As well as an incredibly unhealthy diet, I also smoked 20 a day from the age of 13. By the age of 38 I decided to quit smoking. I had just become a dad so I felt that I had to start acting more responsibly. That was in 2011 I have never touched a cigarette again.

During a routine consultation with our site Dr where I was living in Madagascar in 2016, he told me that even though my stats were good for my age (I was 42 at the time), at 104 kg I was overweight. My BMI put me pretty much on the obese category. Having been a very skinny kid and weighing about 55 kg when I got married in 1994, this was a bit of a wake up call. I always took the attitude of “it’s OK to have another take away, I just cycled “X” number of kms”. It was time to make some drastic changes. He gave me some tips such as ease off the takeaways, replace white grain for brown grain but not a lot more.

The Secret is…

Throughout all the books and research I carried out, there seemed to be one term which came up over and over again….eating healthily. You see, the reason that my weight loss journey was successful is because it is not a diet. It is a very simple approach to eating healthily and having a healthy lifestyle which involves being active.

The body has a balance point. By feeding it what it needs, it will find its sweet spot in time. The simplest term is: more calories consumed than burnt = weight gain. Less calories consumed than burnt = weight loss and yes, you guessed it, equal calories consumed to those burnt = weight maintenance.

This is a very, very crude and rough approach but in it’s basic form it is about right. The science behind it is relatively simple. When we consume food, it either is stored or used up as energy. We need some energy stored to survive and as reserves, but there is only so much the body can store and use. If we over store, we gain weight. This is an extremely simplified explanation of a much more complex process.