The first thing you have to do is make up your mind. You really have to want it. Remember, when you cheat, you only cheat yourself.

Calorie restriction works! Especially at the start and if you are metabolically healthy. However, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. Metabolically healthy means that you are not insulin resistant and do not suffer from pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes.

I knew nothing about nutrition. I only knew that I was overweight and my general practitioner's advice to avoid fatty foods kept resonating in my head. So I diligently stuffed myself with pasta, potatoes, and rice, only allowing myself a small piece of meat. For lunch, I would typically have about 600g of pasta, and then I wondered why the needle on the scale was moving in the wrong direction. Thank you, modern medicine!!

I studied mathematics, so I told myself that I simply had to calculate it somehow. If my daily intake is less than my expenditure, it must surely work.

The app on my mobile phone - calorie charts - helped me a lot. This app is unfortunately not available in english mutation but there are few alternatives. (MyFitnessPal, Calorie Counter by FatSecret,YAZIO Food & Calorie Counter, Nutrie,Caloreasy). It should:

1. makes it very easy to write down what you eat during the day
2. locate the food by scanning the barcode
3. even suggests not only your daily caloric intake, but also the composition of individual macronutrients after entering your personal data (height, weight, physical activity ...)

I also made one crucial decision - no sweetened drinks.

• essentially no sodas
• no fruit juices, neither real ones nor those made from a concentrate
• no sugar in tea or coffee

It wasn't based on any deep knowledge; I just intuitively suspected that drinking 2 liters of cola per day probably wasn't a good idea. Only later did I realize that it was indeed a wise decision. Sweetened beverages significantly contribute to making a person insulin resistant. They contain large amounts of added sugar, and it's not uncommon for them to be consumed in excess, especially when you're trying to quench your thirst on a hot day.

Please also try to avoid so-called 'zero sugar' drinks, even though that "zero sugar" label strongly suggests they're a healthy alternative. Nothing could be further from the truth. They use artificial sweeteners, such as aspartame, which is a neurotoxin and harmful to the gut microbiome. Despite containing no sugar, they still trigger insulin production—this is activated by the brain the moment it detects sweetness on your tongue, and the brain doesn't differentiate between the sweet taste of sugar and aspartame.

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