Getting Ready For Christmas

Well, this poor little corner of the internet is truly a little sadly neglected these days, but actually, for once, it's not because things have gone completely tits up with the weight loss, but rather that things are just ticking along in a very undramatic fashion, which doesn't make for the most interesting writing!

Just over 6 months since I adopted my new approach, and I'm now about 17lbs down, and I'm just slipping out of the 14 stone bracket and into the 13s again - a fact that makes me very happy.

I fully expected December to be a month of pretty minimal losses, what with the festive season in full swing, but committed myself to at least remaining absolutely 100% honest in my tracking during that period, so I could make sense of the gains and losses that occurred.  Instead, a week and a half into the month I appear to have had another little jump forward on the scales and have lost nearly 4lbs. Go figure!  I expect that the final figure at the end of the month might end up a little smaller after all's said and done, but I'm content with how things are going.

17lbs means that clothes that were tight are now loose, and trousers that really didn't do up are now being worn regularly.  It's made quite a different to my confidence (or learning to trust myself and making some final peace with food has - I'm not quite sure which at this point!) and I'm feeling pretty ok with life.

My only concrete New Years Resolution that I know I will be making yet is that I will be continuing to treat myself with love, respect and a little dose of honesty well into next year, and see where it takes me.  That, and making a trip to Bali and Lombok happen.

In the meantime, the house is looking very Christmassy - I probably spent waaaaay too much on decorations last month in preparation, but I don't care too much as they'll last years - and I've been baking Christmas goodies (Swedish Christmas Biscuits! Mince pies!) and getting organised with my present buying.  I'm feeling pretty chill, if a little broke, and pretty organised at this point.  It's a bloody Christmas Miracle!

Even better, my dad is coming to me for Christmas this year!!  This is another Miracle with a capital M because Dad hates being broken out of his comfortable routines.  But with my own house this year, which he helped buy and hasn't yet been to see, plus the fluffy majesty that is Otto to think about, I suggested that it might be nice if I host this year, and after a bit of persistent "suggesting" he gave in! I'm super excited!

It's going to be a good Christmas - I have a very positive feeling.

And I have a feeling that 2018 might just be a corker (as long as Trump doesn't start a new world war).

October Already?

This year is just flying past!  I can't believe that it is October already and Autumn is firmly upon us but life is not too shabby at the moment.

I've had a fab holiday in the Pyrenees - 2 weeks going coast to coast from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic full of relaxing by the beach and taking in the amazing scenery of the mountains.  We walked loads, stayed on a yacht  and enjoyed the local speciality of tartiflette pizza (bacon, onion, potatoes and cream on pizza - what dreams are made of).

I'm still bumbling along with my Weightwatchers "Plus" approach to eating and ... it's going quite well.  I've lost 11lbs since the end of May which is slow and steady, but definitely adds up as time goes by.  Admittedly, I lost nearly 7lbs of that in the first month, and the losses have been slower after that (and I went up a couple of lbs after holiday) but the losses do keep coming.  Which is awesome.

I've also kicked my activity up a level over the summer and as well swimming and a bit of yoga, I'm now regularly incorporating HIIT into my routine and have even started running again in the last couple of weeks.  I'm not doing it to speed up weight loss, or even inch loss particularly, but because it makes me feel good, and empowered, and I've actually noticed a difference in my fitness and strength.  It's taken a while to build up to it, and I think the fact I've built up to it slowly has meant things like running have actually been less painful to re-introduce.

Having said I wasn't doing it for the inch loss, that has been one of the nice side effects.  My clothes are fitting better already and my weight and size are better than they were before Borneo last summer.

The house is coming along and it's slowly, slowly starting to look like a home, and one I can be proud of.  I have a good contract currently with people I like and it looks set to run until sometime between the end of the year and next March which is good news.

I think, in short, life feels pretty good right now.

The Return To Weightwatchers

I’m extremely conscious that over the last 18 months or more, I have written on more than one occasion that I really think that this time I’ve found the key to losing my excess weight without returning to dieting.  And yet here I am, still carrying that excess weight round with me.

I read a lot around emotional eating and different coaching approaches, make another little breakthrough with my understanding of my emotional eating and for a week or two I’m really conscious with my eating and the scales start to drop.  Then life happens, as it tends to do, and my mind wanders back into its old patterns and I’m back where I started, or occasionally a little heavier.  So it is, that in the 18 months since quitting Weightwatchers and dieting as a whole, I have ended up about 8-10 lbs heavier than I was on quitting.  My mental state and my attitude to food is undoubtedly better now, and I have detoxed myself of the fear of certain foods and re-normalised most things into my diet, but I have still not shifted the excess.

After a gorgeous long weekend away in Wales with 4 friends at the second May Bank Holiday, I came home feeling bloated and a few lbs heavier than I left – extended social occasions are always the toughest on my eating – and this time something shifted in my brain:  I absolutely did not want to return to dieting, but I fully recognized that I needed some extra tool that was missing from my repertoire to help me … and so I signed up to Weightwatchers again with a plan that this time things would be a little different.

Let me explain:  whenever I did Weightwatchers previously (let’s call it Weightwatchers Original) or any other diet, I always approached it as the Solution To All My Problems.  This Plan would tell me everything I needed to do to make the weight fall away and as long as I followed it faithfully (and perfectly!), success would surely follow!  I would contort myself into whatever patterns the diet told me to, cut back my intake drastically and for a while it would probably work.  Then I would get resentful of the restrictions, fall foul of feelings of deprivation, over-eat a bit, decide that if I couldn’t do it perfectly there’s no point in doing it at all, beat myself up, eat everything in sight, beat myself up some more for good measure, and eventually viciously restrict myself to get “back on track” and “make up” for my dieting indiscretions.  I gave all authority to the diet and assumed I could make myself fit it.

A model, I think we can agree, that is clearly flawed.

Enter my intended new way of doing things, which we shall call Weightwatchers Plus ….. otherwise known as utilizing the Weightwatchers tools to suit me personally.

During my time away from dieting, I have come to conclusion that I get easily distracted from what I have consumed throughout the day, and I wanted a way to stay aware of what I’d eaten.  A way to track my food and therefore make fully conscious decisions.  What I didn’t want was the accompanying set of standard rules and regulations – I want to trust myself to work out for myself how many points I need and to take a more flexible approach to how I eat them throughout the week, rather than falling into the increasingly extreme binge and restrict cycles that I ended up in by the time I quit Weightwatchers back in 2015.

I am choosing to sacrifice fast, “guaranteed” weight loss in favour of conducting some research on myself over a series of weeks to build a picture of how much I can eat in order to lose weight, maintain or gain.  I’m trying to become my own expert on me and take responsibility for the results of what I eat.

It’s been 4 weeks since I started this new Weightwatchers Plus approach.  For the first couple of weeks, I haven’t intentionally restricted my food at all, but I have faithfully tracked everything and consequently I sometimes find myself making more responsible decisions based on what I’ve already had that day.  I’ve started writing down at the end of the week how many points I’ve consumed in total and calculating a points per day for that week, recording what deliberate exercise I’ve done and what weight I’ve lost, and I’ve kept an eye on those stats.  They’re pretty fascinating.  Weightwatchers Original plan would have me eat 37 points a day on average (including my Flex allowance) – that first week I averaged 47 points a day and lost nearly 3 lbs. 

It turns out that, at the moment, I can lose weight by eating anywhere between 45 and 55 points per day on average, and over the first 4 weeks I lost just shy of half a stone.  So this is what I’m now calling Weightwatchers Plus – my own personalized plan.  In the first month, I have religiously tracked everything because I don’t have rules on how much I can consume so I don’t need to be embarrassed or disgusted at myself about anything.  There are no bad days or bad food.  Curiously, since taking this new approach I haven’t had any of those binge days that used to plague my original attempts to follow Weightwatchers, no days of 100 points or more or even close to that.  It always fits into my life, because it’s completely flexible.  I’ve noticed that the items I’m least keen to have to add to the tracker are the things I’m debating eating due to something other than physical hungry and the thought of it seems to be enough to slow me down and have a think many times.

I am conducting an experiment in Me.  I will continue eating roughly as I am, and tracking the results of that, until the current losses tail off, and then I will look to just reduce my intake a little bit – maybe even just a few points a day on average, until I observe losses picking up again.  

I have bought quite a few habits with me from my time off-dieting, including not being afraid to use a healthy chunk of points on breakfast and things like avocado or peanut butter which pack a hefty number or points, but also happen to keep you full for ages.  Consequently my snacking levels are still down and it’s rare for me to feel super hungry.  I’ve started cooking properly again, including batch cooking dishes so I can bring leftovers for lunch and I’ve recently been rekindling some affection for moving a bit more and getting some activity on.

I have no expectation on what kind of losses, or rate, I can expect, and in many ways I’ve resolved to focus on what I’ve already achieved and be grateful for it, rather than get hung up and impatient about the next target to reach – it’s so unsatisfactory and negative to always focus on what I don’t have rather than what I do.

Life Lately

Once upon a time I was a good little blogger and actually wrote posts on a regular basis.  Looking back now, I thought it hadn't been as long as it clearly has since I last wrote, and also - I was much better at posting last year than I thought I was! Huh - who knew?

But anyhoo - apparently it was January when I last wrote something and I'm not really sure where the time has gone since then.  If it's any comfort, it's seems to have really flown by in real life too!

In just 2 days time, it will already be 4 months since I got the keys to my very first house.  4 MONTHS!!  It's certainly looking homier than when I moved, and yet I've also not got as much done as I dreamily thought I would.  Mostly because I've discovered that a) I hate painting.  I only did one room so far and that was quite enough for me - next time I'm getting a decorator in to do the main slog for me! and b) everything costs a lot more than you think and buying a house is really expensive and basically I ran out of money for now.  Probably not helped by the fact that I slunk off for a 5 star week skiing in Switzerland in January - oops.

What I have managed to do though is completely paint the front bedroom and get new carpet laid and when I finally have time to drive a van to my dad's house and collect my bed from him I can actually think about moving in there - well done me!

I've started hanging my pictures, bought a sofa and a coffee table (the tv stand is still a cardboard box though) and spent endless hours pouring over the internet trying to work out what style my house will be and splodging paint samples in different rooms.  I've planted a few things in the garden which miraculously haven't died yet and I bought some seeds to plant a few vegetables - ambitious I know!

I have a cat! A giant, fluffy, black and white called Otto has come to live with me and we're just about getting to know each other and find a rhythm now.  He throws up hairballs and tries to trip me up when I walk down the hall and I baby-talk him and freak him out with feathery cat toys which he thinks are trying to kill him - it's delightful.  But all is right with the world when he curls up next to me and delicately puts a paw on me to check I'm still there / ask for a scratch behind the ears.

I went skiing at the end of January and got to tick a new country off the list - I loved it but goddamn it, I really miss the mountains.  One week a year is not enough.

I handed in my notice on my job - I have two weeks left to go and I am so ready to be out of there.  It was way past time for me to do it and I'm enormously looking forward to a short break and finding my next opportunity.  Speaking of which I did the foundation course for coaching in February with the Coaches Training Institute in London.  It was an eye-opening 3 days that challenged me more than anything in years and made me realise that I hate getting something wrong, but that it also doesn't kill me.

And finally - because it's sort of the point of the blog - I'm hoping that I'm slowly turning a corner with my eating and my weight.  It's slow, slow progress, but I'm consistently a few lbs down from where I was at the end of last year.  Of course, I'm still up from where I was when I quit dieting but I'm happy if I'm slowly heading in the right direction.  I've not got far on the scales yet, but have noticed it more in how some of my clothes fit and someone actually commented today that they thought I'd lost a little.  I shall take that comment and run with it!

A lot of the work I've been doing recently has been around working out what triggers you to eat in the first place and working to remove it - quitting this job and figuring out a better long term career plan are big parts of that ... of course I also gave up alcohol for Lent, so that could also have something to do with the loss - I don't know but I guess we'll find out in the coming weeks!

In the meantime - I'm super looking forward to the long weekend for Easter, spending time with Otto, good friends and my Dad, sleeping, watching films, reading old favourite books and pottering in the house and garden.

And on that note, I'm about to fire up Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and sit back and watch.

Enjoy the bank holiday!

Joy

One of the books I was reading recently suggested the idea that a common reason for eating more than we physically need is due to not enough joy in other areas of our lives.

It's an interesting idea because, in a weird way, it means I've got kind of lazy.  It means I basically stopped making the effort to find what I actually enjoy doing, and resorted to food for easy-access joy.  

Since making that realisation, I've started questioning a lot of the times I find myself at the cupboard.  The result has been turning away from the kitchen a lot of the time, and on other occasions taking a little bit of something and really savouring; knowing full well that I am eating it for joy, not fuel, and accepting that.

The scales are currently creeping down by tiny increments.  I'm working on not expecting any particular results by a specific time - this is part a work of self-acceptance, and part a realisation that changing my habits and beliefs takes time, and therefore the external symptom of my habits and beliefs will also take time.  It's hard though because we're all conditioned to want the result right now, and I have to put the work in to get the results.

On the positive side, with the scales dropping slowly I'm experiencing the opposite of what normally happens.  The weight that usually insidiously creeps on, that you don't really notice (or deliberately deny), until suddenly one day your jeans don't fit - well, that is basically going the other way.  If I can keep my impatience in check, and just keep going with the self-acceptance and the mindfulness, I will wake up one day and find my jeans don't fit for all the right reasons.

So I've been working on bringing joy back into my life - recognising what makes me happy, actively monitoring my boredom levels and setting myself activities to occupy myself - not distraction so much as actually filling my time well - sometimes that's practical stuff around the house like decorating, and sometimes that consciously sitting down with a good book or tv show to enjoy, and I have to say, if nothing else comes out of it, my house is slowly getting decorated and I'm feeling generally pretty content!