Exante: Tester Week

Hi all,

I feel like I've been writing nothing but a string of posts, saying how badly I'm going and how I'm planning to get back on track. So, yeah, this is unfortunately another one of those posts.

At the start of the year, I had 11lbs left to go to get to goal weight. For one week, I stuck to my wholefoods diet really well, only straying from it about twice. I started exercising more, though not as much as maybe I could have, and was determined to do well. I lost a pound that week, and I was disappointed that it wasn't more, but determined to keep going.

Then, cookies, pizza, chocolate and takeaway happened. The difficulty is, if those foods are around my house, I have very little self control. I live with my family, five adults in one house, so I don't have sole control over what food is sat in view. So then I eat it, enjoy it, feel terrible for doing it, and then do it all over again. It's a problem.

The other issue, is that on my good health days, I'm in charge of the cooking, but when I have my frequent bad days, it's harder to get a good meal. My parents both work, as does my sister, and my brother has been unwell himself recently. Making it hard to avoid going to the local takeaway.

So after week two of January fell into a pit of eating so badly, not just bad food but over calories, to the point that I'd log food into myfitnesspal until it showed me going over, then I'd just stop adding but not eating. I gained 3lbs on the scale today. I was gutted.

I knew something had to be done, and I thought what better way to get myself kick started again, than to have all my meals already planned out and made up. So I started looking into different diet companies, like DietChef and Exante.

I couldn't afford to go for DietChef, and I was drawn to Exante when I noticed they had a tester week for just £20. That gives you one weeks worth of breakfast, lunch and dinner. It's a VLCD plan, which I've never done before, and I am a little worried about dropping my calories so much. However, I am only going to do it for a week, starting tomorrow.

One thing I'll say from unboxing today, is that it's not what I was expecting. Maybe I should have looked a little deeper into it, but I didn't. I was expecting to have ready meal type food. Instead, it was pouches of dried food. Very small pouches. I'm a little concerned.

I'll be following the Exante plan for one week, eating three pouches of food a day, which I believe total about 700 calories. So lower than I've ever done before on a diet, with my lowest daily allowance usually set at 1,200.

I'm hoping that I'll lost around 3-5lbs this week, and I will be trying to add in as much exercise as I can. Which is proving hard at the moment, after injuring my ribs after a bad fall. So we'll see how that goes.

I'll post an update at the end of the week, letting you know what I thoughts of the products, how much weight I lost, and also my overall thoughts on the diet.