Willpower part 2

Since coming off Atkins, I haven’t really put any weight on but I haven’t lost any either. I hadn’t been trying very hard, so that’s understandable, but now I am trying again and for the first time, I feel like I can’t do it.

I saw a Groupon for Diet Chef so I thought I’d give it a try. I did well with Atkins because it was super strict, so I thought I might do well on another strict diet. And it’s easy, I mean you just pop meals in the microwave or top them up with hot water and it’s done, ready to eat. But… there’s something painfully hard about it.

This is a sample day:

Breakfast: Porridge
Lunch: Soup and a small slice of bread
Snack: Crisps
Dinner: Curry and a small portion of rice, side salad

By the time I leave work at 6pm, I am stupidly hungry. Hungry like I can barely concentrate and my stomach is growling constantly. The dinners do not fill you up. I go to bed and dream about food. And it is so hard not to eat anything else and most days since I started (about a week ago) I’ve had a bigger dinner than I was supposed to. I feel like I can’t help it, I’m just so, so hungry and I’ve never been good with being hungry.

I feel really disappointed with myself. How can I lose weight if I have no willpower to eat less?

Changes

Since I have last written a post, a million things have happened.

The year anniversary of being on a diet has been and gone. I graduated. I started my masters degree. I passed my driving test. My two bosses got fired. Two of my wonderful guinea pigs passed away. I got a new guinea pig who is extremely naughty. My boyfriend got promoted, then immediately got made redundant. He didn’t have a job for over a month and we barely got by on just my wage. We took his ex-employer to court. He got a new job. We set a date for our wedding, March next year. I found out I have gall stones and my doctor told me to come off Atkins or he couldn’t put me forward for surgery. I came off Atkins.

We’ve been trying to diet since by calorie counting, but it is really hard when a) you don’t have any money and have to just eat whatever you can afford and b) there aren’t such strict rules to follow. I haven’t lost any weight, I’ve put on a few lbs instead.

With a date set for our wedding, I have something to aim for, but it is much harder than it was before. Calorie counting is a million times harder than Atkins. Cutting a whole food group out but otherwise pretty much eating what you want is a piece of cake compared to limiting food and checking labels. If I got hungry on Atkins, which was hardly ever, there was always something I could eat, like a pepperami or tuna mayonnaise or whatever. When you count calories, if you get hungry and you are over your calories, that’s it. You just have to be hungry, and I’ve never really taught myself to be hungry. I’ve got in a really bad habit of binging, I will eat literally nothing at work, just drink four or five coffees because I’m too busy to leave my desk, maybe snack on a biscuit or 3, then I’ll get home, eat my allowed calories for the rest of the day, then still feel ravenous and stuff my face with whatever I can find, thinking ‘oh well, I’ll get back on track tomorrow’.

We still haven’t managed to sort ourselves out financially, paying back what we owe from when my boyfriend didn’t have a job. We’re eating all our cupboard food from before Atkins, like tins of kidney beans and packets of risotto rice.  I don’t know how we’ll afford fresh food this month, so maybe I’ll learn to be hungry on the poverty diet. We haven’t told our families just how bad things are, because they are not in a position to help us and we don’t want them to worry. It’s a hard time for us.

I’ve been focusing on our wedding as a distraction. We haven’t told our families yet, so I’m still calling my boyfriend my boyfriend rather than my fiance. I know, we’re keeping lots of secrets from them right now!

I have a sort of plan for the wedding. I want it casual and low key, because we’re a casual and low key couple. And we’re poor of course, nothing limits how flashy your wedding is like an empty purse. I also don’t want the stress that loads of my friends have planning and replanning table plans and worrying the colour of the confetti won’t match the grooms shoelaces and all that bull.

The original plan was to have a surprise wedding, tell people it was an engagement party or something and then just get married. But we talked about it, and there would be too many passive aggressive comments from our mothers especially. “Oh this is lovely but I wish I could have known so I could have told my friends” or “This is great surprise, but I wish I’d known so I could have made an effort to look nice” … and personally, I would make far less effort to go to an engagement party than a wedding, so we might miss out on seeing people that we actually want at our wedding if we don’t tell them it’s a wedding, especially if we do it out of town.

So… I think we’re going to forget that.

My plan instead is a day at the seaside. We’ll get married in the registry office of our favourite seaside town, then spend the afternoon on the pier with our families and then have a party in the evening with our friends. But that still seems a bit stressful, like how and what do you feel 100 people at a party? Should we risk somewhere with a minimum bar spend? What time should we have it? If we do have it at the seaside, will people make the effort to come that far? Who the hell should we invite? Do you need security guards? How can you keep track on everyone? Is it even worth spending so much money on ONE day?!?!

My other idea is to JUST invite our families to our day at the seaside and go out for a meal in the evening instead of the party, then having a party in our hometown the next day? But then the costs just add up and up. But I want to do SOMETHING with our friends as well as our families.

Anyway. So, the day I need to fit in to my dress by is on the horizon. I reckon it will fit if I stick to my eight stone goal, so on that basis… 67lb down, 45lb to go.

45lb in nine months, I did it before, can I do it again?!

Willpower

I read this blog and thought I would also share what I used to eat compared to now…

This used to be a typical day for me:

Breakfast: Banana
Mid morning snack: Tea with 2 sugars and semi skimmed milk, 3+ digestive biscuits
Lunch: 2 shop bought sandwiches (breakfast triple and cheese and onion), 3/4s of a large bag of Kettle Chips, pork pie, apple
Afternoon snack – Caramel coffee from a sachet
Dinner: 2 homemade chicken burgers consisting of: brioche bun, mayonnaise, battered chicken breast, hash brown, at least 500g of deep fried chips
Evening snack: Caramel ice cream
Exercise: Walking to the bus stop

I had literally no willpower whatsoever and if I wanted something I let myself have it. If I wanted something and wasn’t even hungry I’d let myself have it. If I sort of only half liked something I’d let myself have it and still eat every scrap of it.

This is the sort of thing I eat now:

Breakfast: Large coffee with almond milk and a splash of double cream, scrambled eggs
Mid morning snack: Green tea x 2
Lunch: Salad consisting of mixed leaves, aubergine, olives, avocado, sundried tomatoes, olive oil, salami
Afternoon snack: Black coffee
Dinner: Chicken thighs (skin on), broccoli and peppers, 30g grated cheese
Evening snack: Fruit tea
Exercise: Strength training as many times as I can a week for at least 30mins (and I still walk to the bus stop!)

I also feel like I should share my weight, something I was super secretive about when I first started dieting, I hated telling anyone. I even deliberately left it blank on the form when joining a new doctors.

I used to weigh 21.5 stone (301lb) and I now weigh 15.5 stone (217lb)

I would like to weigh 13.5 stone and eventually get down to 11 in the next 3 years.

I can’t believe I let my weight get that out of  hand. 21.5 stone is just… way too much for one human to weigh. I can’t even tell you why, I can’t even say, ‘Oh I ate to deal with my emotions’ because I don’t think I did. When I felt shit about myself I was at my thinnest. I would definitely like to blame rebelling against my mother as the start of my weight issues, but to get to 21.5 stone… that is all my own doing. I don’t know why my relationship with food was so bad. I guess I’m just greedy and lazy. I don’t have anyone to blame but myself and now I don’t have anyone but myself to make sure I lose it.

My boyfriend still craves food and talks about it a lot, but I feel like I’ve moved past that. I would happily eat a pizza, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve learned I can definitely do without it.

I feel good about myself knowing that if I can resist my favourite chocolate in the cupboard (I currently have five bars of it) I can resist anything.

The Wedding Photos

I saw the wedding photographs from my brother-in-law’s wedding at the weekend. Even though my dress was gorgeous and I got loads of compliments… I look awful. Truly awful. I’m not exaggerating, I wish I was. My boyfriend tried to be nice about it but even he struggled to find a picture where I look ok. There is not one picture where I look pretty, I just look like a fat mess. The worst one is from the speeches, where I’m sitting down and my back fat is hanging over the back of my chair and my bra strap is on show.  I know it wasn’t my day or anything and it doesn’t really matter how I looked, but I nearly started crying when I saw them because I just look so bad, much worse than I thought, much worse than I ever imagined.

One of my neighbours said I looked like I’d lost weight when I saw her in the street last week, but then followed it up with “A good start to the new year!”- I was like, “I’ve been on a diet for over 8 months you bitch!”

Last week I religiously stuck to my exercise regime in my attempt to lose a stone before graduation, but this week I’ve slacked off a bit. I’ll try and pick it up tonight. I’ve maybe lost a pound or two over the past few weeks. Even though my weightloss has slowed massively, I keep reminding myself that I’m the lightest I’ve ever been in my 20s. That makes me feel a bit better but I wish it was still as easy as when I first started. I sometimes feel really alone in my weight loss journey, even though everyone in the office is on a diet and loves to give ‘advice’. Try losing 112lb yourself and then come back to me.

73lb down, 39lb to go.

This time next year…

I keep on saying: ‘this time next year I will…’ and follow it up with something like, ‘be at my goal weight’, or ‘be able to drive’ etc. But this morning I looked in the mirror and thought “I really am 3 stone from my goal” and felt good about today.

I can really see that when I’ve lost another 3 stone, I will be at a size that I like. Or maybe not, who knows?

I am finally graduating at the end of next month. I dropped out of university half way through second year, but started studying part time in 2013 and have now finished my degree. I really want to be another stone lighter by then – a stone in 6 weeks… Not sure how confident I am about that, but it is something to aim for. Getting to the point of graduating has been hard… But I’ve done it, five years later than most of my peers, but hey.

We had to stop seeing the personal trainer. He put his prices up massively in the new year, by 66%. By putting up his prices by so much he can’t just be pricing us out, he must have lost other clients too and he did especially well with us as we only ever trained together so he got double time for hardly any more effort… If he’d put his prices up by a bit, we could have carried on, but 66%… I wouldn’t give my custom to any business that did that.

He thought that by saying we couldn’t afford it, it was just an excuse to stop, a way out. He always seemed to think that we weren’t into it, but I think he just didn’t understand us as clients. It was hard for us, not because we weren’t motivated or we didn’t try. But because it was new, it was something our bodies were learning to do. I feel hurt by it. I liked training. It felt good. And it is harder by myself.

I want to prove him wrong. I want to train by myself and be strong and fit and then go back and be like ‘just an excuse eh?’. I can do this by myself. I didn’t need anyone to tell me when to do essays and how hard to work for my degree. I don’t need anyone telling me when to do exercise… right?!

 

40lb

40lb to go.

If I stick to my new rate of 1lb a week, it will still take nearly another year before I reach my goal… But I’ve managed for seven months, I can manage for another ten months. At least I can be done for next Christmas…!

While my weight loss has slowed, my body is still changing and I’m happy with that. I’m wearing a skirt today that I last wore in 2013 – and every time I sat down in it, it cut into my stomach. Today, it is loose and comfortable and is borderline too big and about to fall down. It’s almost a shame because loads of people have said how pretty it is! I’m getting a waist back and if only my face wasn’t so fat I’d be almost happy with how I look.

The future-mother-in-law pissed me off last week. We went to visit as it was my boyfriend’s brother’s birthday and they ordered pizza. When we said we wouldn’t have any, she gave us both a really hard time, she said it was a treat and we couldn’t avoid carbs forever. She said that we could do extra exercise to make up for it. I was really cross with her, she was so dismissive, as if it is as easy as ‘doing extra exercise’. It’s like she wants us to be fat just so it is more convenient at family gatherings. This is the same woman that constantly had a go at my boyfriend to lose weight because she didn’t want him to die young.

Christmas dinner was better than I expected. My parents put on a buffet for us so we could just pick and choose and my boyfriend told his mother not to worry about us, so she didn’t, and we just had a bit of leftover cold turkey and some veg in the evening. So… we didn’t feel like we were missing out, unlike usually when we go round to someone else’s house to eat, when we look longingly at the roast potatoes and really wish we could enjoy the gorgeous chocolate cake they’ve made.

This time last year, I couldn’t imagine losing 70lb. I thought losing that much would make me super skinny. But I’ve gone from morbidly obese to just obese, I’ve gone from a few pizzas away from being crane lifted out of my house to now just averagely fat.

Hopefully, I’ll just be chubby by Christmas next year.

Sugar and Spice

I’ve had a bad week. We knew Christmas time would be bad… but we were really bad.

My boyfriend’s brother got married, so we indulged a bit at the wedding. We made good choices out of a bad lot, but we definitely went overboard. Then last night was my work Christmas party and we overdid it a bit then too.

And next we have Christmas with two families!

My total weight loss before the wedding was five stone (70lb) but I reckon I’ve probably put on a few pounds, especially as we drank a lot.

Before the wedding, I was seriously craving sugar. I don’t have a sweet tooth, never have, I’m the one that insists on getting a starter when eating out, but will skip dessert and have a coffee. But I don’t know, not having sugar since May, I was really, really craving cake. Lovely, soft, proper cake. Before, I would have just given in to the cravings. I remember doing the watercress soup diet, which only lasts seven days, and I gave in on day four because my carb cravings were so extreme. But now… now I carry on and think of the long term. I relaxed a little at the wedding, but I didn’t enjoy it. I was just thinking about the carbs and how I was eating them for no reason -the sauce that came on the meat was loaded with carbs and I would have preferred not to eat it and save the carbs for something else. I tried explaining that to my boyfriend – he’d was like ‘it’s only got 20g carbs’. But if I’m going to eat 20g of carbs I’d rather that was from something like a cake rather than a meat sauce. And I’m not about to start eating cake. So I felt shit about eating the sauce.

I didn’t have any wedding cake by the way. But I did  have a very sweet cocktail so that’s probably worse. I don’t really understand ‘fake’ sugar. We do eat Atkins bars when we need something sweet, but from what I understand, your body gets confused by fake sugar and treats it like normal sugar and this hinders weight loss. But sometimes… you just need something sweet.

I wore a dress that I loved. It’s a few sizes bigger than I wanted to be at this stage, but I really, really loved the dress. I got compliments from loads of people, people that weren’t obligated to say I looked nice (like the mother-in-law) or friends. People I’d never met, members of staff at the reception. But… only one person said “you look lovely” the rest said “your DRESS is lovely” …

While I’m pleased with myself and my progress, I mean, if this time last year you told me that I would lose 70lb in 2016, I would have been astounded. But… my dress got compliments, not me, and it was a reminder that I’ve still got a way to go. I can wear a beautiful dress but I still don’t look how I want.

Only 42lb to go now… Hopefully 2017 is the year I lose that too!

BMI and Progress

I’ve made progress. I probably didn’t stall as badly as I thought because suddenly another half a stone has fallen off – I probably just didn’t notice that I was only losing 1lb a week instead of the solid 2lb I’d got used to. Well, a lb a week is still progress…

My boyfriend and I were watching an old episode of Gladiators and one of the Gladiators, Saracen, weighed MORE than my boyfriend (who has annoyingly now lost SIX stone… why is it easier for men?) and this got us talking about BMI and about how the two of them would make a great poster for explaining BMI to people that dismiss it. Saracen has three inches in height on my boyfriend, so they actually have the same BMI, both in the ‘obese’ category. However, one is just made of muscle, the other, a normal guy who is overweight (I feel mean writing that, but I hope he won’t mind). So from this we can conclude – if you are a PROFESSIONAL BODY BUILDER then yes, congrats, BMI does not apply to you. Everyone else… yes it does. To quote He’s Just Not That Into You – You are the rule and NOT the exception. Sure, BMI is simplistic but it’s still a fairly good thing to go off, especially for women as we (usually) have more fat and less muscle to skew the result.

My long term goal is to get to a ‘normal’ BMI (my ‘short’ term goal is lose 112lb) and people are quick to dismiss it. Time after time, people say something along the lines of “Oh everyone knows not to worry about your BMI, it’s just so inaccurate” well OK Susan, but considering before I started dieting my BMI was classed at ‘morbidly obese’ I think is IS something to worry about.

The only person who hasn’t dismissed my ‘normal’ BMI goal is my GP. He’s a nice guy and has always been super polite and friendly when we’ve talked about my weight, unlike my GP when I lived with my parents, who starkly told me when I was seventeen that I needed to lose weight if I wanted to FIND A HUSBAND and have children in the future. Anyway, my GP said it was a good idea and a good thing to aim for and asked what help and support he could offer, even saying I could go into the surgery every week for a proper weigh in (I told him I have basic, non electric scales). So yeah, I’m going along with what a qualified, has a PhD, studied for seven years, doctor says rather than anyone else.

When I started losing weight, having a ‘normal’ BMI seemed like a fantastical dream. Now, it is sort of insight, it is doable.

My brother in law’s wedding is next month and I really wanted to be two more dress sizes smaller than I currently am. Hopefully I’ll be there for Comic Con London in May.

I tried bench pressing yesterday. Shit, it is so hard. I’ve never tried before and never had any particular opinion on it. I mean, I thought it would be like dead-lifting which I enjoy and which I can do. Nope. I couldn’t coordinate properly, and I could really feel it in my biceps and it makes me wonder if I’ve ever used them before! I have a new respect for people who can bench press. I have a new respect for massive arm muscles. I have a new respect for how much my boyfriend can press and can now acknowledge that he is genuinely considerably stronger than me where as I didn’t really believe that before!

63lb down, 49lb to go! Eek less than 50lb now!

(Saracen is at the back, far right)

Scaffolding

I have reached a weird part of weight loss.

I’ve plateaued a bit which is obviously disheartening.

I’ve also got to the point where my clothes are getting too big and I could probably do with buying new ones, but I don’t want to.

I really don’t like my body right now. When I was about this weight before, I definitely felt more secure. Now I feel like my body is in a transition period and I just cannot enjoy it, like when you do up your house and there’s scaffolding and dust sheets and mess everywhere. I just want this to be over, I want to reach my goal, get rid of the scaffolding and see the lovely made over house, because I’m really fed up of looking in the mirror and not enjoying what I see. I’ve never really been one of those people before, I’ve always thought I was pretty and I’ve never really minded my body. And now, when I’m about as light as I’ve ever been in my 20s, I’m not happy.

I watched this thing on how most of our weight is due to genetics, our metabolism. You only impact about 10 per cent of your body weight through food and exercise, the rest is just how your body works, how your body stores and uses fuel. That affected me in a few ways. At first I was like, shit, what’s the point, I might as well just give up. And then I thought, so I’ve really been abusing my body if I only actually have an impact on 10 per cent. I mean, what have I been doing that I’ve got myself into this state?!

The answer is, I’ve been eating too much. 95 per cent of the time, I will clear my plate. Whenever I eat with skinny people, they leave things. Even delicious things. Both my boyfriend and I eat in a particular way, we leave the thing we like the most thing until last. However, that means we have to clear the plate if we want to eat it, which of course we do. So maybe if I’d just learned to eat the thing I like best first and leave the rest, I wouldn’t be like this. Maybe if I learned to be less greedy.

The personal trainer gave my boyfriend and I a lecture last week about our activity levels and how we really needed to up them. He gave us a really hard time and although I take most of what he says with a pinch of salt, the fact that I’m still thinking about it obviously means that I care.

This is something I’ve struggled with, I don’t get how to make exercise part of my routine. I mean, I wash my face every day, without fail. There could be a nuclear accident or zombies could take over and I would find a way to wash my face in the post apocalyptic world. I am astounded when people don’t wash their face before bed, especially girls, especially when they leave their makeup on. Anyway, so washing my face is part of my routine, I couldn’t imagine not doing it. So how do I make exercise part of my routine? How can I change myself so that I make sure that I exercise, that I don’t think twice about doing it, that it becomes habit? At school, I would deliberately change my handwriting. When I was about fifteen I decided I wanted to dash my ‘i’s instead of dot them. I decided I wanted my ‘z’s to have long fancy tails. I decided I wanted wanted my ‘f’s to be big and looping. So I would sit there, true story, and write the letter over and over and over until my hand got used it. Then I would write sentences over and over until I was writing the new letters without thinking. I still write my letters that way, I don’t think about it, it’s just my handwriting and how I write.

So… how can I do that with exercise? How can I do it over and over until it becomes habit?

I just don’t know. It doesn’t feel easy.