Friday 29 August 2014

Aaaaaargh!!!

That's exactly how I felt standing on the scales this morning.

Fucking aaaargh.

The week before last: 13st 7lbs. Last week: 13st 7lbs. This week: fricking 13st 6.5lbs.

That's what 2 weeks of hard work got me. And let's not forget the 2 weeks before that when I also worked hard and had a gain followed by a moderate loss. Or the week before that when I was on holiday, and not tracking but not completely off the ball, and put on a lb and a quarter (which incidentally, I was really pleased with at the time).

In other words, in the 5 weeks since just before I went on holiday, I have spent one holiday week semi-tracking and 4 weeks pretty much nailing it ... and I've lost a grand total of 0.5lb.

I could sob. Or scream and rant. In fact, I feel like I'd probably burn more calories that way!

The MOST frustrating thing is that both this week and last, I've soldiered through the long weekends, the meals out, drinks and all the other challenges and I've been consistently lower all week, only to bounce back up on Friday mornings for no good reason.

Take this week: long weekend, and I've navigated dinner out, BBQ, cream tea, lunch out and takeaway, and have been sitting pretty down on 13st 5.25lbs all week. I've made good choices. I came home last night, ate veg and grilled turkey for an early tea and then stormed round the local mall sorting out a load of chores. What in all of that caused me to suddenly put 1.25lb back on over-night??????

Yeah, I'm pissed. Yeah, it's a rhetorical question. Yeah, giving up and eating angry chocolate won't help me long term.

Hmph.

And so we swing into this week's challenges. I'm hosting a low key birthday evening for a friend tonight - there will be cake. Tomorrow I'm at a wedding all day. Sunday, I'm guessing, we'll be staying with our friends for a bit then heading home.

So I'm clinging on to the positives: I wore a tailored dress to work yesterday that I swear wasn't QUITE as tight as it was when I last wore it a few weeks ago. The scales were consistently down all week. And the biscuits survived another week. That's all I can come up with right now.

Time to go back to soldiering on!


- Posted from my iPhone

Friday 22 August 2014

Stuck

Short story: I stood on the scale this morning. I was disappointed.

Long story: I tracked all week, did some planning, messed up slightly but not enough to make a real difference and the scales were down all week. This morning they were 13st 7lbs. Which is exactly what they were last week. So a week of effort for no results.

Before anyone starts in with all the reasons this should be ok: I know them. It still doesn't stop me being disappointed when it's only my second proper week back on track and I get that to show for it.

Anyhoo, this weekend is looking particularly challenging. It would be much easier to throw my hands in the air and say that this food-centric weekend is going to chuck me off track anyway, but that won't actually help anything. I have dinner out tonight - it's at a place that specialises in sausage and mash and ALL OF THE OTHER BAD THINGS. ALL OF THEM. The plan is to keep my food fairly light during the day, just have straight up sausage and mash with some steamed veg on the side tonight and try and restrain my drinking intake. No starters, no desserts.

Tomorrow my visiting friend has requested a cream tea ... not much I can do to make that healthier apart from leave the cream off, and then we have a BBQ in the evening. Plan is to take chicken and some veg skewers along for the grill, avoid bread and just make up a single plateful for myself. Again, I'm going to try and keep the booze intake down - maybe wine spritzers.

Sunday - possibly Sunday roast before my friend leaves mid-afternoon, I reckon that will be ok if I have fruit for breakfast and soup for tea. And Monday is as yet unplanned.

On the upside I did manage to do Body Pump followed by Pilates last night so I feel virtuous if a little achy today.

Right - I shall take my gloom off else where - enjoy your weekends!


- Posted from my iPhone

Thursday 21 August 2014

On It!

This week has proved that it's possible to muddle through tough days when you're firmly in the driving seat of This Shit Is Happening.

I was dreading Monday with a fear that only those dieting will understand: lunch out AND dinner AND a cinema trip. How to do that and stay on plan??? But I survived it with a little forward thinking and planning. Fruit for breakfast, lunch was eaten in two halves and I saved some of my leftovers for the afternoon (I was able to take it back to the office in a takeaway box) and I excused myself from dinner to just meet my friends at the cinema. Ditto Tuesday when I had to get a super early train and was working in London all day.

Which brings me to my next point - it's also entirely possible to lose concentration for 30 mins and find you've squandered a load of points and didn't even really enjoy them! Hmph.

So my learning point (or re-enforcement of what I already knew) is that eating in front of the TV is just not possible for me. I just can't focus on what I'm eating, no matter how earnestly I try and then 5 hobnobs have been dunked in the hot chocolate before you know it. I learn. I move on. I won't beat myself up about it but I will try and use that knowledge.

I'm hoping for at least a small loss tomorrow to show for my hard work. This week has been light on activity due to the socialising and working away, which also means my tracker looks a bit lean and I'm slightly over my points. I realise that this probably isn't as bad as it would have been in previous weeks though as I've stopped tracking my general walking as activity.

I'll just have to wait and see!


- Posted from my iPhone

Saturday 16 August 2014

Satisfying Saturdays

I am currently lazing in my pyjamas on the sofa - yep, it's after 11am and I don't care. It's the weekend, I have no fixed plans and nowhere I need to be - its really rather pleasing!

Yesterday's weigh in was good: a solid 2.25lb loss, made better by the knowledge that it wasn't the lowest the scales had been this week. I'll take that!

I enjoyed a nice relaxing drink and chat with a friend after work yesterday and walked home absolutely staaaaaarving, dreams of a takeaway pizza in my head. Then I thought that I'd got pasta in the fridge so I could just have that. Do you know what I actually ended up having? Toast and cuppa soup. Single girl cooking, huh?? :-)

Other good things this week:

1) I have the satisfying ache this morning of someone who got up super early yesterday and hit up the 7am Body Pump class at the gym - definitely a good sign I'm in the mood to look after myself at the moment!

2) I finished my weekly Weightwatchers tracker with points unused this week. It's been a very long time since I haven't used up all my points, including activity points, but there were a (scant) few left this week. AND I've stopped tracking my activity points for my daily walk to work. I remembered that I did the same last year, because if I track it, I have a tendency to want to use them and that walking is really just part of my life.

3) I got my half year rating at work this week, and despite work currently not being satisfying AT ALL, I still got a good rating!

Right - I have to go and figure out what I might want to do with myself today.

Have a lovely weekend!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Wednesday 13 August 2014

Home Comforts

Tonight's dinner literally made me so happy. It was pure, 100% comfort food.

What's was it?

Sausage (quorn), mash, gravy and lots of greens.

The funny thing about this dinner was the most comforting, childhood memory part of the dinner was actually ... the mash!

I can't remember the last time I had mash and it was soooooo nice. I took a slightly unconventional approach as I actually used new potatoes which were in the veg drawer but, as I've just discovered, this actually makes really nice mash! Personally, I'm a big fan of skin-on mash so I just chopped the new potatoes in half, boiled them, added salt, pepper and some butter and roughly mashed them.

Pure. Home. Childhood. Comfort.

Better still, although the dinner was a little heavier on points than my usual dinner (12 points) I had enough points to cover it all, so have managed two absolutely bang-up perfect days in a row.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Tuesday 12 August 2014

Zen Rewards

I know - two posts in one night - what's going on?

This is what's going on:




This is me giving myself a little non-food related treat. And yes, I realise there is actually some food in this picture but that's actually my final points for the day.

My actual treat to myself though is that I'm giving myself some unadulterated me time. I'm closing the door, muting my phone, lighting a lovely smelling candle, lowering the lights and allowing myself to watch a film, completely undisturbed.

A rare treat indeed.

- Posted from my iPhone

Fresh Eats

Do you know one of the worst things about eating healthy, and especially eating healthily enough to lose a steady amount of weight?

The boredom.

The mind-numbing tedium of working out which quick, cheap and easy meals work and then rotating them ad-nauseum, until you eventually give into the backlash and fall into a tub of ice-cream.

Nope?  Is that just me?

As an essentially lazy person, I probably end up eating the same 5 dishes for weeks at a time.  Which is probably why I find eating out such a nightmare, because I'm just so thrilled to be eating some DIFFERENT that I go nuts.

Having read through a load of my old posts from this time last year for both inspiration and motivation, I can see that one of the maxims I gravitated towards was either having starchy carbs or protein with my evening meal, but not generally both.  This turned out to be a quite unconscious evolution at the time, as I gradually worked out what low points meals were easy for dinner, and the reason it worked is that it meant I had to massively stock up on the veggies on my dinner plate.

However, there is a limit to how much chicken and broccoli or pasta with veg sauce I want to consume before I start bashing my head against the kitchen window.  So this time round, whilst I am very motivated, I'm also seeking out a little variety in my diet.

Yesterday I suddenly realised that what I'd really like was a mushroom stroganoff - something that tastes decadently creamy, and doesn't use bloody pasta or tomatoes.  A quick google later, and completely by chance, the first recipe I found was on the BBC Good Food site and was a slightly healthified version.

I've tried it this evening and can report that it tastes really nice.  I would show you a picture, but I scoffed it before there was time for photographic evidence.  BUT here's the really great news:  if you're a follower of Weightwatchers, a decent portion of this is a mere 7 points.  SEVEN!!!  (If you're a Slimming World peep, then I'm pretty sure this is also free with a Healthy A portion).

Note:  I used a 60g portion of rice, a spritz of olive oil (which I don't count) with a little water to sauté, and Sainsbury's Be Good To Yourself soured fresh cream.  Oh yeah, and a standard beef Oxo cube because I can't be arsed faffing around with this low-sodium bollocks.

Bliss.  A new, quick, easy, cheap recipe to go into my roster.  I used this one here: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1898646/mushroom-stroganoff.

Happy fricking Tuesday all!

(And since I have points left over, I shall go and enjoy a hot chocolate with a couple of chocolate chip  Hobnobs guilt-free now)

Sunday 10 August 2014

Little Improvements

I've had a fabulously relaxed weekend - time with my dad, tea and cake with my friends and their gorgeous little girl, pre-holiday purchases that weren't quite right returned for a refund (I'm post-holiday broke so being practical is good!), car vacuumed ... I felt quite productive!

Better still I've tracked EVERYTHING I've eaten and survived the snack-tastic over-eating potential that is Dad's house, and even managed to finish the weekend without quite using all of my weekly points or any of my activity points.  

What I'd like to improve on next is tracking at least some of my food before I eat it so I have a better idea of the total points I'm eating.  I'm making pretty sensible choices on my food, but I sometimes forget how the sensible choices can add up, so the best thing I can do is to pre-track my food which gives me a better idea of how many points I have left over for the nice little things.

So that's my project for this week, along with getting some activity in and lots more veg.  I'm feeling pretty motivated right now, so it's time to make the most of it.

I love a good bit of motivation!

Friday 8 August 2014

Weekly Weigh In

It wasn't the greatest weigh in - annoyingly up another lb from last week's late weigh in, which immediately back from holiday.

However, I have to be slightly prosaic as I know I've eaten pretty damn well the last couple of days and I've been honest with my tracking all week and it's not been a terrible week. So I just have to believe that if I hold steady it will all sort itself out and head off in the right direction again.

In the meantime, I'm hitting the gym at lunchtime and hoping to finish early this afternoon.

Happy weekend!

(p.s. I did avoid the wine last night - hoorah! I may have had a few of the snacks though. Something to work on and vigilant about).


- Posted from my iPhone

Thursday 7 August 2014

Random Thoughts

1) I'd forgotten how nice roasted squash (or any other root veg) is! I was reading through some very old posts on the blog today and suddenly got reminded. Dinner was a score as a result!

2) How naive I was in said early posts about the progress I would make! I even hypothesised that I'd be at my goal weight of 11 stone in November 2009, just 11 months after I started out. 5 years later and I'm still not there .... but I'm wiser in so many other ways.

3) How there are some foods that conscious eating may cause me to pretty much forsake altogether. This was thought as I was enjoying a bit of ice-cream for dessert and musing over how it's no wonder I could never stop after a few mouthfuls, as I was previously practically unaware I'd even had those full mouthfuls due to distraction. This lead me to thinking about foods I only EVER eat when distracted by something else, like popcorn, and how I would never in my right mind sit down to eat a big bowl of popcorn without the distraction of a film. Therefore how I was rather unlikely to eat much popcorn anytime soon. And I don't feel overly sad about it.

4) If I get my arse back in gear I'll have the joy of getting some of my smaller clothes out of the storage suitcase again, and just how bloody lovely that feeling is.

Right - I'm off to go nose around a friend's new flat and resist drinking wine :-)


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Little Pleasures

After returning from holiday, I now seem to have roped myself into getting decently back on track with my eating. Yesterday there was lots of veggies and it was the first day in quite a while where I was bang on my Weightwatchers points.

Looking back to last year I had a holiday in late August and although I'd been back on Weightwatchers for a while it was that holiday (or the return from it) that lit a fire under my ass. I realised that the start of the ski season wasn't that far away and I wanted to be in better shape for it. This year the holiday's a few weeks earlier and I'm a lb or 2 lighter but the fire seems to be stoking the same way. Hooray - I've been looking for my motivation and thought I'd misplaced it!

On the conscious eating front there have been definite positive benefits. I feel like I've stopped wrestling with myself over a lot of food. I'm now capable of having biscuits and ice-cream in the house and not nose-diving into them. I can sit and really enjoy a chocolate chip hobnob without fighting myself to put the rest down or feel guilty about it. It feels like a huge step forward!

I feel like I've been looking at it the wrong way round for years. When they said "pay attention to how you feel - whether you're full or want to eat for an emotion rather than hunger" all they really needed to say was "stop distracting yourself from your food - enjoy it and the rest comes later". At least it's that way for me.

Without the food multi-tasking I can also concentrate more on whatever else I'm doing too: a good book, a TV programme and enjoy how that makes me feel independently of the food.

To top it off, I did the most amazing yoga practice yesterday that left me feeling so zen and refreshed (and not a little sweaty!) - inversions are the best!

Another little pleasure I've been enjoying this week: taking time to cook properly and the joy of leftovers. I'm monumentally broke after the holiday so I'm turning it into a positive and using it as a good excuse to investigate the fridge, freezer and cupboards and do some proper cooking. I've enjoyed smoked salmon and lemon risotto this week, along with making a big batch of veg and tomato sauce to go on pasta, jacket potatoes or with chicken. Way more satisfying than processed food.

So generally, this week has been full of positives ... hope yours is too!

- Posted from my iPhone

Sunday 3 August 2014

The Holiday Is Over

Boooooooooo - the return to reality is kicking in after a fantastic week in the French Alps. Sucksville to be home from this:





I've had a fantastic week in Les Deux Alpes where I ski'd, zorbed, swam and sunbathed, read, and ate a fantastic amount of cheese, and I'm feeling relaxed but knackered now.










(Top to bottom: heading up the gondola to the glacier in the morning with some of the guys, a well earned après-ski beverage in the sun, zorbing)

The weather was sometimes a bit hit and miss - we had a couple of heavy rain-storms and a cool day or two, but also enough sun that I managed to burn myself not once, but TWICE. Idiot.

The company was fun, the atmosphere relaxed.




I spent quite a lot of time playing around filming and photographing the guys in the park and on the rails, especially after I nearly dislocated my thumb with a stupid fall from a kicker (first morning and I was desperately hungover and not concentrating properly) - so I thought taking it easy might be a good idea! Of course, I look super cool when I'm chilling (ahem - not):




In all fairness, it was super sunny that day so most of the above is actually an attempt to avoid being burnt to a crisp and / or blinded by the sun on the snow.

Food-wise all was miraculously good. I chose not to track but the conscious eating trick really worked as I managed two 17+ hour travel days with absolutely minimal snacking on very little effort. I really enjoyed my food though out the week, including a couple of nice meals out, crepes and the group catering, and even with the massive amounts of alcohol involved I was only 1.25lbs up from when I left when I stepped on the scales this morning - result!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad