What to choose?

I was doing my preparation for the diet and of course plain yoghurt plays quite a part in the breakfast section. So off to the local supermarket to buy some, except there are lots of different ones all with varying amounts of sugar, fat and carbs. So which one?.

The calorie counters I’ve seen really just say things like plain yoghurt with no brand name and community sites like myfitnesspal don’t really present the data in a useable form.

I mentioned in a previous post that I work in IT so could I use my skills to get the data to make a choice? Well it turns out yes!. Tesco have what we call an API which means you can write programs around it to retrieve information, it stand for Application Programming Interface if you’re interested. So what I did is sign up to the service, write a program which retrieves details at a high level e.g. yoghurt. The API returns around 700 items some of which have sugar etc. against them, some don’t. I then took this data and cleaned it up so it could work in a spreadsheet (excel in my case but any spreadsheet application would work).

When the data comes back it has lots of products that don’t look to be yoghurt so I filtered the data to only show me things with yoghurt in the title. After this I sorted on sugar and a sample of the results is shown below.

My conclusion I should be using Onken Natural Set Yoghurt 500G, so off to Tesco to buy some. It’s ok not what I would choose normally, that would be a Muller. The one I would get normally is one of the items that doesn’t return the sugar contents so as an example I picked a Muller with some figures just to highlight the difference.

  If anyone can suggest an alternative I'd be gratefull

When I work out how to get comments etc if anyone would like a copy of the data I'm sure I can arrange it.

So, Michael Mosley is promising to reverse my diabetes, well not promising but is giving me some pretty good pointers for which I am very gratefull.

I decided to create a blog to capture my thoughts and feelings as I go through this process. I've also created a twitter account for more immediate thoughts. It's at @kevins8weekdiet

A bit about me:

I’m male, I live in the North West of England and I work in IT.

I’m just on 6ft tall and just under 20st , so according to my BMI I’m just obese not morbidly obese. I have been up to around 23 stones which I think would put me firmly into the morbid category. I’ve been type II from at least 2001, when I was first diagnosed. I come from a long line of diabetics on my Mother’s side and not ,as far as I know, from my Father’s side. 

My daily medication is 4 Metformin, 1 Aspirin, 3 Gliclazide, 1 Simvastatin ,1 Januvia and 1 Ramipril none of which seems to be doing me any good.

The suit I’m in today is a 52 inch chest and a 44 inch waist trousers and my shirt is 18.5 inch neck, so all in all I’m in a pretty bad state!

I’ve tried all kinds of diets but like the vast majority of people it doesn’t ever seem to work or really last.

The best diet I tried was the Weetabix diet where I got down to 15st and a 38 inch waist but regained it within a few years.

So onwards and downwards friends!