Permanent weight loss or just short term? For permanent weight loss you should reckon at losing about 1 - 2lb/0.5 - 1kg a week tops. I've lost 16 kg since January by making a few small changes to my diet and increasing the amount of exercise I get. I do 2 sessions a week at Bad Company (the normal open training sessions we do on Wednesdays and Fridays) and when I have time go for a 4 - 8 mile bike ride on Sundays. My job involves mostly sitting at a desk so I have to get the exercise somewhere else. Foodwise, the rules I'm following are:

• No alcohol (except on special occasions; about twice a month max)


• No chocolate (so I had a massive chocolate high over Easter)
  
• No blocks of cheese. I'll buy grated cheese and stuff with cheese in, but no big blocks of cheddar or whatever


• No eating between meals (I'll have a cup of coffee (strong white, no sugar) or a glass of water instead)


• Nothing baked with pastry (eg pies, pasties, stuff en croute or cakes)

On a working day I'll have:

• Breakfast (at work): coffee and either a couple of biscuits or a cereal bar


• Lunch: sandwich, bag of crisps, can of drink (usually something like diet Coke)


• Dinner: a decent meal of some kind. Last night was southern fried chicken with peas & baked potatoes. On Thursday I had a steak and mushroom curry with homemade chapatties

At weekends I tend to get up later so I have toast, cereal and coffee as a brunch and then the same kind of dinner that I'd have during the week. I know the biggest things to watch out for with this are the amount of salt and sugar ("low fat" food often has loads of either) and making sure there's plenty of fruit and veg. It's easy enough to add some fresh mushrooms to pasta or stir in some sweetcorn into a curry.

There's no real secrets. It's just a reasonably healthy and balanced diet with plenty of exercise. The occasional lapse is OK as I'm planning on doing this for most of the year because I want to do my first (non interclub) fight in December. Chances is are this will probably be a permanent change to my eating habits. There's a lot of strange plans about (my particularly dislike is of something called "the Mayo Clinic Diet" which has nothing to do with the Mayo Clinic, as they say themselves) but all you have to do is make sure you get all the right nutrients and reduce the calories (but not too much that the body thinks it's starving and hangs on to it). I'm probably getting around 2000 calories a day which is what a lot of places recommend for controlled weight loss.