So I can eat my way through 1,950 calories a day and in theory I should lose one pound or thereabouts a week in weight.

1,950kcal does seem an awful lot of calories, but I suppose it adds up without me realising it. A bag of Wotsits contains 212kcal, a Mars bar 294kcal. Throw in a can of Coke (139kcal) and a typical night in front of the TV has just clocked up 645kcal. And that’s not me exactly stuffing my face either. You should see me when I get going on the Jaffa Cakes.

Actually I have a confession to make. When I decided that I was going to lose weight, I wanted to get off on the right foot so went into my local supermarket to buy a dozen cans of caffeine free Diet Coke (I kicked the caffeine habit months ago, but that’s another story).

When I got to the soft drinks aisle I was sidetracked by the fact that Pepsi was on special offer so loaded up my basket with that instead.

I polished off those 12 cans in less than a week and returned to the supermarket, this time with my wife, and went to buy some more. As I loaded them into the trolley my better half said she thought I was trying to lose weight not gain it. I am I replied. This is caffeine free Diet Pepsi. Hence the gold cans. No it isn’t she replied. It’s caffeine free full sugar Pepsi.

Oops. Still at least I was saving money if not shedding pounds.

Anyway, I have 1,950 calories a day worth of food to eat and I think I can manage that no problem if I avoid the obvious no-nos like sweets, biscuits and chocolate. And full sugar Pepsi.

My next task is to work out exactly what I will be eating. And that means more research.

My morning’s eating is more or less sorted already however.

For breakfast I plan to have two Weetabix with semi-skimmed milk and no sugar (fortunately I don’t add sugar to any of my cereals, but do like Smacks, Golden Grahams, etc). That’s about 220kcal. And I also have one of those Actimel strawberry yogurt drinks every morning so that’s another 80kcal.

If I want a glass of orange juice too that’ll be another 90kcal, but I will see how the rest of my days pan out before committing to the juice.

Without the orange juice, that’s me through my first 300kcal of the day at about 8am and then I like to have an apple sometime mid-morning to keep the hunger pangs at bay. A typical apple, that’s another 50kcal.

So every morning that’s 350kcal total, leaving me 1,600kcal for  the rest of the day. Seems more than enough, but we will see.