firstaidquiz tweets relating to first aid and health topics.
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