Mine has been a long journey with diets, weight loss, weight gain and more diets and I have finally found something I can really live with, and it came about after much research, trial and error, experimentation, failures and now success. Here I am, steadily losing weight at a reasonable pace. MOD – My Own Diet. I knew I would find it one day, and it totally appeals to me every single day. Everything I have read and experienced about healthy foods and different low carb diets, everything that has resonated with me has been included in my diet. Not all at once of course.

I have lost and found so many kilos on low carb because I could never stick to any one regime absolutely and there were always a whole new slew of special low carb recipes to learn when all I wanted was to eat some of my favourite dishes from a “normal” life (like real mashed potatoes instead of faux potatoes made with cauliflower!). So I would stop the diet and go back to my favourites, and that would cause more and more cravings and I would put on some serious kilos all over again.

My Own Diet involves a few basic ideas that work for me. First is intermittent fasting, and that is not every day mind you, probably most of the week with perhaps a day or two of Reward Meal breakfasts or brunches and lunches with friends. (Read about intermittent fasting in an earlier post on this blog.) The one thing that supports intermittent fasting and makes it possible is fat in the diet. That is the secret weapon – appetite suppressing fat. As I write, the spinach and garlic is cooking in coconut oil waiting for the cheese and eggs. It will be followed by Earl Grey tea with a touch of cream. This first meal is eaten close to 12 noon.

This meal will hold me until 3 or 4 pm when I will have some biltong (beef jerky) or a piece of roast chicken (with the skin). Or, if I am really feeling in the mood, I may make some almond flour pancakes. Often I am not that hungry, especially if I have eaten a protein and fat snack. Another good reason for having my first meal at around 12 noon is because of the Ayurvedic premise that the digestive fire, agni, is at its strongest. The evening meal is usually eaten between 6 and 7 and if I should feel at all peckish later, which is not often, a little more biltong does it.

My eating lifestyle is now never boring and I don’t feel deprived in the slightest. My first drink of the day is usually lemon juice and warm water with a touch of salt and later in the morning I have my favourite freshly ground mocha java with a little cream. Sometimes it is followed with a black coffee, and always throughout the day, water.  The first meal is anything done Banting style from the Real Meal Revolution, as well as Atkins and general low carb meals learned along the way. Through the years I have collected many a low carb recipe and I have no less than a zillion low carb books…OK, maybe 15 or so. And then there is my collection of other cookbooks which include many recipes that can be converted to low carb cooking, or eaten at the reward meal.

Low Carb Cookbooks Galore!

I am so excited. Why? Well, since one of my top passions is reading cookbooks, cooking and entertaining my friends and family with really yummy food, I can do so with whatever food I please within my reward meal hour, with no guilt. My husband is easy to please as long as I don’t give him too many vegetables. Meat and salad have become his way of eating of late and now he rarely eats bread and he has never been a great fan of rice either. It is easy living with him on this lifestyle. Of course I do try to hide an extra vegetable or two in somewhere, like in a soup.

For further explanation as regards my excitement, it is all about the best meal of the day for me. The Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet Reward Meal is the reason I think so many lose weight on that regime, and it would appear that 80% keep it off. What I have discovered is certainly exciting for me. If I eat a reward meal and do not go crazy with refined carbs, I continue to lose weight, 0.1 to 0.3 kg in a day. The ratio of the reward meal is protein, low carbs and starches in thirds. (Rule of thirds? Of course it doesn’t always work out like that, and that’s OK too. Yesterday, when out shopping, I had a reward meal lunch and that was a scone with jam, cheese and cream and some filter coffee with cream, (no thirds here) but then I kept the rest of the day’s food really low carb and quantities minimal as well. This morning the scale was .3 kg kinder to me.

So far I have lost 10.5 kg in seven and a half weeks which is extremely cool. The weight loss got stuck on 9 kilos for a while and then I started enjoying Reward Meals. The next 1.5 kilos loss happened in the course of this week while enjoying a daily hour of food and wine that I love. Needless to say, I choose fairly healthy reward meals and that is because I like the concept of alkaline food, vegetarian food now and then, but mostly I likw real food. Meat from animals that are reared ethically, raised and killed humanely, and natural food grown organically for my table. Of course it isn’t always perfect. Yesterday I looked at the mince from free range beef and it had in it fillers, unnamed vegetable oil, preservatives and soya that no-one can guarantee is not GMO. Why would one want to do that to healthy free range meat?

It may not always be easy to keep to a low carb lifestyle, but the reward meal has made it so much more alluring and do-able for me. It is eaten in the space of an hour so that the insulin release stays manageable. At least that is how I interpret it. Since I am pre-diabetic this is truly good news.

So what is my reward meal for today? A large green salad with a few baby tomatoes, strips of yellow pepper, shredded red cabbage and freshly picked snow peas with some feta cheese and a few raisins. This is dressed with extra virgin olive oil and verjuice. With this a free range medium rare rump steak served with a grainy mustard cream sauce. With that I will have one or two glasses of good red wine. As I have said before, this is eaten within an hour. An hour of food bliss.

That was bliss, even though I made the mistake of munching on some salad ingredients and salami before actually sitting down to dinner. The result is that I did not have time to finish the steak, the salad nor the second glass of wine. I stopped on the hour, determined to keep to the rule, but it taught me to hold back while cooking and wait to sit down when the entire meal is ready and then really enjoy the hour.

All that I have tried, learned, failed, tried again, all this has brought me to this point and now I really am excited!

Tonight’s Reward Meal

Steak and Salad with Creamy Mustard Sauce

Reward Meals Rock!!!…