up and running

groovybabe.co.uk is back up and running so I will go and post over there now. please adjust your links and things. thanks.

WeightLoss

I’ve been doing so well in the day time but it has still been going to pot during the night. Last night in the night I must have consumed 500+ calories. I thought the weigh in today would be a disaster. I started off 15.4, then went down to 15.0 and thought I’d be back up to 15.4 again but I wasn’t! I was down to 14.12!!!! So the concerted effort I am making in the day time must be helping me to lose weight. I am well happy.

I am reading that book about overeating as it arrived this morning. It talks about over eating as an addiction and I have to say so far it comes across as the biggest load of rubbish I have ever read. It might just not apply to me as I have battled the over eating mostly, it is just the night time stuff that relates to me but I am just not that impressed with it really. I will read the whole book though as it does have some informative stuff in it like about sugar being a drug. It suggests not looking at weightloss as a goal but as a side effect of healthy eating, which is all well and good but when you’re obese losing weight is not about looking better but about improving your health and she doesn’t really take that into account. She makes a lot of assumptions about fat people, predominately that we all want to lose weight to make other people like us more. And while that obviously is a factor in our motivation, it is certainly not my principal reason for weightloss (not anymore anyway). Anyway, enough on that book or I will wind myself up to the point where I can’t read it any more!!

Eating Less

So, I am back on here for the meantime. So please update your rss feeds! I will be back on my domain very soon though so might be an idea to keep both feeds.

I am so poorly!!!!! I think it is hayfever rather than a cold because I just had Lemsip and it hasn’t done a thing. You hear the word ‘hayfever’ and think it’s something not real but believe me it is horrible, you feel really ill. I keep being determined to go to the gym but when it comes to it I just don’t have the energy. I am so scared of getting out of it again but I have to rest while I am not well, I just hope the pollen count goes down soon!

My eating has been getting so much better lately. Not only in amounts but in quality of food too. I am still struggling at night at the moment, last night I had 2 large bowls of cereal through the night but at least it is not sandwich after sandwich as I don’t have any bread in the house now we’re on school holidays. I am thinking of downloading the Paul McKenna Think Yourself Thin hypnosis audio, as I have heard good things about it and I think hypnosis may help with this night time problem. Has anyone used this? What do you think?

I have just ordered Eating Less: Say Goodbye to Overeating by Gillian Riley as I have heard a lot of good stuff about this book around the web. She also has a stop smoking book and people are saying her methods and theories are in a class of their own. And frankly if it can help me to over come my overeating then it will be worth every penny of the £5.99. I am a bit worried that reading about food will cause me to want to overeat through thinking about it but I am hoping this will not be the case and I will find the book thereputic. I will let you know.

Full of Cold

I had a good day yesterday with food. I managed to find a way around night time eating. I ate around 1000 calories during the day so that I had another 400 to play with during the night. Obviously, night time eating is not ideal but at the end of the day what matters is the amount of calories over all. I probably ended up going over by about 200 but that is much better than going over by 700 like I normally do!

Last week I had a good week and lost 6lbs but then over the next day or two I ended up putting it all back on again and returning to 15.4. A lot of that loss was through dehydration so it was not a complete surprise it went back on but there were binges involved. I have been exercising this week and I think that is helping but I have gradually been getting better and am down to 15.0 today. I feel so achieved with this because it has been slower and I know it is more likely to stay off. It encourages me not to binge too.

I have eight weeks until I am going on the cruise, which, at 2lbs per week, means I can lose 16lbs for the trip. This means I will weigh 13.12 stones. Getting into the 13’s has been a goal of mine for probably six months now, so I am just really going to go for it. I want to go work out this afternoon but I am full of cold today and I am not sure I should or whether I will achieve anything.

My hosting is running out on here today and I am too broke to pay for it again this week so the site may be down for a week or so but in the mean time I will write in https://groovybabe.wordpress.com

I’m Going On A Cruise

I have a new incentive to lose weight. My friend has just won an overnight stay on a cruise ship and she has asked me to go with her! We sail from Southampton to Brugge (Belguim) overnight, stay in Brugge for the day and then head back. It is in September. I cannot wait. Everything onboard is free except for alcohol, and we plan on finding some mugs nice young men onboard to fund that! I have to buy a nice new posh outfit so I want to lose some weight and look great! I am going to get a new ‘do and everything. I am so excited!

I had another manic weekend. It was good fun, met a new man but again I don’t think anything will come of it *le sigh*. Still, it was a fun time… Monday I was so worn out from the weekend excesses, it wasn’t really tiredness so much as a huge lack of energy. Tuesday I felt a bit better so I went to the gym. I didn’t have as much energy as I would have liked for my workout but I got through it best I could. Today I woke up with the flu so that explains my lack of energy lately. I am hoping it is just a 24-hour thing though so that I can go work out again tomorrow. I have my cruise to get slim for!!

I cancelled my wwonline subscription. It just isn’t working for me at all. I am up and down like a yo-yo. I am trying calorie counting again with weightlossresources.co.uk as I have had more luck with that in the past, so let’s see how I go with that.

I keep buying and eating strawberries, which in itself is not a bad thing. But according to Gillian McKeith they raise your sex drive and I really do not need mine raising any more than it already is! LOL

Meet You In The Kitchen At 3am?

A couple of months ago I talked about my night time eating. It was a problem then and it is still a problem now. This is intensified by the fact that I suffer from insomnia. But I tend to wake up in the night and half-consciously go and eat, go back to bed, wake up a couple of hours later and repeat the behaviour. This can happen between 2-4 times per night and I don’t know why. I am being so good in the day time and yet including my night time eating I am only just maintaining my weight. I have tried everything I can think of to counter this behaviour. It happens more on sleeping tablets than off then but it is a rare night I don’t eat at all.

I was chatting to my cousin about this at lunch time today. She suffers from it too, we both agreed our rate of loss would be better if we could combat this. We have tried telling ourselves not to do it before going to sleep, having only healthy food around, eating before going to bed, having breakfast but nothing solves it. So I was wondering if any of you have suffered with this and overcome it and if you did and have how did you get past it?

I went to the gym again today. I am so glad I am back into working out, it makes me feel so good. I ran for 10 minutes today and found it fairly easy to do so. I felt so great afterwards, and the weight training is making me feel stronger again.

I eat too much bread, out of all my food vices this is by far the worst. I have gotten into the habit in the last week or so of having a one-egg omelette inside a wholemeal pitta bread, coupled with margarine, this becomes quite calorific. Today I decided to forego the pitta and I had the omelette with a side salad I prepared instead and over halved the calories involved. I felt better for it too. My son is on summer holidays now so I do not need to buy bread for the next 6 weeks, so once the bread we have has gone I am going to try not to eat it at all for a while. It might help de-bloat me if nothing else. What is your food vice?

Freedom

I have just read a fascinating article in Lighter Life magazine about freedom. It basically suggests that we all need freedom to thrive but it is what we do with that freedom that determines the success of us as individuals.

With freedom comes choices and limitations, which translates as respnsibility and it is how we cope with responsibility as people that matters.

Observers suggest obesity has come about through capatalist excess, and this is true. The sheer amount of food choice available to us in our developed human societies and the choices available for a lack of exercise has esculated in a rising epidemic of obesity. (I’m thinking Wall*e here, I am going to see it this weekend) This is because we are not dealing with the responsibility that comes with freedom of choice and have gotten greedy (not literally but in terms of choice we want it all).

We hear so often in our society about people not taking responsibility: men not wanting to settle down, parents not making their children go to school, teens involved in knife crime, high unemployment, junk food addicts… people want the freedom that comes from a free society but not the limitations that brings with it.

I think in order to be successful in weight loss then we need to accept we have the freedom to eat healthily or not, but know that we need to impose limitations on ourselves to help the freedom and weightloss to thrive. If we eat junk then that will hinder our success. Think of weightloss as society and food as the people within that society. In any society you have good and bad people; good people are free to come and go as they please and live their lives. Bad people need to be restrained and locked up and only released when they are under control again. Think of good people as healthy food. You are free to eat healthy food and you need to restrain and keep locked up in the supermarket junk food (bad people) until we know it is under control. Its a slightly complicated metaphor but I think it works.

According to Abraham Maslow, a renowned psychologist, there are 7 steps to freedom:

1. Physical – food, water, warmth and sleep.
2. Safety needs – protection, security and comfort.
3. Love & belonging – friendship, family and sexual intimacy.
4. Self esteem – competence, achievement, recognition and respect.
5. Cognitive – knowledge, meaning and understanding.
6. Aesthetic – symmetry, order and beauty.
7. Self-Actualisation – creativity, problem solving, personal growth and acceptance of facts.

I actually think that when we do not fulfil these needs within ourselves then we become lost in what it means to be who we are, we lose the ability to deal with choices that come with freedom in the right way and we become obese, and fail to keep ourselves happy. I think this is where the saying you need to sort the rest of your life out first and then weightloss will happen comes from. Of course I dont think it is as simple as that and you can lose weight and have that develop the self esteem to enable you to use your freedom wisely, but it certainly explains where I am coming from when I say obesity is a mental disorder.

Good Days

I have been thinking about going to the gym for ages; for the last seven weeks that I haven’t been there, in fact. There have been a variety of reasons. First off I stopped going because I was suffering from suspected anaemia, where I literally had no energy at all. Then when I got my energy stores up again I suffered from a sprain on the front of my right calf, meaning I could barely walk at all. Then I got depressed, then insomnia was raging making fitting it in with my responsibilities hard, then depression again and finally just pure laziness.

During times when I could go, I just had no mojo to do it. You know what it is like when you get out of exercising, getting back into it is almost impossible. The mind plays tricks on you, convincing you that you don’t want or need to go. In fact, last week I decided to cancel my membership. That would have taken the decision out of my hands, wouldn’t it?!!

The last couple of weeks I have been trying to get serious about weightloss and everytime I have a good start initially I end up destroying the good work. Take this last week. I lost 6lbs then the next day end up binging. I then binge for 2 days before trying to get back into it. This morning when my son told me he was too embarrassed to have me at his sports day it hit home that I am really not taking this seriously enough. When I was successful at weightloss before it was because I was so totally focused that everything else came a poor second. I never once tried to fit healthy eating and exercise into my life, my life fitted in around those things and I had to get that back.

I am not going to lie, it was my sons comments that gave me the kick up the bum I needed to get back into the gym. But it was the kick up the bum that I needed. For ages I just completely lost my confidence and didn’t feel I could even go in the gym, thats how low I felt about myself. But I was being silly. I rang the gym today before I went in to make sure my membership was okay as I havent been for ages and they were really friendly so it was all good.

I thought I would have completely lost my fitness after seven weeks off but I was surprised at just how much I could do. I walked to the gym, which takes 45 minutes, plus I had a few errands to run, so I classed that as my warm up. Then I did 15 minutes on the XT, at between 8-10 speed. Then I stretched and did 20 minutes on the treadmill with Interval Training, 7 minutes of which were jogging. I then did some weight training. I couldn’t do the full weights I normally do because my arms are killing me from playing too much wii the other day, but I just dropped a weight on each and it was fine. I then did some sit ups, stretches and did my 45 minute walk home.

I have been very good with food today. I have logged everything and it is 9pm and I have 7 ww points left yet, so it is all good. I came out of the gym feeling so euphoric, so much happier and quite a bit more confident, actually. It is really helping me to manage my eating habits too. Early days but hopefully good days.

You Lazy Mare

I was getting back on track yesterday but then I made the mistake of going to the shop before dinner… I only had a twix and some rainbow drops but it set the precedent for the rest of the evening and it ended in distaster. I figured today was a new day.

This morning I discovered that my son (who is just hitting his teens) purposely didn’t invite me to his sports day because he is embarrassed by me. After some investigation I found out it is because of the way I look, because I am fat….

It is interesting because I know I am fat, still technically obese, but considering I have lost so much weight I dont really think of myself as such. But I know I am.

But this is going to spur me on. I mean, I have a lot of reasons for wanting to lose weight – to look good, to be healthy, to be seen as attractive to others… but if nothing else it is worth making my son proud to have me as his mother. I have been good today so I am back on track now. I am about to have a wholemeal pitta for lunch.

I am currently trying to argue with my inner lazy self about whether to go to the gym today. I didn’t have much sleep so am trying to convince myself that I am too tired. Plus my right arm is hurting from playing too much wii the other night, but the other side is saying – you want to make your son proud? Then get to the gym you lazy mare!!

Quiche

I have been doing a lot of thinking about why, when I lose control, this happens? Am I greedy? Am I emotionally weak? Am I a junk food addict? One can never really know the full answer to this situation, just learn by their triggers and try to be better the next time.

Since I have been back on the ‘wagon’, I have been getting progressively better at handling my food. To the point of losing 6lbs in the first 5 days. That suddenly changed yesterday when we had quiche for dinner. To clarify, this was not homemade from fresh ingredients, it was a frozen quiche from the supermarket.

Within an hour of eating the quiche I felt a really strong need to eat and eat and eat. This was rather odd given I had just eaten a large meal and didn’t, previously to the meal, have much of an appitite at all. I resisted and resisted until about 9pm when I ended up giving in and having a one egg omelette inside a pita and then a bowl of cereal. Normally my binges are much bigger so I think I handled it well but still, the cravings seemed to come out of nowhere.

I woke up this morning ravenous. Given I ate before I slept I should not have been hungry for hours after waking. But I had a cup of tea and two toast, with marg and Jam. But I was still hungry and ended up having 3 weetabix and 2 more pieces of toast with another cup of tea within the hour (!). I told myself I would not have anything else until dinner. I had a nap and when I woke up I was hungry still. I managed to hold off until 12.30 when I made myself some plain noodles with a tin of tuna.

After eating that my hunger really subsided. Its now 3 hours since I ate the tuna and noodles and I am still not even remotely hungry. I think I am back on track. I am thankful it lasted less than 24 hours but it makes me realise just how powerful the chemicals are in junk and processed foods (such as the quiche) and how eating the right foods (such as plain noodles and tuna) can help to control appitite.

I think half the battle is in realising this.

On a side note, I have set up a challenge page for a little competition I am running to lose 10% of our body weight. It’s only me and Tigerlily at the moment so please join up!