If you follow @beautie on Twitter you can't have helped but have noticed that I've been Tweeting - sometimes a little deliriously - about Muller Rices a lot recently.
See, I've been dieting since around April and as someone who has had a lifelong battle with her weight (we skirmish, I push back, but crisps will always be my personal Waterloo) I am incredibly prone to putting on weight. Coupled with that, I have absolutely zero inclination to do any exercise and I am so busy that trying to shoehorn fitness in is just a no-can-do a lot of the time.
And as a veteran of the diet wars I know one thing for me personally: if I want to reduce my size, I quite simply have to significantly reduce what I eat. That means cutting way back on fats, upping my lean protein and watching carbs like a hawk. It is as simple as that. I'm no fan of fad diets and crazes and when I do decide to go hell for leather and get a few stone off, I cut down - waaaay down - and I (mostly) stick to it. That's what I'm doing now, and that's where the bauld Muller Rice come in.
I do not advocate diets where you eat two shakes or two bowls of cereal and then one meal - they're not sustainable. I am also not a fan of low-fat ready meals, spreads and products that are often packed to the gills with not very nice stuff. So what I do is I eat small portions of naturally lower fat food at meals - lunch is something like sushi or soup, one piece of wholewheat bread and fruit or carrots and a small pot of houmous, dinner is lean chicken or fish in marinade, a small potato and a whack of veg and then my brekkie is a Muller Rice and fruit.
With 205 calories in each pot and 2.5g of saturated fat, they're not as low-cal an option as an Activia for example, and I'm pretty sure there's sugar in there a dietitian would flail at, but what they do help with is to keep hunger pangs at bay quite successfully and I don't feel like crying, eating my arm off or chowing down on biscuits in the run up to lunch.
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Is Muller Rice the secret of this current diet's so-far modest success (I've lost about a stone)? Well - no, being disciplined and eating smaller amounts of the right things has been what's fought the flab. But Muller has helped. I think planning is incredibly key with dieting and being very busy is anathema to eating correctly. I have to force myself to plan meals at the moment and knowing what I'm having for breakfast each and every day has very much helped me structure the rest of the days food over the past 10 weeks or so.
I am kind of sick of them at this stage, though. Blugh.
Now, I should like to point out that I am no dieting expert. I know in theory all the right things to do - I'm not too amazing at taking my own advice most of the time. I am a size 16, heading for a 14 - that's my comfortable size, I've no aspirations to be a size zero, and I've about another two stone (at least) to go.
What about you - how do you diet successfully?
Edit: directly after writing this post, my boyfriend collected me, I begged, with tears in my eyes - due to strain of living off Muller Rice - and demanded to be driven directly to Eddie Rockets where I fine-dined on a classic with swiss and chipses. Sorry bitches, I think the strain was too much. Back on the wagon now!
