Four Years with Nutracheck

In the Autumn of 2013 I weighed 148.5kg (23st 5lbs), and that was when I joined Nutracheck. I had had enough of yo-yo dieting, and I wanted to lose a lot of weight and – this time – keep it off for good. This was all very ambitious! So now, after four years with Nutracheck, how am I doing?

I wanted to get into the healthy BMI range, with a BMI of 25. OK, it’s only just in the range, but sitting there with a BMI of 43.4, a BMI of 25 seemed like a distant dream, because it would need a loss of about 10 stone to get there. I’m not a believer in gimmicky lose-it-fast diets, so I decided to try for a pound and a half a week. There were some good times and some bad times, of course, but basically keeping it simple and sticking to the Nutracheck system worked well for me. It took 20 months to lose that weight, and that meant that I lost just over a pound and a half a week.

So two and a half years ago I hit my target weight of just over 13 stone. Then, as I never stop telling people, it came to the difficult bit! When I got to my target weight I was just approaching my 63rd birthday, and my huge weight loss was responsible for a terrific improvement in my health. I was very late in life to pile on such a lot pounds again (it’s never a great time to do that anyway!) and so I was even more determined to keep my new eating habits going, and keep my weight at a healthy level forever.

But maintaining is not easy. I’d achieved something very good, and it would have been easy to relax things and go back to how I had eaten before (and stop the exercise I had started to do). And even if you do stay focussed, there is not the same motivation as when you are losing – when you’re losing, people tell you how well you’ve done, and how good you’re looking. Once you have been maintaining for a time, that dries up and people forget what you used to be like, and people very rarely come up to you and excitedly tell you how brilliant it is that you’re just the same! So it’s tough, and because it’s tough so many dieters put all the weight back on again.

Still, so far, things are going well. In my two and a half years of maintenance, I have kept eating and exercising in the same sort of way as when I was losing weight, and I have set myself targets for various things (such as alcohol units) just to keep my nose to the grindstone. I continue to have the same amazing support from my wife Ann, and I am also very fortunate to have got to know someone else who lost a lot of weight with Nutracheck and who now wants to keep it off. The three of us support and encourage one another, which is extremely useful, as well as good fun!

Finally, I continue to use the Nutracheck diary. Not all the time, but whenever my weight drifts up for any reason, I go back to basics, fill in my diary, and make sure that my weight drifts back down to where it should be. And every time I fill in my diary it makes me reflect that if I hadn’t have come across Nutracheck, with their sensible and friendly service, I would probably still be dragging myself around tipping the scales at over 23 stone!