Manic Mandies LighterLife

Introduction

It is very rare in the course of living that such a moment comes along, where by making a few changes you can alter the quality and character of every single day of the rest of your life - even the length of your life.

LighterLife is so much more than a weight loss programme. Yes, it's the start of a time in your life for you to lose weight, lots of weight, but it's also so much more.

LighterLife offers you the chance to recapture, maybe even find, the real you.

Decades of research and the experience built up with groups has enabled LighterLife to develop a programme that is practical, but also provides a level of support necessary to achieve and maintain weight loss.

Each LighterLife group will have up to 10 people. Contact with the counsellor and other group members is a vital part of the process of losing weight and keeping it off. Each week the counsellor weigh you and test your urine for ketones (more about those later) to ensure you are burning fat and drinking enough water. In the first week you'll also have your photo taken (it will be taken again 3 months later) and your bust, waist and hips will be measured. Some weeks there is a video to see and there is a series of booklets. They are designed to help you understand more about weight loss and help you look at the long term changes you need to make - both to lose your weight and keep it off in the long term.

People usually lose around 6lbs in the first week then about 3lbs a week after that. I actually lost over 8lbs in my first week and then the 3lbs for the next two weeks - making a stone in just 3 weeks! Each stone thereafter normally takes 4 weeks... so, you're looking at losing 3 stone in 3 months. Also, weight loss is GUARANTEED.

Many people have cravings or feel out of control around food, sometimes, this is a form of addiction. My addiction is (... no, was!) chocolate. This is most common with high carbohydrate foods including bread, biscuits, crisps, cakes and.... yes, chocolate. In the same way that some people have headaches and get cravings when they give up caffeine or nicotine, you may experience withdrawal symptoms when you start on LighterLife, but this does fade.

Did you know?

Our bodies get energy from 3 places, newly digested food, glycogen and fat.

Our body will use the fresh food first.
When that has all gone it will get food from the fridge (the glycogen)
When that has all gone it will get food from the freezer (the fat)

  1. In the first few days of a diet your body uses up all the food that has just been eaten.
  2. It then goes on to use up your glycogen. This is a carbohydrate formed from sugar stored in your liver and muscles. We have 1-2lbs of glycogen which holds about 4 times its weight in water. When all that has gone, you will have lost 5-10lbs.
  3. Once your glycogen stores have been used up your body uses stored body fat for energy.

Fat is full of calories - about 37,000 for every stone.

Fat takes a lot longer to burn up than food or glycogen. This is why the second half stone takes longer to lose.

Have you spent years losing half a stone and putting it back on again, sometimes in as little as a week? What you were doing was just using up and replacing you glycogen, hardly touching your fat stores. Hence the saying.... the first few pounds of a diet is purely water loss.