This is probably the main point of this blog – to encourage keeping the effort up by forcing me to publish the results! Back at school, we were always told to write up experiments as ‘Method’, ‘Results’ and ‘Conclusion’, so here we go for January 2023.
Method
- Switched diet at home to plant-based, following the ‘Daily Dozen’ principles in How Not To Die
- Allowed myself freedom to eat/drink anything when out (although tried to stay sensible)
- Aimed for daily exercise of 9000–10000 steps walking or 45 mins on static bike
- Weighed myself daily to get an indication of the impact of individual events
Results
- Mood: I’d say good. Some diets have made me miserable. This certainly has not.
- Hunger: No issues at any point.
- Energy: Again, I’d say good. Minor daytime tiredness issues haven’t improved, but that was always more likely to be a result of poor nighttime sleeping, which is a separate issue.
- Weight: Loss of exactly 2.0kg.
- Daily Dozen: Not bad. Room for improvement? Let’s say, finding its feet.
Conclusion
I’m most pleased to have found the cookery to be interesting, and the diet itself to have been both enjoyable and satisfying. The weight loss is decent, but it’s from a high mark (post-Christmas), so it may not be the best month to judge if it’s sustainable. However, weighing myself daily showed what a disaster that a night out drinking, or a couple of days away on a ‘normal’ diet, can be. A 2–3 day trip which involved poor eating and an overindulgence of beer drinking took over a week to recover from, in terms of weight gain/loss. It’s pretty clear when that was on the chart above! But overall, results were good, so I’m not beating myself up about that. I’m not going to become a teetotal hermit. There may be a compromise; let’s see how February goes.