Having had her own share of ups and downs in life, Kay Illingworth recognises that everybody's way of dealing with stress differs; some people don't eat and lose weight hand over fist, and some like Kay, dive head first into the food cupboard.
By January 1996, Kay had piled on six and a half stones!
Her downfall has always been pasta, smothered in bacon, mushrooms and sauce with few spring onions and chilli bits for colour, Kay was supposed to weigh out the cooked pasta, rice, noodles etc as recommended for a calorie limit of 1,250.
After three weeks of being good, she found that she was not losing any weight. Something suddenly clicked with Kay and she realised that to her horror that she actually had a llb of pasta on her plate - more than five times what she was allowed under her diet regime! It became obvious that she had no visual concept of what 3 - 4oz of cooked pasta actually looked like.
She set off weighing her food very carefully, placing it on a white dinner plate. The penny dropped and she thought she would also try to weigh her other foods, rice, peas, corn etc. To Kay's joy, it worked and she very quickly calibrated 2 - 3 oz protein section on the plate.
Cheese, another one of Kay's favourites, was cut into a one-inch cube that weighed exactly half an ounce. She realised that as long as you know the calorific value of the food, a simple mental division will give you your count of how much you should eat as part of your diet, the plate provides you with a well balanced diet too.
Kay kept the idea for the plate to herself for some time. She then decided to create a template, for which she used a greaseproof paper that she stuck onto a plate. She used this as a food-measuring device and lost three stones using the diet plate. It has taken her four years to develop the product, register, design and trademark it.
The diet plate has been on sale since January 2001 and demand is rising sharply as people are beginning to understand how it works, and reap the benefits it can bring.
One of the benefits of the diet plate is that you can eat the same food as the family, just in the correct portions.
Her product has already won an award for excellence for the most innovative health product of the year 2001.
We love this product and would highly recommend it.
