Three items to cut from your diet

Milky lattes, wine and processed ready meals are all shockingly high in calories and expensive additions to your weekly shop says dietician and nutritionist, Azmina Govindji. “Swapping your daily [shop-bought] latte fix for a homemade black coffee can instantly save you on both fronts.” For example a regular Starbucks latte costs £2.25 and contains 143 calories, over five days that’s £11.25 spent and 715 calories consumed.

A report from the Royal Society for Public Health highlighted the number of calories we consume when drinking wine, our favourite tipple. It equated drinking a large glass of wine (250ml, 13% abv alcohol) to eating a Cornetto ice cream – both have 228 calories in them.

A standard glass (175ml, 13% abv alcohol) has comparable calories to a slice of madeira cake (160). “Calories in alcohol are high. You get around seven calories per gram of alcohol. To put that in perspective you get around four calories per gram of sugar,” she says. By cutting out a small glass of wine a night you can save 1,100 calories a week – make it a large glass and it’s 1,600 calories – or weight loss of 2lb in a month.

Britain leads the world in consumption of ready meals, spending around £3.3bn a year on the 12,000 varieties on supermarket shelves. Govindji, who spearheads the NHS Choices’ Eat4Cheap challenge, says that by ditching ready meals and switching to home cooked food you can cut your weekly shopping bill by as much as half. Of those who took the challenge, “No one said it was easy,” she said. “But by cooking in bulk, eating leftovers and having things like scrambled eggs and homemade soup, the participants improved their health and bank balance too.”

Cutting down on takeaways, choosing cheaper brands and reducing waste, families can save up to £2,650 a year on food alone. The NHS Choices website shows households how to make these savings and get the recommended five a day for less than 50p too.

Take up running

For the cost of a cheap pair of trainers you can run straight from your front door, it’s that simple. Or is it? For many, lack of motivation is the biggest barrier to leaving the house. If you don’t want to run on your own, try joining 50,000 runners on a Saturday morning at a Parkrun event. Find one near you at parkrun.org.uk.

These are free, weekly timed five-kilometre runs held around the country at 9am. They’re open to everyone. “It doesn’t matter how fit, how old or what gender you are. We try to make it inclusive,” says Parkrun’s Danny Norman. A runner of 10 years, he says they even have volunteer “towel walkers” who stay with the last person so no one is left behind. Going to the same venue each week gives you “an apples for apples litmus test and it’s a good way to track your fitness,” he says.

Parkrun monitors a runner’s personal best but Norman says this isn’t people’s sole motivation: “The biggest reason for people coming to Parkrun is to do with the community at large It’s about people running with others in a safe, inclusive environment.”

The organisation regularly receives thank-you letters from newly converted runners Norman says: “For some people, five kilometres is the furthest they’ve run since cross country in school 40 years ago. We get letters saying it used to be a form of punishment and now I’m doing Parkrun for fun.”

It’s fair to say running 5km once a week will not shed the pounds, (on average you only burn 300 calories on a run) but, says Norman, combining it with reducing calories is a healthy way to start losing weight. “If you just did 5km every week and your diet stayed the same you’re not going to lose weight. If you’re putting in more than what you’re burning off – you could run six times a week – it’s still going to be detrimental to you. The established rule of thumb for people starting off is three runs a week.”

Download the app

Research says that you are more likely to lose weight if you keep track of what you eat.

There are hundreds of tracker apps to choose from in the app store, but MyFitnessPal is regarded as the best. For a start it’s free. By adding your personal stats (height, age, gender, weight etc) and weight loss goal the app will work out how many calories you can have each day to reach your -target within a set time.

It has a database of more than 2m foods to track plus a recipe counter (where you can upload ingredients in your meal) and the app will work out the calories you’ve eaten.

It charts your progress in a graph and gives you the option to sign up to its online community for support and motivation.

Nicola Read, 37, a TEFL teacher based in Thailand, says: “I use it to remind myself of calorie values, calorific burn rates of different exercise regimes as well as the necessary proportions for ‘proper’ balanced meals and portion control. It’s easy to use, free and it sends through great recipes.”

Of the other tracking apps Runkeeper and Endomondo come highly recommended by the editor of tech website Wareable, Paul Lamkin.

He says: “Both are free and great for people who are just beginning to run.” They work by using the GPS from your smartphone – which has tracking capabilities that says exactly where you’ve been – so you don’t need to buy an expensive running watch. “Endomondo has a strong community feel to it. You can track your steps, your runs, calories and get to see how other Endomondo users are doing and achieving,” he says.

Novice runner and chemist from the University of York, Rob McElroy, 36, has been using another free app, Mapmyrun, for almost three years and has found it a really motivating fitness tool. “In the beginning I liked it simply because it let me know how far I’d run and how fast. As it has evolved I really enjoy getting real time feedback and how I’ve fared against myself and others,” he says.

Buy the book

Often cited in the top 10 best selling diet books, the 5:2 Fast Diet devised by Michael Mosely and co-authored by Mimi Spencer, is a low access point for a diet. There are no clubs to attend, added extras or expensive diet products to buy says Spencer.

“People have dubbed it the ‘austerity diet’ because you’re not only cutting your calories but also your costs two days a week,” she says. Recent research from Visa suggested that commuters spend on average £10.59 per day on lunch, snacks and coffee. “So if you’re skipping lunch twice a week you’re going to be saving whatever that cost is.”

Janet Robinson a 56-year-old social worker from York, started the diet at the end of January 2014 and went on to lose 2½ stone (16kg) within a matter of months, while her husband lost 4½ stone. She agrees that she saves money on fast days. “Today’s lunch was £11 (I ate out). But on a fast day, if I take fruit and yoghurt, I would only spend £1.” Robinson says she’s cut out expensive processed food from her diet and now cooks her food from scratch – making bigger meals so that she can reheat them the next day.

Spencer says, unlike other high-protein based diets, you can do 5:2 on the cheap. She suggests making a batch of soup for the fasting days as research shows it is more satiating than eating food or drinking liquid. “Somehow there’s a trigger mechanism that makes you feel fuller for longer. It’s easy to make – you’re using up food you’ve already got in your fridge. A bowl of rooty soup, like carrots and parsnips, will come in at about 30p a bowl. And because you’re not having a big hunk of bread and butter on the side your costs are really limited,” Spencer says.