Yesterday was a friend's funeral - I wasn't going (too far and it was already massively over-attended for the venue) but it was all over Facebook as we all said our personal goodbyes. Yesterday was an old friend's wedding, but I wasn't invited for political reasons along with a handful of others, and had to watch all our other friends plus 150 others go off to enjoy the celebrations and try not feel left out. Yesterday I found out that I got screwed over on a recent sale I made on eBay and had to sort it all out including refunding the buyer and ending up out of pocket ... the last thing was the smallest, but the straw that broke the proverbial camel.
It ended up being a day of complete emotional turmoil - I should have seen it coming but I didn't and it knocked me sideways. And yeah, I'm human, and I'm now embarrassed that I screamed .... and I mean absolutely SCREAMED .... at my dad when he said the wrong thing and put me over the edge.
Being human is letting yourself feel all those emotions. I screamed, I cried hard (in the privacy of my bedroom, because I'm still not that liberated about crying in front of other people), I slept for a while then I stayed by myself and watched some films and read for the rest of the day.
Yeah - I'm sorry that my dad got blasted by it, although honestly it might teach him a bit of tact on a day when I was obviously teetering close to the emotional edge .... or since he's a man and probably didn't clock that, just some general tact. If a 34 year old woman snaps at you for (apparently) no reason ..... telling her to not to sulk is probably never going to elicit a good response. But that's dad for you.
But here's the positive - I felt all the emotions, I didn't eat them. In fact, I didn't even eat lunch in the end.
Now I just need to work out how to get back to facing the world again, as I haven't quite forgiven dad yet, which is a bit awkward when I'm currently living his house.
Oh .... and the weigh in: stay the same.
I'm not frustrated by that for 3 reasons: I lost quite a bit the week before, my eating's still not 100% although there's good choices being made, and I weighed in earlier than normal yesterday morning (early hair appointment) so I probably had actually lost a little.
This week's non-scale victories: went to the cinema on Wednesday night with snacks in my bag - didn't bother eating them, went to my first gym class since being home and not eating all the sadness yesterday!
Keep it up!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Saturday, 30 May 2015
Thursday, 28 May 2015
Interview
I finally (hah - a week - I'm so impatient!) heard from my agents on Tuesday about a job they wanted to put me forward for and was I interested?
Why, yes, yes I was!
Long story short, it all moved quite quickly and I went for an interview on Wednesday and now I have to wait until Monday to hear if I'm called back for a second interview.
Ironically, knowing I won't be hearing anything for at least a couple of days is relaxing, because I've now decided I would really like the job but suspect I'm going to be outclassed by the other applicants and that there's going to be a LOT of competition for the position. Basically, the job would be amazing but I'm preparing myself for the answer being a no. Apologies for being secretive about what the job is but it's at a pretty high profile institution and I think they're trying to avoid being swamped by time wasters - I'll tell you what it is afterwards and you'll understand why it would be pretty awesome.
Still, it was good to be doing something positive on my job hunt even if the morning turned into a bit of a comedy of errors. I was out the house and walking to the bus in good time yesterday morning when I suddenly realised .... I'd forgotten to brush my teeth! How does that even happen??? And why on interview day when you want to be feeling super confident??? Argh!! I was literally stood on the pavement looking both ways trying to work out if I had enough time to go back and do them (I didn't), then frantically looking for chewing gum (had none), before finally trying to remember where a shop was on the way to bus to get some. Major DUH! I think I went through two or three pieces in the journey.
Then having finally hopped off the bus and started walking to the interview location, and I realised I really needed to wee. Why do these things happen to me? Bloody nerves. So there's me trying to figure out if I've got time to charge into this huge Tesco Extra to try and find toilets without being late to the interview.
I'm so bloody suave.
There was obviously a fate smiling kindly on me somewhere as I did manage to arrive on time, and to the correct place first time, and I even think the interview went pretty positively and smoothly. Which really means it all hinges on my competition. Is it mean to wish small catastrophes on their heads???
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Why, yes, yes I was!
Long story short, it all moved quite quickly and I went for an interview on Wednesday and now I have to wait until Monday to hear if I'm called back for a second interview.
Ironically, knowing I won't be hearing anything for at least a couple of days is relaxing, because I've now decided I would really like the job but suspect I'm going to be outclassed by the other applicants and that there's going to be a LOT of competition for the position. Basically, the job would be amazing but I'm preparing myself for the answer being a no. Apologies for being secretive about what the job is but it's at a pretty high profile institution and I think they're trying to avoid being swamped by time wasters - I'll tell you what it is afterwards and you'll understand why it would be pretty awesome.
Still, it was good to be doing something positive on my job hunt even if the morning turned into a bit of a comedy of errors. I was out the house and walking to the bus in good time yesterday morning when I suddenly realised .... I'd forgotten to brush my teeth! How does that even happen??? And why on interview day when you want to be feeling super confident??? Argh!! I was literally stood on the pavement looking both ways trying to work out if I had enough time to go back and do them (I didn't), then frantically looking for chewing gum (had none), before finally trying to remember where a shop was on the way to bus to get some. Major DUH! I think I went through two or three pieces in the journey.
Then having finally hopped off the bus and started walking to the interview location, and I realised I really needed to wee. Why do these things happen to me? Bloody nerves. So there's me trying to figure out if I've got time to charge into this huge Tesco Extra to try and find toilets without being late to the interview.
I'm so bloody suave.
There was obviously a fate smiling kindly on me somewhere as I did manage to arrive on time, and to the correct place first time, and I even think the interview went pretty positively and smoothly. Which really means it all hinges on my competition. Is it mean to wish small catastrophes on their heads???
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Friday, 22 May 2015
Weigh In - Week 4
Truth be told, I'm feeling a bit all over the place at the moment, but we'll get to that in a second. Despite fearing that the weekend had cocked things up a bit and that I'd wobbled a bit on Wednesday, I had 4 good days this week and actually turned in a good result:
2.5 lbs lost.
That means I've lost 3 lbs in total since starting back on Weightwatchers, and more importantly for me from a mental point of view, I've just dipped back into the 13 stone bracket, which feels like progress made. I suppose 3 lbs lost in 4 weeks isn't magnificent in the scale of things, but I'm happy with it because it's steady progress in the right direction and comes in spite of holiday and quite a chunk of socialising.
In terms of non-scale victories, because I tend to forget how important it is to acknowledge those too, I've just had takeaway and actually stopped when I was full and before I'd gluttonously devoured the whole thing ... and put the leftovers safely in the bin. Good girl.
Aside from the positivity with the food, I'm having quite a battle with myself to stay happy and bouncy at the moment. I had a meeting with a recruitment agency in London at the end of last week, which left me feeling very up and since then .... nothing. Which has left me on the way to feeling very down.
Truth be told - without a job and no one beating down the door to employ me, I'm feeling rather pathetically lost and a bit of a failure. Logically, I realise that I only saw the agent last week, and have only been back in the country 4 weeks, the second of which I was back out the country again, but logic doesn't seem to be featuring too heavily in my feelings right now. I'd naively expected it to be super-quick getting employed, and this uncertainty is preying on me.
Looking back, I was thinking that it had always been speedy and easy in the past, but then when I took the rose-tinted specs off I realised it probably just looked that way because I was always employed (or travelling) during the period I was looking so probably didn't realise that there was indeed a delay of a couple of weeks, and whilst I have been extremely lucky with the number of interviews that I've been offered jobs from in the past, there have been one or two times when I haven't been immediately successful. Plus I need to keep reminding myself that I'm trying to break into a new field, as I move away from permanent to contracting, so I'm potentially up against people with more relevant experience than me, and I just need to let my recruiters do their thing and and be patient whilst they do it.
In an attempt to stop myself wallowing my way into some really crappy, negative feelings, I've been doing a couple of things. Firstly, I've prepared myself to be ready to interview and work as soon as something comes up by spending a bit of time reviewing my work wardrobe and updating it as appropriate. Clothes are armour to me, and especially when I'm feeling a bit uncertain about the weight I'm at currently, looking good makes me feel more positive and confident. Plus it will make packing easier in the event of a rapid move to London.
Whilst doing that, I've also been having another massive review and declutter of the rest of my belongings, which whilst slightly stressful and frustrating at the time, is massively cathartic afterwards. I've started with my whole wardrobe and have binned some stuff as well making a (growing) pile for the charity shop. I literally went through every drawer first and tried stuff on, assessing whether it fitted, was shabby or had holes, and of course whether I liked it. That left me with a pile of stuff that is currently too small and is to go in storage for later (I'm going to try stuff on every half a stone or so) and a much larger pile of "current" wardrobe. Thing is - I looked at the current stuff and really didn't feel inspired by much of it, so I got a bit stricter with my criteria.
I set myself up to go through that pile and make a 3 second, instinctive decision about every item - either I loved it / wear it frequently, or I'm a bit "meh" about it and it joined the charity pile. That was an eye-opening exercise I can tell you: probably another 1/6th of the pile joined the charity items. I'm going to give it a couple of days and then do a quick review to make sure I'm not chucking out anything I shouldn't be, but I think that answers my problem with my wardrobe!
Clearing my wardrobe was another item to do on my "35 before 35" list, which is satisfying. Next up, I want to go through my other belongings which are all still in the blue Ikea bags I moved them home in and sort those too. And whilst I'm waiting around for employment, my flatmate-to-be Jo suggested I see what else I can do on my list without bankrupting myself. Good plan.
Wednesday, 20 May 2015
That Old Chestnut
Getting back to tracking regularly has been an ... interesting experience.
For one thing, I'd forgotten how much a weekend of being social can knock you completely off track. I love my school friends dearly and relish the time I have to catch up with them, but it cannot be said that it's any way good for healthy living. So Thursday, Friday and Saturday were pretty much a write-off in terms of the healthy eating - I tracked it, I moved on.
By Sunday, Jo, my flatmate-to-be-and-very-old-friend, and I called time on ourselves and decided the gluttony must end. We both want to live more healthy lifestyles and lose a bit of weight and we definitely weren't helping ourselves, so we ate good food and walked 3 miles to the cinema and generally felt more virtuous.
With Sunday under my belt, the days started to flow a bit better, and I've now had a streak of 3 days of good eating and was right in the middle of being all self-congratulatory about it today when, for no apparent reason, I just finished the day all wrong. I made a not particularly excellent choice for dinner (fishcakes with chips with Dad instead of the low point fish pie that was in the fridge) and before you know it I've added dessert to it .... and it wasn't even a particularly satisfactory dessert!
So now I'm quietly kicking myself because I'm not sure why I did it, except that this has happened numerous times in the past, and the only thing to do is suck it up and move on.
Maybe I really was craving that scone with jam I had for pudding (which was annoyingly a bit stale so not as amazing as hoped). Maybe it's because I'm feeling a bit lost and pathetic with my jobless state right now and it was a little food solace. I don't know but it's still annoying.
I guess these things are sent to try us. And usually succeed mightily.
For one thing, I'd forgotten how much a weekend of being social can knock you completely off track. I love my school friends dearly and relish the time I have to catch up with them, but it cannot be said that it's any way good for healthy living. So Thursday, Friday and Saturday were pretty much a write-off in terms of the healthy eating - I tracked it, I moved on.
By Sunday, Jo, my flatmate-to-be-and-very-old-friend, and I called time on ourselves and decided the gluttony must end. We both want to live more healthy lifestyles and lose a bit of weight and we definitely weren't helping ourselves, so we ate good food and walked 3 miles to the cinema and generally felt more virtuous.
With Sunday under my belt, the days started to flow a bit better, and I've now had a streak of 3 days of good eating and was right in the middle of being all self-congratulatory about it today when, for no apparent reason, I just finished the day all wrong. I made a not particularly excellent choice for dinner (fishcakes with chips with Dad instead of the low point fish pie that was in the fridge) and before you know it I've added dessert to it .... and it wasn't even a particularly satisfactory dessert!
So now I'm quietly kicking myself because I'm not sure why I did it, except that this has happened numerous times in the past, and the only thing to do is suck it up and move on.
Maybe I really was craving that scone with jam I had for pudding (which was annoyingly a bit stale so not as amazing as hoped). Maybe it's because I'm feeling a bit lost and pathetic with my jobless state right now and it was a little food solace. I don't know but it's still annoying.
I guess these things are sent to try us. And usually succeed mightily.
Saturday, 16 May 2015
Second And Third Weigh In
So I'm back from Morocco and I had a really nice post about it and my second weigh in ready to go ... and my iPad ate it. Damn it.
And then somehow it was a busy couple of days and suddenly it's the weekend again and I haven't posted!
Morocco was lovely (and I'll get that post sorted and up) but for now let's concentrate on the numbers side of things. After the week away, I arrived back in the UK at 3am on Sunday morning. As I wanted to get my head straight back in the game, I did my missed weigh in from that Friday as soon as I got up on Sunday morning. I was 14st 2lb, which meant I'd put 1.5lb on over the week but wasn't quite back to where I'd started a couple of weeks before.
For me, long travel days are a bitch. I'd surfed pretty much all day at the beach on Saturday, gone back to the riad at 4pm to shower and pack and then started for the airport at 5.30pm. Flight at 8pm, land at midnight and drive home from the airport. Even with some circumspection with eating so I didn't go nuts with snacking, that's still a long day with eating and drinking at weird points, so I wasn't at all surprised to see some bloating at the scales. Plus, given how much my post-surf muscles ached I wasn't surprised to see a bit of gain there either. A loss for the week would have been nice, but I wasn't going to cry about it.
So that was week 2's weigh in.
After that I had a short, sharp week of socialising and getting organised before having to weigh in for week 3 on Thursday morning so I could go away for meetings and a long weekend in London. The scales had dipped back down just after returning from holiday but with the socialising and running around to contend with they ended up with week 3 staying the same - 14st 2lbs.
Could I have worked harder in those few days to get a loss? Probably. Could I have been stricter the week before on holiday for a loss then? I imagine so. But surfing makes me hungry and I've enjoyed catching up with friends and frankly I'm in this for the long haul, not a short term fix.
The thing that makes me fairly sanguine about the whole situation is if I compare to last year's return from the Alps. Twelve months ago, when I got home, I enjoyed catching up with all my friends and indulging in the food I'd missed and didn't think about stepping back on Weightwatchers straight away. The result was I put on an extra half a stone before I realised it and did something. This year, tiny as it might be, I've enjoyed all that but LOST 0.5lbs already. Which means once life calms down a bit and routine reasserts I'll be in a good place.
Perspective.
And here's to a slightly quieter week .... if I survive the weekend in London!
- Posted from my iPhone
And then somehow it was a busy couple of days and suddenly it's the weekend again and I haven't posted!
Morocco was lovely (and I'll get that post sorted and up) but for now let's concentrate on the numbers side of things. After the week away, I arrived back in the UK at 3am on Sunday morning. As I wanted to get my head straight back in the game, I did my missed weigh in from that Friday as soon as I got up on Sunday morning. I was 14st 2lb, which meant I'd put 1.5lb on over the week but wasn't quite back to where I'd started a couple of weeks before.
For me, long travel days are a bitch. I'd surfed pretty much all day at the beach on Saturday, gone back to the riad at 4pm to shower and pack and then started for the airport at 5.30pm. Flight at 8pm, land at midnight and drive home from the airport. Even with some circumspection with eating so I didn't go nuts with snacking, that's still a long day with eating and drinking at weird points, so I wasn't at all surprised to see some bloating at the scales. Plus, given how much my post-surf muscles ached I wasn't surprised to see a bit of gain there either. A loss for the week would have been nice, but I wasn't going to cry about it.
So that was week 2's weigh in.
After that I had a short, sharp week of socialising and getting organised before having to weigh in for week 3 on Thursday morning so I could go away for meetings and a long weekend in London. The scales had dipped back down just after returning from holiday but with the socialising and running around to contend with they ended up with week 3 staying the same - 14st 2lbs.
Could I have worked harder in those few days to get a loss? Probably. Could I have been stricter the week before on holiday for a loss then? I imagine so. But surfing makes me hungry and I've enjoyed catching up with friends and frankly I'm in this for the long haul, not a short term fix.
The thing that makes me fairly sanguine about the whole situation is if I compare to last year's return from the Alps. Twelve months ago, when I got home, I enjoyed catching up with all my friends and indulging in the food I'd missed and didn't think about stepping back on Weightwatchers straight away. The result was I put on an extra half a stone before I realised it and did something. This year, tiny as it might be, I've enjoyed all that but LOST 0.5lbs already. Which means once life calms down a bit and routine reasserts I'll be in a good place.
Perspective.
And here's to a slightly quieter week .... if I survive the weekend in London!
- Posted from my iPhone
Sunday, 3 May 2015
First Weigh In
Greetings from slightly overcast Morocco! I'm post-surf and slightly red-faced from the non-existent sun (how does that even happen??) but feeling pretty damn chilled.
So, first things first, how did Friday's weigh in go? My first weigh in since returning to Weightwatchers on my return from the Alps, and despite not being at all perfect last week, I still managed to lose a satisfying little 2lbs. In the spirit of all honesty, I should add that my original starting weight was on my dad's scales, but they were driving me potty (they don't just give you one definitive weight reading but keep fluctuating slightly as you move whilst standing on them), so switched back to mine by the end of the week (one number, no arguing) - there might be a slight difference between them, I'm not sure, but I'm on my scales now and we'll take it from there.
So my current weight is 14st 0.5lbs, which hopefully means that my next weigh in will take me back in to the 13st bracket. Which would be nice. Since that will be post-holiday though, we'll just have to see how that goes! I don't get home until the early hours of Sunday morning, so will just take a reading on Sunday morning when I get up and take it on the chin whatever I get.
Which brings me nicely to the far nicer topic of holidays! I'm on my first ever solo holiday. I've gone away for a couple of days on my own before (surfing in Devon) and I travelled independently in 2013 (a month in Africa, one week with a charity and 3 weeks on an organised tour), but this is the first time I've come away for a self-contained, stay in one place holiday all on my own. And I'll be honest - there were points yesterday when I wondered what the hell I was doing, as I journeyed from my Dad's house to Manchester airport and on to Morocco.
I think my most awkward moment came at dinner yesterday, when I'd literally just arrived at the riad at 9.30pm, and our host took me down to the dinner table in the courtyard and invited me to sit down with all the other guests to eat ... they'd all eaten their first course already and, as it turned out, they'd all been there a couple of days already, and I just thought "aaaaaaaargh - this is not as easy as I'd hoped!". But turns out they're pretty friendly for the most part, there's a couple of other solo travellers, and another new guy's just arrived as I sit here typing this, so I'm sure I'll survive!
We had our first surf session this morning under cloudy skies, but the waves were mellow and I actually managed to come into the beach a couple of times standing up, which is pretty much more than I've ever accomplished before so ... yay! We're just chilling at the riad now before our BBQ fish dinner tonight. Food is traditional Moroccan for dinner, continental for breakfast and we get a packed lunch bought to the beach for us - with a surf every morning, it's a pretty healthy set up, so diet friendly as well as relaxing. I'm not actually tracking at the moment, although I did track up until airport departure yesterday, but just being mindful instead of quantities.
On that note, I'm off to shower the salt off myself and maybe watch a film before dinner time!
So, first things first, how did Friday's weigh in go? My first weigh in since returning to Weightwatchers on my return from the Alps, and despite not being at all perfect last week, I still managed to lose a satisfying little 2lbs. In the spirit of all honesty, I should add that my original starting weight was on my dad's scales, but they were driving me potty (they don't just give you one definitive weight reading but keep fluctuating slightly as you move whilst standing on them), so switched back to mine by the end of the week (one number, no arguing) - there might be a slight difference between them, I'm not sure, but I'm on my scales now and we'll take it from there.
So my current weight is 14st 0.5lbs, which hopefully means that my next weigh in will take me back in to the 13st bracket. Which would be nice. Since that will be post-holiday though, we'll just have to see how that goes! I don't get home until the early hours of Sunday morning, so will just take a reading on Sunday morning when I get up and take it on the chin whatever I get.
Which brings me nicely to the far nicer topic of holidays! I'm on my first ever solo holiday. I've gone away for a couple of days on my own before (surfing in Devon) and I travelled independently in 2013 (a month in Africa, one week with a charity and 3 weeks on an organised tour), but this is the first time I've come away for a self-contained, stay in one place holiday all on my own. And I'll be honest - there were points yesterday when I wondered what the hell I was doing, as I journeyed from my Dad's house to Manchester airport and on to Morocco.
I think my most awkward moment came at dinner yesterday, when I'd literally just arrived at the riad at 9.30pm, and our host took me down to the dinner table in the courtyard and invited me to sit down with all the other guests to eat ... they'd all eaten their first course already and, as it turned out, they'd all been there a couple of days already, and I just thought "aaaaaaaargh - this is not as easy as I'd hoped!". But turns out they're pretty friendly for the most part, there's a couple of other solo travellers, and another new guy's just arrived as I sit here typing this, so I'm sure I'll survive!
We had our first surf session this morning under cloudy skies, but the waves were mellow and I actually managed to come into the beach a couple of times standing up, which is pretty much more than I've ever accomplished before so ... yay! We're just chilling at the riad now before our BBQ fish dinner tonight. Food is traditional Moroccan for dinner, continental for breakfast and we get a packed lunch bought to the beach for us - with a surf every morning, it's a pretty healthy set up, so diet friendly as well as relaxing. I'm not actually tracking at the moment, although I did track up until airport departure yesterday, but just being mindful instead of quantities.
On that note, I'm off to shower the salt off myself and maybe watch a film before dinner time!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)