Hello, Mr Bank Manager …

I’ve just taken what was, for me, a very scary step.

I’ve rung my bank and spent quite a while talking through my debts and trying to sort out a better solution for them.

*************

The worst part of being an adult, is that you have to stand tall and face your own fears.  There’s no parental figure to hide behind when things get tough, and for the most part cushioning of childhood is gone.

I’ve spoken before, I think, about the fact that I’ve managed to get myself in a financial mess in the last couple of years.  I’ve never been great with my own money (oh yes, spot the irony of a debt-saddled accountant – hilarious), but the last couple of years saw me take my eye off the ball and let it get somewhat out of control.

Probably much the way some proportion of readers here feel about their weight.

Debt’s a little bit sneaky though.  Whereas when you put on weight there only is a certain amount of denying it you can get away with – after all, everyone else can see it, and you’re clothes will certainly tell you sooner or later – it is entirely possible to completely stick your head in the sand with debts and just pretend it isn’t happening.  After all – if like me, you have a decent credit rating and a slightly above average salary, the financial institutions are falling over themselves to lend you money, and it takes a bloody long time for you to get to the point where you start to feel the bite of the repayments.  But like all good things – the fairytale comes to an end, and one day you realise, with a panic-stricken jolt, what a horrible mess you’ve got yourself into.

If you’re me, it’s one step worse, because as a professionally qualified accountant who’s been living the life of riley for years and is apparently successful in the financial world, it’s frankly embarrassing to have to own up that you have an alarming amount of debt lurking in the background.

Still, I have started to face up to it.  I’ve scared myself sufficiently to realise that now is the time to do something about it, whilst I can still just about afford to take control without damaging my credit record further.  That’s given me the motivation to get this thing sorted.  I got over the embarrassment and told a few close friends, and I’m trying to be open about it, so they can support me (is any of this sounding familiar from anyone about to start a healthy-eating and fitness plan???), and I’ve sat down and written down the nasty truth, and worked out a budget so that I have a realistic plan for getting it paid off.  And that’s got me through the first couple of months. 

I’m finding it hard to adjust to having a strict budget (oh God – this is a diet!), but the longer I stick to it, the more I find that a) I appreciate now how all my spending adds up, and b) I am sometimes surprised by how little it’s possible to live on relatively comfortably if I apply myself (it’s like Weightwatchers for my bloody bank account!!!!).  But what I started with wasn’t enough – chipping away at the balance a tiny bit at a time is good, but I can do better.

So I’ve finally bitten the big bullet, and done the thing I’m really scared of.  I’ve rung the bank and asked about my options.  Admitting to your friends that you’re broke and in debt is one thing – doing to the bank is a whole lot bigger and scarier.  I owe somewhere in the realms of £22k between my credit cards and my overdraft.  That is a whole big heap of debt.  I’ve heard of worse, admittedly, but I need to get a handle on my personal ball of pain now.

The problem I’ve had, is that I already applied for one loan so I can pay off my cards and cut them all up, but because of the way credit checking works, they don’t take into account that I want the loan instead of the credit cards, and not as well as, and so I was turned down.  Speaking to the bank has been my next option, because I obviously I want to do something so I’m paying less interest and have a strict payment plan to stick to, but actually having to beg the bank – well, it’s just not a nice option.

But I’ve done it.  It’s a little bit more expensive each month than I wanted, which will mean having to stay on a really strict budget until I can either engineer another payrise or can find some costs I can comfortably cut back on, and it’s a slightly higher interest rate than I wanted, but it’s still half the interest rates on my cards / overdraft and has the flexibility to repay early if I can find a better financial option later.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get accepted straight off, and my application has been referred for someone to individually review (again – most likely because of my current balance of debt and the fact that they need to manually adjust my budget (they took about a billion details of my income and outgoings) to cancel my current debt-repayments off), so I now have a nerve-wracking 3 days to wait and find out if I’ve been accepted or not.

I’m literally praying at this point (probably somewhat pointless as a confirmed non-believer), because this would be a big step forward for me in getting my finances straightened out, and I’m not sure what I’ll do if it gets rejected.

I know this is a little off-track from my usual topics of conversation, but I guess my blog title is Losing A Little Bit of Me, and right now this debt is a rather large part of life, and an even larger source of stress to me, to boot.

Fingers crossed, eh?

Feeeeeed Me!

One of the things that I have always found hardest to deal with is trying to make good decisions when I’m hungry.  Not a bit hungry, but really-freaking-starving, got-the-shakes hungry.

My natural inclination is always instant gratification, and preferably in the sweetest but sugar-laden form I can find.  I literally crave sugar when I hit that level of hunger, and it is so difficult to think clearly at that stage.  As I’ve mentioned before, I also suffer from a massive case of eyes-bigger-than-stomach when I’m really hungry too.  I want it all, and I want it now, damnit!!!!

Conquering myself when I’m in that situation is literally an effort of willpower – a conscious decision to fight it, and try and make the best decision I can at that time.

For me, that was this evening.  I was so hungry when I got home from work, that I was literally prowling round the kitchen looking for what would hit the spot.  Cereal straight from the box?  Tempting.  Cake decorations from the cupboard?  I kid you not – it crossed my mind.  How about decision no. 2?  Something more sensible to hold me over like a banana.  Zero points and it’ll probably take the edge off for a bit.

Or here’s a thought:  why not just suck it up like a big girl, and just get on with cooking the damn dinner????  My planned dinner was pasta with a tomato and vegetable sauce – even cooked fresh from scratch (it’s still one of my favourite meals as it’s so colourful and tasty and chunky and wholesome, and just all-round guilt-free!) it takes a little over 10 mins.  Surely, I could hold out that long???

I probably cooked a few more veggies than I strictly needed in a normal-sized portion – a whole red pepper, half an onion, some garlic, a couple of small carrots, half a courgette and 3 large-ish closed cup mushrooms, but given that was pretty much all of dinner, with just the addition of half a can of tomatoes and a 60g portion of pasta, I don’t think I need to worry too much.

So a small win for me.

Another fight for me, is taking the time after a meal to sit and relax and allow my stomach to say “hey matey, I’m full now, ta”.  Which it did after 20 mins or so, meaning I could stop obsessing over pudding and think a bit more clearly.  Sometimes I wonder why it should be so hard to just get the small things right, that other people do without even thinking.

Post-dinner / feeding frenzy, I’ve been thinking about this plan for the weekend, and the required strategising I mentioned earlier.Here’s the problem with me – in order for me to actually lose weight, I have to approach this eating / moving malarkey with something akin to military precision.  And discipline.  And let’s face it – neither of those is a natural state of affairs for me.  If I just roll with it, 9 times out of 10, I do enough to maintain but no more.  But it did occur to me earlier, that completely accidentally, I’ve picked up the organising of food and drink for our barge this weekend, which puts me in some kind of control.  More than that, I already know what’s been planned for Friday night’s dinner, and I’ve had to pre-order my food for Saturday.  So, I have more than control – I have the ability to pre-plan and pre-track a lot of my food over the next couple of days, and retain a total awareness of what remaining points I have to play with this weekend.  Wooohoooo – could this the plan of success????

I hate that having to be so conscious of my diet / exercise in order to have any success causes me to dread weekends away like this.  But I reckon with a little bit of forethought, I can have my cake and eat it (or in this case: crème brulee on Saturday night).

So I guess I’m off to scare myself with how many points this weekend is likely to consume if I’m not careful.  Better now than afterwards though!

A Weekend Well Spent

It never ceases to amaze me what a weekend on track can do to the scales on a Monday morning.  It should be the basis of encouraging me to get on with it and stick to the plan for, well I would say the rest of the week, but really indefinitely til I get where I want to be. 

Oddly, after all that stretching in Body Balance  yesterday, I actually feel a little tight and stiff today, but I hadn't got any plans to work out so I shall call it a rest day and let it be.

My dinners are already planned for the rest of the week, and with an element of organisation seeming to kick back in, I made my lunch last night, and remembered how much easier that makes everything in the mornings.  So I'm going to make the effort to make my lunches, and clean and pack my gym kit the night before for the rest of the week to keep things simple.

I'm off again for a long weekend in Wales from Friday, and shall be heading back up to Malvern on Thursday night, so rather than attempt a dodgy weigh-in on my Dad's scales Friday morning, I shall vote for an early weigh-in at mine on Thursday this week.  Then I need to some hard-core thinking about how I'm going to strategise the weekend, so I get a little of what I fancy without completely cancelling out this week's good work.  I've bimbled around a little bit this past couple of weeks, and although I'm still in the ball-park of my lowest weight (especially as at this morning), I'd like to crack on through that and take another small step forward now.  Psychologically, even setting a new low by half a lb would be great, as it's all still new ground.

So onwards, troops, onwards!  I've got a plan for the week - eat clean, try to stay away from using the activity points, but at any rate, use less than half of them (and thereby also make sure I get off my ass and earn some in the first place!).  I've got PT tomorrow night with Rob, which leaves me Wednesday and Thursday for maybe a lunchtime run and a toning class of some sort - Lili in my office did a Fitball class at the gym a couple of weeks ago on a Thursday, and it left her in suitable amounts of muscular pain afterwards, so I'm tending towards trying that one out (masochistic tendencies?  Moi?).

On a completely different topic, I realised last night that my second anniversary of this blog slid quietly by, unmarked and forgotten, a couple of days ago.  Two years, and my random rants and tangents - yet another thing that I've surprised myself by sticking too, almost as much as my continuing with the diet / healthy eating / fitness quest itself!

I flipped back to my first post last night (which you can find here) and was surprised how much I feel different from the girl who wrote that.  Since then I spent a year losing quite a lot of weight successfully, and a further year figuring out how not lose quite a lot of weight successfully and getting very frustrated with my lack of progress.  It took me quite a long time to work out that what I had managed to do was keep the weight off while I went about living a very full life.  I did a lot of growing in other ways last year:  I tried new things, pushing my boundaries and comfort zones, and taking some chances.  And then I dropped everything to go travelling (and managed to come home the same weight I left), quit my job, got a new job and moved cities.

Compared to the girl who was just starting out on 2009, I've shown myself to have more perserverence, guts and determination, along with sheer, bloody-minded, pig-headed stubborness, than I would ever have guessed.

Now it's just down to me to make my way to wherever I want to be on this blog's 3rd anniversary. 

R & R

Mmmmm, the self-indulgent weekend has continued apiece and boy, have I needed / enjoyed it.

I slept for a straight 11 hours last night, which is totally unheard for me. I'm the kind of girl who routinely exists on 6 hours a night, so I was clearly wiped out.

When I finally did wake up, I felt really refreshed, and since I was in time for it, I had a nice breakfast of crumpets and then wandered over to the gym for Sunday morning Body Balance. Not having been for a couple of weeks, I was a bit disappointed to find myself rather stiff, but it was a great session anyway.

I've been far more on track with my eating this weekend, and despite the temptation of a day with no plans, I've been good today, and have wrestled myself through to the end of the day on my daily points.

Here's to a good week.

- Posted from my iPhone

Lazy Days

I have had a thoroughly self-indulgent day, and it's been bloody great.  I slept in, and when I finally did get up, I had a proper weekend treat breakfast sat on my sofa, in my pj's in the sunshine, taking my time and reading.  I loafed around til lunchtime, and did a few much needed jobs on my to-do list that could be done from the comfort of the sofa (phone call type stuff). 

This afternoon I took a wander up to Clifton Village, which I've been meaning to do for ages now, to have a bit of a nose around and an explore.  It's about a 40 min walk from the flat, but it was a nice afternoon, and I needed to stretch my legs a bit.  I love the mix of boutiques and independent stores up there - it is so damn quaint!  I seriously think I aspire to having one of the gorgeous modern flats up there one day - a chic pad, views of the city, but all the loveliness of the shops and bars at your fingertips.  One day, huh?

Since I'd handily packed my current book, I found myself a promising looking coffee shop and treated myself** to a decadent mid-afternoon tea; a praline hot-chocolate and one of the nicest blueberry and yoghurt muffins ever.  I spent a very enjoyable hour + lazing in the coffee shop, lingering over my cake, reading and doing some quality people watching.  They're very fashonable folks up there in the Village!

Another stroll back down the hill later bought me home for some Glee and tasty stir-fry for dinner.

It's been a lovely day, but I have to admit, as much as I've enjoyed dancing only to my own tune and doing exactly what I want, I have been feeling a little nostalgic and would have enjoyed having someone around to share that with; good friend, loved one, someone special ... just someone to share it with.

In terms of food, I'm doing ok this weekend.  I had a work dinner out last night, which although not terrible did involve rather more alchohol than I'd originally intended (and a follow-up moment of "Oh God, why did I tell them that?" this morning as I recalled my beverage-induced chattiness last night) - between that and my afternoon tea, I've burned through my flex points for this week already.  That's not a problem though, as I have another lazy day of nothing planned tomorrow, and I'm usually pretty good with my eating during the week.

Thinking about Claire's feedback last week on how I use my points, I'm going to try a little experiment this week.  I want to work out, what I can get away with in terms of my losses vs points used, so I have a better idea of how the plan works for me.  I tend to be a little haphazard with Weightwatchers, in that I'm either having an absolutely on-the-ball week and haven't used any of my extra points, or like last week I'm right on the edge and have used them all (or far more than). 

Since I don't often have perfect weeks, I need to work out what I can get away with and still have some more consistent losses - if I know what I can get away with, I'll have a far clearer target to aim for.  So for this week, I'm going to aim to use as few of my activity points as possible, but no more than half of them at the most.  Let's see how that works as a starting point.

I'm also trying to pay more attention to how hungry I am, rather than eating because it's a meal-time, or piling the plate high because the points are zero on something.  For instance:  I had a late breakfast of scrambled eggs on toast with some wafer thin turkey and mushrooms this morning, and consequently, I was not at all hungry by late lunchtime.  I had the smoothie and a yoghurt instead (I was feeling a want for some fruit of some sort), and then enjoyed my afternoon tea later.  Dinner was stir-fry as mentioned, but cooked late, as I was once again not so hungry.  Now I have to persuade myself to listen to my belly that is telling me I'm comfortably full, rather than my head which for some reason wants to carry on nibbling on stuff.

I think I might tidy the kitchen, and then retreat to bed with a film for an early night to avoid the siren call of the kitchen cupboards and fridge.

Night all!

** Treat - yes, treat.  I now take note of something I read a while ago, that pointed out that a "treat" is only a treat if you do it rarely.  If it turns into a regular ingulgence, then it's no longer a treat but a habit ... and 9 times out of 10, it will be a bad habit of some sort (shopping, eating, drinking being the usual "treats").  I used to have coffee and cake in coffee shops a lot, and for a dieter, it's a pretty expensive indulgence to make.  I've cut back since, and now I really enjoy it when I get the chance to do it.  I appreciate it more for the fact that I only do it rarely.

Ah Saturdays ...

... The day when I have time to enjoy homemade smoothies :-)




- Posted from my iPhone

Honesty

Hey kids,

I come here this evening in the spirit of the confessional.  Forgive me readers, because diet-wise, I have sinned. 

Today was always going to be a little testing as I've been out with clients all day, which meant eating a buffet lunch and no chance to exercise, and then I met a friend who lives in the Oxford area for dinner, since I was over that way.

Actually - the day - not so bad.  Sensible breakfast, thoughtful snack and drink for the journey, and I held it together at lunch - a small plate, realistic portions and no going back for seconds.  No snacks other than fruit - not too shabby at all.  Dinner however, wasn't as great.  I was defeated by being taken to a wonderful Thai place, and although I resisted the deliciousness of Thai curry, aside from a  spoonful of Kate's to taste, we did have a mixed starter platter and coconut rice.  Delicious, and a rare treat (I hardly ever get Thai food), but I know I could have stopped earlier than I did, on the rice at the very least.

On the upside, I did resist any suggestions of pudding and also further sweet snacks (any snacks in fact) for the drive home - I knew I was full and that was enough.

I don't forsee a great weigh in tomorrow.

But Claire had a very good point on her comment on yesterday's post - these last two weeks when I've gained, I have been flying very close to the wire on my weekly points allowances (and in fact, I know that this evening's meal will have taken me just over this weeks points), because I've been using all my activity points as well as my allowances.  Even allowing for me trying to be realistic with my food pointing and prudent with my activity points, I have to allow that I may be the wrong side of my allowance by more than I suspect - it's entirely possible. 

I'm also growing a little suspicious of my portion sizes too;  I eat a hell of a lot of vegetables and fruit .... which is all very well and good, but even if it's healthy and "free" on Weightwatchers, I should still be considering my appetite and how much food I actually need, rather than how much I can cram on my plate for the points.  I'm pretty damn sure that I'm eating more volume-wise than I was a couple of weeks ago when I was consistently losing.

So - this week I will most likely show a gain of another lb or 2 tomorrow.  Suck it up, Sue.  I have very little planned this weekend;  I have a work dinner out tomorrow night, but I've pre-ordered my choice of a vegetarian pasta dish in tomato sauce.  We have two free drinks via our meal deal, but I might not bother and just stick to soft drinks.  Even if I use most of my flex up tomorrow, I have a clear weekend to stay in points, and it's usually the weekend free-for-alls that set the week up for failure.  Less drinking, more thought and a little bit of movement. 

I might not lose tomorrow, but I reckon I can get a good loss next week.

More anon, Fellow Battlers of Food!