Changing the plan

I've decided to change my weigh in day to a Friday for a bit as an experiment.

Why?

I'll explain.

Every week my eating falls into a set pattern: during the week I eat pretty clean. I cook my dinners, mostly from scratch, I eat breakfast and a proper lunch, and I have snacks to keep my metabolism boosted. I get some fruit and veg, and I drink plenty of fluids. I also get some exercise. My weekends then fall into one of 3 categories:

1. It's a really quiet weekend, and my eating's the same as during the week. Clean.
2. It's a normal weekend - I do a bit of planning, but it's a little bit more fluid than during the week. I'll stick to my points, prob including any saved points from during the week, but I might eat out, which will be added sodium and MSG (doesn't particularly agree with me). Not as clean as during the week, but not overly bad.
3. All hell breaks loose, and I go massively over points somewhere along the line. My eating is in no way clean, I've probably not drunk enough (or too much of the wrong stuff), and I know I'm on track for a gain. There's no point even trying to regain the points I've gone over, so I just switch to sticking to points for the remaining days till weigh in.

Very occasionally, scenario 4 occurs:

• Sue is broken. I've gone so far over the line, that the line is a distant memory, just a pinprick on the horizon, and I just give up trying to point it, as I don't have that many fingers and toes (I'm an accountant, and it's a well known fact that we can't count very well). All damage control measures are thrown out of the pram along with the toys. I stop caring, until after weigh in. When I care very much.

With all that in mind, weighing in on a Monday is a bit of a traumatic experience, because I never know how the weekend is going to have affected all the groundwork that I layed the previous week.

Ultimately, of course, the groundwork still counts, and in the grand scheme of things, I still lose the same amount of weight over the long run. But how often have I bemoaned the fact, that if I was just weighing in a couple of days later, my weight wouldn't be fluctuating so much.

Well, call me slow, but it's just occurred to me, that I don't have to weigh in on a Monday if I don't want to. So I'm going to move my weigh in day as far away from the weekend as possibe - et voila - we end up on Friday.

(See how I've neatly cycled back to the beginning - beautiful. Unless, you're one of those impatient types who wanted me to actually make my point quickly, in which case my friend, you are on the wrong blog entirely!!)

So there we have it - it's not going to make me lose weight quicker, I'm not that deluded, but it might help me avoid the traumatic peaks and troughs, and make better sense of what I can get away with, and what is genuinely too much.

That said - moving my weigh in day has meant that I have inadvertantly bought last weekend's excesses into this week - oh goody! I've somehow got rid of about 8 points of my deficit already, but I've still got another 11.5 to get rid of.

I optimistically booked myself in for Body Combat last night whilst I was at the gym, but I now realise that I'm still far too stiff to attempt it. I desperately want to know how much longer all these twinges can last for, because my stretches don't seem to be making much difference. Think I'm going to have to back as see my physio again, and hope and pray that she says it will fix itself. Preferably without me having to take 1 or 2 complete weeks of exercise. And definitely before windsurfing in just under 4 weeks. Getting a leeeeeeetle bit worried about it now!!

Haircuts and heart rate monitors

Wooohooooo - it's Friiiiiidaaaaaaay!!

Yeah!!

Well, thank god for that, because frankly, it's been a long and tiresome week at work!! It's funny how you feel much better once you've left the office for the week, been home and had some lunch and then had a bit of pampering at the hairdressers. I'm now sporting some ultra-big, glam-style hair (that'll last as long as the next shower!), which I think looks rather nice!


What's been extra nice today is I've had loads of compliments on both my weight loss and my clothes - I do soooooo love it when that happens. I am fabulous after all lol.

Friday's are always a bit funny for me, as I only work 5 hours, so don't have a lunchbreak. So I always end up snacking my way through the morning but missing out on lunch - apart from the very few weeks when I'm organised enough to remember to take something with me. Ah well, no harm done!

I'm looking forward to spending time with friends tonight - we're all feeling pretty poor at the moment after booking holidays and other such stuff, so we're having a fun night in with the Wii - we'll be rocking out with a bit of guitar hero I reckon!

New Toys - Revisited

My shiny new Polar F6 hear rate monitor arrived today ... it was there to greet me on the front doorstep when I got home.

Yes, of course I ripped the box open and started playing pretty much straight away. So I now know I have a resting heart rate of around 60. I think that's quite good so I'm pretty pleased. Can't wait to test this baby out .... guess it'll have to wait til Sunday's circuits though, as I've got stuff I've got to sort tomorrow during the day before the wedding in the evening.

Broken ... And Then At Least Partly Fixed

I had my first session with Kate, my physio, last night. Yikes, that woman can be brutal sometimes. It's a little disturbing lying face down on the table, mid-conversation, when your back suddenly gets pounded so hard it cracks audibly and you come to an abrupt halt mid-word! Just started talking again, and another thump / crack. Maybe she just wanted to shut me up???

After 45 mins of sports massage, work with some weird vibration massager that feels like an excrutiating mix of pleasure / pain when you hit a really tense spot (like pushing on a sore muscle the morning after a hard work out - it's on the border of pain, but oddly satisfying - then magnify by about 20), and finally ultra-sound with freeze gel, I wearily dragged myself off the table. But I feel a million times better today.

My walking's looser today, and I can tell that the niggles I've got now are just where I've not been using muscles for a couple of weeks. Kate reckons it's exactly what I had in January again, and nothing worse.

Basically, what came out though, is that I'm an impatient sod, and I can't expect it to just heal itself up instantly. When I said about the doctor / NHS physio telling me to get back to my normal routine as soon as possible, Kate just looked at me, pretty much rolled her eyes, and said "they didn't mean your normal routine though!!!" Apparently, they just meant going to work etc, not running, spinning, blah, blah, blah. So I've got to allow myself another couple of weeks to heal properly, before I can expect to get fully back up to speed. Grrrrrr.

Right, well I'm off to grab some food before I head out for the evening. Have a great weekend all! xx

Ooops!

Let me tell you a little story, about a good little Weight Watcher who was doing oh, so well, until she went to her Daddy's house for dinner. And then it happened. Dessert. Sigh.

Story of my life that! My dad, Lord love him, is at heart, a feeder. He's never really happier than when he's fussing over people, and able to offer them nice food. Especially cakes and desserts. And I'm such a sucker for rhubarb crumble that it would take some Herculean-style effort of willpower for me to say no. And Hercules I ain't.

Luckily, this story isn't all doom and gloom because I had points saved for this week already, and since I was still a few points short when I got home and added it up, I shoved my swimsuit and a towel in my bag and pottered off to the pool for 30 mins (and 30 lengths), to collect a few more.

Oh yeah - and at least I said no to the fudge that was offered apres-pudding!

Other than that, it's been another good day lol.

Physio Appointment

And thank god for that - tomorrow evening I'm off to see Kate, my trusty physio. I've given up waiting for the NHS to remember me and my "urgent" referral, and I know Kate's good because she straightened me out (literally; and then she made me touch my toes again) in January after crippling myself snowboarding. I can't wait - even swimming tonight I could feel horrible cramp-i-ness in my left ankle and (weirdly) ass-cheek, and this whole episode is just beyond tedious now.

So I'm quite sure she'll lever me into some ridiculous and wholly uncomfortable position and laugh at me when I whimper in pain, but I'll feel better afterwards. Kate's hilarious - she's really posh and swears a lot, usually whilst wrapping your leg round the back of your head or something equally weird, all whilst telling some crazy anecdote about her family life, but she sure gets results. Well worth the money.

New Toys!

I'm such a big kid when it comes to shiny things - I get all excitable! So I was very pleased earlier today, to receive an email to say that my new heart rate monitor had been dispatched - yay!!!

I've wanted one of these for ages, and I've been umming and ahhhing over cost and what to buy. I finally settled on a Polar F6, which has the option to transfer your work-out data from the last 12 workouts onto your computer and save online for comparison over time - hopefully, I'll be seeing some progress!

It's also got audio-visual alarms if you want to work in a set heart rate zone, which will be great for this aerobic working out that I'm meant to be doing as part of the gym challenge. For me, my zone is 115 - 135 for my body to be burning fat rather than gycogen, so the monitor will really help me target that.

I've been thinking about everything I've been reading, and been told, about aerobic and anaerobic exercise, and I'm thinking one of the things I can do to mix things up is to try and get a bit of both in the week. At the moment, pretty much all of my preferred work outs are anaerobic - spinning, running and combat are all in that zone. What I want to do is make sure I get a few lower impact sessions in the week. My intention to start yoga / pilates will fill in one session. Swimming is probably another one for me, and then I guess more walking would be good too. I'm quite enjoying the whole circuits class at the moment too, so I might look into whether there are any of those around that I could do.

Anyhoo - I was really pleased because I managed to pick this baby up for just under £50, when it should be about £80 or £90 full-price - bargainacious!

And there you have it - half way through the week already, and wondering where the time's gone!

Weigh in

I'm feeling a little more sane this week. I'm back on track - 2 good days in the bag, and after circuits on Sunday, I managed to make it to spin last night. I didn't go at it full pelt like I usually would, but I found I could do most things without aggravating my various injuries too much.

Even so, weigh in yesterday showed a small gain of 0.5lb. Pretty much the smallest gain I could have had, but a gain none the less - can't escape the scales when you've been over-eating pretty much 6 days out of 7 of the previous week. It did occur to me yesterday to check my diary though, which partially explained last week's temporary food insanity - I must have PMS'd my way through the latter half of the week without realising it, which multiplied the effect of my doom-and-gloom over everything else. Ah well - as I say - normal service has now been resumed.

I've also decided to bite the bullet and book some private physio again. I've got less than 6 weeks before windsurfing, which will be a pretty rough week on my body, so I need to get myself sorted out, and clearly waiting for the NHS to forgive me for missing an appt (through no fault of my own) and give me another one is not going to work. That and the fact that I'm still eating painkillers like their candy, and I'd quite like to have a stomach-lining left when I get old and disgraceful!