The Five Key Steps To Losing Weight

Yesterday, a lot of folk will have embarked on a diet in a desperate attempt to lose weight because they are simply fed up with carrying around their excess bulk, feeling unnecessarily tired, and having a very low self-esteem. Monday is the most popular day for starting a diet as it signifies the start of a fresh week and most of us have a pretty predictable work pattern and that helps us stock to our diet.

To be successful on any weight-loss campaign we need to understand that we have to cut down on the calories we eat and we need to step up the number of calories we spend. We can have very good intentions of eating more healthily and doing more exercise but when reality takes over, often we make some effort but not enough to give us the quick weight loss we need to spur us on to our ultimate goal.

So here are my top tips to keep you on track to quick results.

• To lose weight you need to stick to a reduced calorie diet and the easiest way to do that is to eat low fat foods which should contain significantly fewer calories that their high-fat equivalent. Check out the food labels and buy foods with 5% fat or less, and check out the calories per portion that you are going to eat. Cut right back on alcohol as alcohol just causes you to gain weight.



• Next, reduce your portion size. This is, in my opinion, the biggest reason why so many people are overweight. We are just getting used to eating too much. Find yourself a smaller plate and cereal bowl and cut back your portions. If you have a set of my Portion Pots, use them. (find them on our website www.rosemaryconley.com)



• Stop snacking between meals. That’s a tough one if you’re used to munching your way through a packet of crisps and a Mars bar every day but if you are serious about getting back into shape, then you do need to cut back on the high fat treats that do nothing for you except make you fat. If you feel really hungry mid-morning or mid-afternoon, have a small piece of fruit – just one!



• Exercise burns extra calories and any activity that uses your heart and lungs – in other words makes you out of breath – also burns fat. We need to do 20-30 minutes of aerobic exercise 3 – 5 times a week to be healthy, but while we are trying to lose weight, our exercise time is crucial. It will speed up your progress significantly. Also do some toning exercises which will strengthen your muscles and give you a better shape. (Try our diet and fitness classes as the exercises we teach in them will burn fat and tone you up- find out where your local Rosemary Conley Diet & Fitness classes are held here).



• Last, but by no means least, write down everything you eat and drink, every day. By doing so research has proven that you double your rate of progress. It just makes you more accountable than eating something and thinking ‘just one won’t hurt’ – but unfortunately, every little extra adds up.

Remember, we don’t become overweight overnight so be patient but when you do reach your goal, you will feel like a new person and every bit of effort will have been worth it.

Have a good day!

Today is an important day!

Every day we are alive is important and I am grateful for every one of them. But today I am writing the diet for my new book which will be published in January. I have already designed the meals, (breakfasts, lunches, dinners), and they have been calculated for calories and nutrition, but today I put them together into combinations so that dieters can open my book and see that on, say, Day 6 the meal suggestions are already decided.

Despite the fact that all of the meals are interchangeable, (i.e. You can choose any breakfast throughout the book if you don’t like the one I’ve suggested for any day), when I put the book together the suggested meal plan needs to look appetising, generous, easy to prepare and not requiring complicated ingredients. I need to remove every barrier imaginable to encourage the potential slimmer to buy the book and give the diet a try. The secret is in the detail. Those little treats that make you think, ‘that sounds nice and it’s easy’ can give you a feeling of optimism that you actually could stick to this one! When you buy a diet book, you are buying hope. It is my job to turn that hope into reality.

The key is to come up with meal combinations that are going to fill the dieter sufficiently at the end of each meal to get them through to the next one without reaching for the Mars bar. If I can do that, and the dieter can enjoy what they’ve eaten and not feel it was like diet food, the dieter will lose weight and they will feel it was easy. If they feel it was easy and they are able to stick to the diet for several weeks, hopefully it will re-train their appetite and taste buds away from high fat food and massive portions so that they can modify their lifestyle from then on and achieve long term success.

Our Chef, Dean Simpole-Clarke, has created some brand new recipes to be included and my Diet Trial concludes tomorrow. Around 50 wonderful folk have given their best effort to the diet, (they just had the lists of meals), and recommended exercise and they will provide a massive heap of hope and optimism to my readers of the book. They will prove beyond doubt that if you stick to the diet and exercise, it really, really works. They will provide very valuable motivation to anyone picking up that book or who attends our classes.

Whenever I write a new diet book, we adapt it for use in our Clubs. Every new member who joins Rosemary Conley Diet and Fitness Clubs receives a New Member’s Pack and in it they receive a set of Portion Pots as well as the diet. Portion control is key and our revolutionary Portion Pots have proved a massive hit in helping our members to lose more weight. Portion control when you are guessing is dangerous and can often lead to little or no weight loss if you not bothering to measure your portions before you put them on your plate. In clinical trials it was discovered that overweight folk under-estimate how much they eat by as much as a third whereas slim people were fairly accurate. And with regard to exercise, most of us over-estimate how much we do!

So, if you want to lose weight now and cannot wait until January for my new book, check out my Gi Hip and Thigh Diet and a set of our Portion Pots. Both are available from our website http://www.rosemaryconley.com/ or go along to one of our classes and get the diet and Portion Pots free when you join.

Losing weight is a choice.

The weight we are is a direct result of choices we have made: how much and what we eat, how active we are and whether or not we take regular exercise.

If we are going to lose weight we need to eat less than our body needs for a while so that the body uses some of its excesses (body fat) to make up the shortfall of calories that it needs to carry out its everyday functions. If we step up our activity levels as well as eat less, we lose weight faster and very easily, plus we tone up as we slim down.

Eating the way we have been doing is a habit. Maybe skipping breakfast, grabbing a high-fat snack mid-morning, buying a sandwich, packet of crisps and a high-sugar drink at lunchtime and then topping it off with a pie, pizza or paella for dinner accompanied by a few beers or half a bottle of wine every night, then perhaps eating a snack before bedtime or whilst watching television. ‘What’s wrong with that?’ you may ask and if you had been working on a building site all day and cycled ten miles home, you would probably be fine but most of us don’t lead hugely physical lives and eating more fat and more calories than our body needs, leads to our being overweight or obese.

Weight creeps up on us and you may be someone who never eats chocolate, crisps and who drinks alcohol only at weekends and you cannot understand why you are two stone overweight. The most likely culprit is portion sizes. Just eating too much of relatively healthy food.

The problem is that these days portion sizes have become ridiculously large, particularly in restaurants, and we are getting used to eating them. America is leading the way in over-sized portions resulting in over-sized people. Whenever I go to a restaurant where I know they serve very large portions, I always ask for a child’s portion. I don’t like waste and there’s a limit to how often I can embarrass the person I’m with by asking for a doggy bag for Waise (pronounced ‘visor’), our dog.

If you want to lose weight fast, go on one of my diets but if you just want to lose a bit of weight and trim down a bit, why not just make a few simple lifestyle changes?

• Cut your portion size down by 20%
• Cut your alcohol consumption by half
• Increase your activity levels and wear a pedometer.
  Try to do 10,000 steps a day .
• Cut right back on fatty foods
• Don’t snack between meals

Losing weight isn’t rocket science, it’s just common sense. Eat less and do more!

Check out our website for more information if you need some extra help. www.rosemaryconley.com

Getting The Balance Right

We spend a third of our time asleep, a third of our time at work and the remaining third to enjoy leisure pursuits as well as looking after our homes, families and ourselves. The trouble is that the only bit that is flexible is our own time as if we don’t keep the hours at work we get fired, and if we don’t sleep we get exhausted and can’t function. The consequence of this is that, if we’re not careful, we can end up with a really poor work/life balance.

Recently I met someone who takes one-and-a-half hours to travel each way to work. Three hours a day! She has a demanding job and by the time she gets home, she really doesn’t feel like exercising or even cooking a healthy meal. All her physical and mental energy has been exhausted and she has little time or energy left to actually enjoy her life, let alone look after her health, get fit and lose a bit of weight. Not surprisingly she relaxes with half a bottle of wine most evenings with the inevitable consequence of her weight just increasing.

Years ago I used to work 80 hours a week. Yes, I was younger, and my priorities were different but life has taught me that we really should have time to enjoy the flowers in the garden, spending quality time with our husband and family, walking the dog, chatting to friends. Having some space to ourselves too is also important, but we must have enough energy left to look after our health and that means doing some physical activity and eating properly.

It isn’t the cooking of the meals that’s the problem, it’s the deciding what we are going to eat. Having made decisions all day I don’t have enough emotional energy to decide on tonight’s meal so I always sit down at the beginning of the week and decide what the week’s menu is to be. Once the decisions have been made, shopping is organised accordingly and as I drive home I know exactly what is on the menu each evening.

Dieters who plan their weekly menus are much more successful than those who are haphazard in their eating. In my Gi Hip and Thigh Diet the menus are all planned, they are interchangeable if there’s anything you don’t fancy, and there’s even a shopping list for a week. See my website for details here. The diet works and you can lose 7lbs in 14 days on this diet – we have proved it with a trial or 35 volunteers who lost an average of 7.25 lbs in the first two weeks.

How is your work/life balance? What could YOU do to improve your life and make it healthier and happier? Would losing a few lbs and getting a bit fitter help. Think about it today.

Are Ready Meals Good For Us?

Yesterday I was invited to visit Saladworks – a company within the Samworth Brothers Group of companies here in Leicestershire. Samworth Brothers is a family company that have grown and developed over the last hundred years or so years to become the largest employer in Leicestershire with a workforce of some 5000 staff locally with a further 2000 employed in Cornwall. They have several factories that produce food for Marks and Spencer, Tesco, Waitrose, Morrisons and others.

Saladworks manufacture a variety of products and a group of us were guided around a couple of the factories. We all looked particularly attractive in our hairnets, white boots and overalls! We saw where the basic ingredients arrive, where they are stored, how the food is prepared and cooked, how pasta is made and measured, how every ingredient is carefully monitored so that if, at any stage – now or in the future - the product ingredients need to be back-checked, a full history of its journey is easily accessible. We watched as ready meals were carefully, and proudly, placed in containers with every component either weighed, counted or measured, to ensure the quantity tallies with the details on the pack – very important for dieters! – and the content composed consistently.

Millions of ready meals, gallons of sauces, tonnes of ingredients are prepared there. The organisation and logistical challenge of creating food of this magnitude is extraordinary. The whole operation is awesome. I was particularly impressed by the quality of the produce that was being manufactured. It was naturally healthy food that had been carefully prepared to make a delicious meal for us to select from our favourite supermarket or store. These were not just any ready meals, these were special.

But Samworth Brothers are not just about producing fine food, they have a very special ethos and they take a real pride in their workforce. Everyone we met, whether they were placing prawns on a paella or weighing out cooked rice, checking the seals on the finished product or washing down the machines, they were happy and you could just feel that they felt valued. There’s even a Samworth Academy which supports the staff by encouraging further education and training. The company believes in investing into their staff and it obviously works. Also, the staff organise charity activities together and raise hundreds of thousands of pounds for charity. As we all know, these kinds of activities build the relationship of any workforce.

Having happy staff is key to the success of any business and it is something that we hold very dear in our company too. If everybody is working together toward a common goal, we can all achieve tremendous success and make a real difference in a lot of peoples’ lives. Isn’t great when you can have fun doing it too?

The key to success

I was sad to hear that Susan Boyle had been admitted to a private clinic in London as she is suffering from stress and exhaustion. And I’m not a bit surprised. How anybody could cope with the expectation, pressure and extraordinary events resulting from Britain’s Got Talent over the last week is beyond me but for someone who normally lives alone with just her cat for company, it is a miracle she actually made it on to the stage on Saturday. Whether she won or not is, in my view, pretty irrelevant. She has a magnificent voice and she will be signed up – hopefully by Simon Cowell - and she will be hugely successful. I just hope someone will be around her to look after her.

Success was once described to me as having three parts. Firstly, it is about having a goal. Next, it’s having someone to share it with and lastly, that what you do makes a difference. Susan Boyle had a goal and she is on her way to becoming an international super-star. What she does makes a big difference to a lot of people. Her singing brings us a feel good factor – whether it be making the hairs stand up on the back of our neck – or even making us cry in a positive way! So Susan scores two out of the three. Having someone to share it all with – the ups and the downs – is where it could go horribly wrong. I so, so hope that her agent will appoint someone who can get alongside, support and value Susan for who she is . She is a vulnerable human being and she needs someone to treasure her and make her feel good about herself, and who’s on her side.

We all need that and after this glorious weekend perhaps we should all ask ourselves the same three questions. And to help you make those first steps towards your success you need to be in a good place with yourself and that starts with self-image, self-confidence and self-belief. Getting fitter and losing a few pounds is a good first step and there’s nothing like a Monday to start a new diet resolution. If you need help, check out our website and you’ll find plenty of people to support you and share your success.

Healthy school dinners

Healthy school dinners are in the news again and I think the government has to be very careful not to push children away from eating moderately healthy food by making the food too different to what they are used to eating. It took 20 years to get the great British public to reduce their smoking habits dramatically. Gently, gently is my philosophy for helping children to eat more healthily and I think we should increase the effort to encourage them to become much more active. It is kids’ inactivity that is the biggest cause of children’s obesity – not the food. We are working towards a programme for children which will be launched on 16th April. Watch this space!

Obesity danger rivals smoking

The report out today by a group of Oxford University experts, which warns that obesity is as hazardous to health as smoking, shortening life by a decade, just goes to reinforce the importance of controlling our weight, eating a healthier diet and taking regular exercise. By taking some relatively simple steps we can dramatically improve our weight and health. Visit my website, http://www.rosemaryconley.com for help and support.