Introduction

I had been seeing the scales gradually increasing and they reached a point where I decided that I had to lose weight, I didn't want to develop any health problems and I simply didn't like the way that my stomach was hiding my feet!

The problem I had was that there were far too many diets to choose from; I had no idea which would work for me. They all had very impressive claims such as "easy to follow", "eat what you like", "lose 20 lbs in 20 days" etc. etc. so I could not choose based on what they claim to do. Some of them just sounded wrong for me, I enjoy my food and so there was no way that I was going to eat "Cabbage soups" or other weird combinations of foods that I simply don't like eating. I did not want to have to keep charts, calculate points or examine food labels for content and calories etc. every time I wanted to eat something.

So even though there were plenty of diets around, there was nothing that I really connected with. I think that the main thing that seemed to be missing from virtually all of them was the reason behind the diet. I felt that I had to understand WHY the diet worked rather than just IF it worked. I felt that it was important to understand the diet because it would be having a major affect on my body (hopefully) and health and so I wanted to know exactly what was happening. I didn't want some unknown "expert" telling me that I should be eating X Calories a day, or that a carrot is "X" points and a steak is "Y" points. How can they know what MY body needs or how MY body processes different foods? After all, we may all be the same basic design but we are all (thankfully) unique.

I read through the details of the "best selling" diets and even though many of them tried to explain why they work, I still couldn't relate them to me personally. They tended to base things around the so-called "average" person; I want something that is based around me.

In addition to this I have yet to hear of a diet that works for everyone, if there was such as thing as the perfect diet, then why are there so many to choose from? How many times have you heard of diets that fail (or even failed for you), how many stories have you heard about amazing weight loss and then heard that the weight just comes back? So I had no confidence in any of the diets I found, so I realised that I would have to develop one myself.

One of the reasons that I wanted to develop a new diet was due to the huge volume of complicated, unsubstantiated, conflicting advice. Eat this, don't eat this, monitor your points, calories etc., the "low carb", "high carb", "low fat", "high fibre" diet and so on.

So I decided that the only option I had was to try to understand how the body works and how weight is gained and lost and use this as a basis for a new approach to dieting that uses common sense as its main principle. I wanted a diet that uses the amazing abilities that our bodies already have built in, so that it would be our body that controls our weight and not some "expert" telling us what is right for the "average" person.

I didn't set out to "tick all of the boxes" for what would be accepted as a good diet, I didn't want to fall into the trap that other diets have fallen into, by looking at marketing claims. I wanted a real diet first and I firmly believed that if the diet is based on what the body actually needs then it would automatically "tick all of the boxes" anyway.

So to build a diet like this I had to start with a clean sheet and not base it on anything I had seen or heard of before. That way I was able to build a diet that does not base itself on anybody's theories, I could concentrate on common sense and facts and therefore have people understand WHY and HOW it works and therefore adapt it to their own unique requirements. I wanted a diet that people could follow and feel that THEY control what is happening.