Well, Hey February!

Time flies when you're having fun, eh?

It's been a jam-packed couple of weeks of social and well ... illness and accidents - yay.

Nothing too serious, I have to say, but I continued my three month streak of one accident a month in January by falling over literally just after I wrote the last post.  I dragged my sorry ass out for a run in the wet, cold and dark and due to wearing glasses for my ulcerated cornea, I steamed up and tripped over a drain cover.  I kid you not.  You literally couldn't make that shit up could you?

So yeah - there was me, running along feeling quite comfortable and smug to be running on a cold, wet Sunday evening .... BAM.  Face first into the floor with literally no warning.  I caught my toe on a pokey-uppy bit of a drain cover and went down at about 100mph.  So fast that I barely had time to get my hands out and actually bruised my stomach hitting the deck - can't say I've done that before.  Given the state of my hands just bouncing off the floor, it's a good job I didn't get them out properly to break my fall.  I limped home dripping some blood and attempting to control my wobbly lip.

And then I gave up running until I a) didn't have such a disastrously bruised and grazed knee, and b) could put my lenses back in so I could avoid a repeat.  I still feel oddly paranoid about tripping again for some reason but have managed a 5k run since with no problem.  Of course, I then dutifully got one of the colds doing the rounds so spent a week feeling breathless and trying not to cough or sneeze so hard my ribs cracked, so that put another halt on the running.

But I did enter a triathlon in May for shits and giggles.

Oh god - why did that seem like a good idea at the time????  It's a bit different to the usual format because it's a 3km stand up paddle board, 15km mountain bike ride and 5km trail run.  Gulp.  I've sort of already resigned myself to finishing last and just taking my time doing it.

Weight-wise I'm still reading, journalling and trying to figure out how to unravel years worth of pants eating behaviours.  I've been tracking less and less, and I've noticed that there are definitely some behaviours that I've addressed - situations where I would have previously eaten (boredom, loneliness, frustration, feeling cold or tired), where I'm now much better at identifying them and doing something else instead to remedy them.  Throughout this my weight has stayed very stable - exactly where I was 3 weeks ago - but with far fewer fluctuations than I would normally expect to see for the amount of socialising I've been doing.  I've spent two weekends away - one weekend with the girls in Leeds, which would ordinarily be heavy-drinking and indulgent, and last weekend at the Watergate Bay Hotel in Cornwall - 2 nights of fine dining and drinking, but I've barely seen any bloat after either weekend, which is great, and I've felt more relaxed.

Now I need to figure out how to shift my excess weight a little bit at a time whilst maintaining that same relaxed approach.  At the moment, I'm just starting to experiment with trusting myself to eat exactly what I want with no judgment of good or bad foods, but within the parameters of only eating when I'm hungry and stopping when I'm full.  A bit of a terrifying proposition because I naturally (well, I thought it was natural, but all my recent reading is turning things on their head, so maybe it's not so natural) have a very sweet tooth.  I'm also very used to eating at mealtimes, and it feels very odd to just wait until I'm hungry to eat.

I'll let you know how that works out!

So that's me - still around, still working on showing myself some love (I've actually bought myself some chocolates and flowers for Valentines Day because I deserve them) and heading off skiing again a week tomorrow.