I LOST 77kg IN 7 MONTHS ON MY LOW CARB DIET

THIS IS HOW I DID IT:

My name is Deon van der Merwe. On December 3 rd 2007 I weighed 169,2 kg. I am 1,86m tall which means my body mass index was 48,91% ( that classified me as morbidly obese).
I had reached a stage where my weight was literally killing me.
I had almost every health problem you could think of:

- I had heart palpitations on a daily basis
- I had headaches almost every day
- I suffered from severe back pain.
- I had difficulty even getting out of bed every day and had to roll out of bed because
  I couldn't sit straight up.
- I would be gasping for breath just by climbing a single set of stairs.
- I was the most unfit I had ever been in my life and my work had started to suffer because  of this.
- I suffered from sinus problems and always had phlegm in my throat.
- I had difficulty sleeping and would often wake up tired.
- I suffered from high blood pressure and all the accompanying side effects.
- In short if I didn't make a drastic change soon I would not have many more years to live.

Over the years I had been on every type of diet imaginable. I drank every kind of tablet to suppress your appetite, block fat, block starch, etc. I tried low fat diet shakes, diet bars, etc. The only thing these diets ended up reducing was my bank balance as none of them worked for me. I also went on diets recommended by dieticians (i.e. low fat) but the weight loss was so slow, the food so unpalatable and the portions of particularly meat so small that I just couldn't stay on them. I also bought numerous books on the latest diet fads like low GI for example, but again I had the same results. Then in 2005 I heard about the Atkins diet and decided to buy the book. I was very sceptical to start off with because like most people I had been led to believe that fat was bad for you and you should eat less of it and carbs was good for you and would help you to lose weight. I weighed 139 kg when I started the Atkins diet and ended up losing 25 kg over a period of 5 months. Unfortunately I then went back to my old way of eating as I was not convinced at the time about the safety of the Atkins diet as there was a lot of doctors and scientists saying it was dangerous. Unfortunately I believed everything they said without question. I now know that everything they said about the Atkins diet was in fact not true and most of the latest studies have proven that Atkins was in fact correct.

When I decided to go on my diet in Dec 2007, I again decided to go on a low carb diet, but my own version of it. I told the rest of my family what I was planning to do and since all of them was also overweight I asked them if they would like to join me. They all agreed and we decided to turn it into a competition to see who could lose the highest percentage of body weight over a 7 month period ( the winner would get R5000).

Well the rest as they say is history. I ended up losing 77 kg over 7 months which meant I lost 45.45% of my body weight and yes I did win the competition. As for the rest of the family Shirley lost 40,7 kg, Giel lost 38,8 kg, Ria lost 23.2 kg and Millie lost 6,1 kg.
That means as a family of 5 we lost a total of 185,8 kg over a period of 7 months.

It is difficult to explain just how much this has changed my life and that of my family. I have never been as healthy or fit as I am right now. I walk between 7 and 10 kilometres every morning. I have none of the health problems I had before. I have continued to follow a low carb eating plan although not as strict as it was during the 7 month dieting phase. This means I now eat almost everything I used to eat before but I do limit certain carbs to small portions. It has now been 12 months since I went on the diet and I have managed to maintain my weight around the 90 kg mark.

I decided to set up this website to inform people about low carb eating. Hopefully more people will be able to experience the benefits of a low carb diet as I and my family have done. I believe this is the perfect diet for South Africans because we love our meat. The latest research have proven that a low carb diet is not only safer that a high carb diet but is also almost twice as effective.