First couple of days of calorie-counting have gone just fine. I actually haven't found myself craving things anywhere near as much as I expected to coming off the Christmas binge — and I suspect at least some of that is down to making a few choices that might seem a bit counterintuitive when it comes to dieting. I guess it remains to be seen if they actually work.
One thing I did was deliberately swap out sugar-free Pepsi Max for full-sugar Pepsi. Now, they say that you shouldn't drink your calories, but I've actually felt… weirdly better after a couple of days of drinking these in moderation (and counting the calories) rather than just glugging through a bunch of sugar-free stuff each day. Ideally, I'd drink plenty of water — and I do intend to work on that — but I've suspected for a while that artificial sweeteners perhaps aren't the greatest thing for you, and that they perhaps don't entirely agree with me. Sugar isn't great for you either, of course — but if you have it in moderation and account for it in the rest of your diet it's arguably more "natural" than whatever the heck Aspartame really is.
One of the reasons I've done this is because I can often feel satisfied after a simple drink. I remember reading in a few places a while back that on many occasions where you think you're feeling "hungry", you're actually feeling thirsty. And if glugging a 140-calorie can of Pepsi means I don't scarf down 500 calories worth of cake or crisps, I call that an improvement.
We've also replaced our Nespresso machine with a Tassimo recently. Andie's wanted one of these for a while, so with some Christmas vouchers we finally picked one up, and it makes really nice coffees. Notably, because it uses some sort of "creamer pods" rather than requiring you to warm or froth milk manually, the amount of calories a Tassimo latte has is literally half what having one made with milk and a Nespresso pod is. And the Cadbury hot chocolate pods are both tasty and considerably less in calories than making "proper" hot chocolate, too. So those are all means of shaving off some calories, too.
On top of all that, we're going to try the odd meal replacement shake — not as a strict following of a meal replacement diet, but rather as another means of carefully controlling calories. Again, chugging a 200-calorie meal replacement shake is better than gorging on croissants — though the nice thing about doing things this way is that if I do fancy a croissant at some point, so long as I account for it in my daily countings, I can have one or two.
Anyway. Early days yet. We'll see how I feel in a week or two, but for now I'm feeling quite positive. Here's hoping it work in the long term!
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