DeepLake Diet - The actual diet
Note: before starting any programme of weight-loss, please consult your doctor or other
health care professional.
Forget Atkins™, forget the South Beach Diet. Forget wasting money (and more importantly, wasting
your time!) to go to 'Weight Watchers' every week. The real diet is here now and can really help you
lose weight. There are no gimmicks, no "too good to be true" claims - just a way that will really help
you lose weight and you don't have to do any extra exercise.
Let's start by getting back to basics. Men and women have a certain amount of
calories and fat (energy) that they are 'allowed' to eat in a day.
If you eat more than that, the
excess energy is turned into fat making you put on weight.
If you eat less than that, your body needs more energy
so it burns your spare fat and you lose weight as a result. It's that simple!
Here are the numbers to guide you:
| | Women | Men |
| Calories (kcal) | 2000 | 70g |
| Fat (g) | 2500 | 95g |
(If you're used to working in kilojoules, you can roughly convert from kcal to
kilojoules by multiplying by four.)
The main point of this diet is so simple: eat less than your requirement,
and you'll lose weight. It's worth just pausing and thinking about this for a minute
so that you realise just how simple it is!
Eating less isn't difficult. You don't have to miss out on your favourite food.
I followed this
diet for months and ate plenty of potato crisps and high sugar drinks.
You can really eat anything you want unless as you eat less than your requirement.
This diet isn't a super easy one. But there's no such thing as a super easy diet. If you want to
lose weight you'll really have to follow the diet quite carefully, but once you see the results
you won't have a problem with this.
So, we'll get started talking about the diet. Here's what you should be eating each day.
Breakfast
Cereal. I can't emphasise this enough. Cereal makes you feel fuller for longer, reducing the
temptation to eat unhealthy, high calorie and fat snacks (next time you feel tempted to buy
that double chocolate muffin on the way to work, just think that it could have 306 calories
and 15.7g fat, almost a quarter of a woman's daily fat allowance and over 15% of a man's
daily fat allowance!). I recommend one of the following cereal:
- Weetabix or own-brand equivalent (3 biscuits)
- Shredded Wheat or own-brand equivalent (2 or 3 biscuits)
- Kelloggs Fruit and Fibre cereal or own-brand equivalent (a small bowl)
- Nestle Shreddies or own-brand equivalent (a small bowl)
Have semi-skimmed milk with your cereal, and don't drown it in milk. Aim to use just enough milk to
make the cereal moist. Or wet the cereal fully but leave most of the milk. Don't have any fruit juice
or anything to drink with the meal except water. I recommend a British pint glass of water
(568 ml).
Morning snack
The first important point here is that you shouldn't eat this snack for at least 2 and a half hours after
your breakfast. So, if you have breakfast at 8:15 AM, you shouldn't have your morning snack until
10:45 AM at the earliest. The later you can hold on, the better. For your snack you should have one
of the following:
- a small chocolate biscuit (such as a two-finger Kit Kat)
- a small piece of fruit such as an apple, banana or pear
- a muesli bar (supermarket own brand), but check the nutritional information before buying as it
varies quite substantially. Look for ones which have no more than 100 kcal per bar and less than 5g fat.
Lunch
Aim to have your lunch around 1 PM, 1:15 PM or about 4.5 hours after breakfast.
This is where we find out another key aspect of the diet: 'bulking up' on vegetables. Vegetables like lettuce, peppers, cucumber, spring onions and so on are healthy but they're mostly water, so they don't have hardly
any calories. They do, however, make you feel full. So for lunch you should be having a salad. It's important to
emphasise that you can't have any salad dressing, mayonnaise or anything like that on this! Enjoy the vegetables for their own taste! If you really can't live without any salad dressing (though I challenge you to try without),
use some vinegar or fresh lemon. I recommend a small portion of salad. 'Small' means
fitting inside a 750 ml container, which is roughly equivalent to the size of plastic
carton that take-away Chinese food comes in (at least in the UK anyway). Here's what to put in your salad:
- lettuce (this should be the majority of your salad)
- peppers (half a pepper)
- cucumber (about 8 or 9 round slices cut about 3 or 4 mm thick)
- spring onions (to taste)
Here's the good news: of course I don't expect you to just eat salad for your lunch. You're also allowed a full
sugar 330 ml soft drink, a small (25-30g) packet of potato crisps, a piece of fruit and another snack like you had
in the morning. You see, this diet isn't that hard, is it?
Afternoon snack
Ok, so I just said that the diet isn't that hard. You might find this bit a little
harder though -- you really shouldn't have an afternoon snack.
I know this will be difficult at
first, but this is an important part of the diet. If you really can't help yourself go for just half a muesli bar.
Dinner
Aim to have your dinner around 6 PM or 6:30 PM.
Dinner is more complicated because there can be quite a lot of variation, and this is when using your own
initiative comes in. I can suggest a few set meals but you may not like them or you'll get bored with them. So
I'm going to give you some examples and will let you work out your own sensible dinner ideas from that. It's
important that you remember that you must always 'bulk up' on vegetables.
For some recipe ideas to give you an idea of what's acceptable and what isn't, please see our
recipe ideas.
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