Week Two

This week, Professor Roy Taylor talks about eating well throughout the day, and takes us through those first few weeks of healthy eating...

Is breakfast really the most important meal of the day?

I think breakfast is a personal choice, there’s no magic to eating at a particular time of day. But the individual has to decide what’s appropriate for them to ensure they don’t eat in between meals.

So if people find that a breakfast is too small and they eat biscuits or a mid-morning snack, well that’s daft and they need to take a breakfast that will allow them confidently not to eat between meals. There’s no one size that fits all answer.

Tell me about this first stage of the diet – you lose quite a lot in the first month.

People are often anxious in the first month, worried about whether they’ll reach the finish line, but motivated by their initial weight loss.

My colleague Professor Ashley Adamson determined that Si and Dave were eating about 3500 calories a day and that an initial target should be to reduce this to around 1300-1500 calories a day. At that time, the first weight to be lost is the stores of glycogen in the liver and muscle.

And because this form of sugar storage is combined with water, people lose about a kilogram or two of weight as water. This phenomenon of water loss is in the first week.

After the first week, it comes almost exclusively from fat and sometimes people get a bit despondent, as it seems that their weight isn’t going down as fast as it was at first. But stick with it and you will achieve weight loss goals.

What is the best advice you could give others?

The only way for most people to lose weight is to decrease the amount eaten each day. Exercise is also important but many who are overweight are unable to exercise much.

Initially it’s about reducing the calorie intake, and when they are able to leap around like gazelles they can lean on that a little bit more.