Hi and Welcome!

My name is Ian Smith, and I’d like to thank you for taking a look at this blog.

If you’re looking for another diet to try, this isn’t what this is about.

If however, you’re looking for a site that will help you reduce weight and keep it off, this is the site for you.  It’s designed to pass on the experiences I’ve had while reducing my  weight, and the techniques I’ve used to keep it off, for just over a year.  It isn’t really a diet, because they are temporary.  Its more a set of guidelines that will help you to build lifestyle changes that let you drop your weight in a healthy way.

It doesn’t contain a miracle cure. The guidelines I’m going to be showing you need discipline, but I’m confident that most people will be able to use them to achieve a healthy weight.  Neither is it to do with obscure food that’s difficult to find or expensive to buy.

They say that you should visualise your goals and that that makes them easier to work towards and achieve.  I had been overweight for 30 years, and following a visit to one of those wandering NHS Fitness Buses that park in city centres, my goal became centred around dropping my weight enough to get myself into a safer BMI.  I simply wasn’t aware of the risks of what I saw at the time as me being a little overweight.  Funny how you kid yourself isn’t?

I have to be honest and say that when I’d got closer to the weight I wanted it made me realise that half of the benefits this gave me hadn’t even been in my mind. (more on that later though).  What are your goals? How do you see losing weight helping you?

At the time, reading articles about Diabetes and heart disease, and its growing prevalence in the UK persuaded me I simply had to do something about my weight to  lower my risk factors.  I probably scared myself into action, but at the end of the day this was useful because it gave me a strong reason for maintaining a weight loss regime.

The problem I faced, as so many others must do, is that I’d tried a lot of different techniques for losing weight but had found that none of them worked, or at least not for me.  Sure I’d lose substantial weight when I started, but this would soon pile back on after a couple of weeks – yoyo dieting I think they call it.

I’d read in a British Heart Foundation guide that losing weight is simple.  The way that they explained it, it didn’t seem like Rocket Science – If you use more calories than you take in, you’ll lose weight.

Again, if you use more calories than you take in, you’ll lose weight.

Normally you have to wade through pages and pages of text to get to something useful in help pages, but here in this first part of the blog, you’ve just read a crucial bit of information you need to turn things around.

Knowing it and doing it are of course two completely different things, and there are a lot of things that I’ve learnt that help in applying it.  In the blog pages that follow, I hope that what starts off simply as a blog, will become, through your participation, something organic and truly helpful. My objective is to show you how you can apply this one simple fact to losing weight, the pitfalls you can avoid whilst doing so, how to recover if you ‘fall off the wagon’, and that you don’t need to diet for life.

By the way, there’s no tie in to weight loss products or an attractive looking E-book with ’all the information you need’ that only costs £x. There’s also no affiliate advertising littering the pages. This information is free and this is because I just want to share techniques that I’ve found have reduced my weight, improved my health and made life a lot easier. They also make life a lot easier for my car!

I don’t it has to be said, have fancy qualifications for handing out this advice.  It is purely methods I’ve found that work, after thirty years of being overweight and using methods that hadn’t.  (I managed to lose 3 and a half stone, or 49 pounds).

You’ll also have to excuse me if there isn’t a fancy banner, loads of imagery and the most fashionable fonts – I’m just starting out with WordPress, and for me, at least at the moment, its the content and not how its displayed, that counts.  Saying that I’d welcome your advice if have hints and tips you think would be helpful with the layout or content.

If nothing else has worked in your bid to lose weight, I am confident that the guidelines I’d like to show you, will.

If you know someone who this advice might help, perhaps you could share this blog with them?

Ok, if you’re on board or are interested enough to want to see where this is going, I have some homework for you to do.

It’s not a lot! You need your weight to establish a starting point.  Don’t worry – You won’t be telling others what it is – keep it to yourself and it will be used simply to determine a help plan a sensible weight loss schedule.  (Not having one of these is one reason even the best plans falter).  So, please find out your weight and come back in three days time for part 2.  (Tuesday the 31st of October at 8 pm).

I look forward to seeing you then and bye for now.

Ian.