First Weigh In : 222

Drum roll please... 5lb lost!

I feel like I deserved a good loss this week. I followed the plan, I did some daily exercise and it's the first week. Porkers like me need a big chunk off first week because even though we know it is just water weight, it is very good for morale. 

Sadly, it isn't the sort of weight loss that makes a drastic difference to appearance as its just a couple of percent of my total body weight. I'm going on holiday in a couple of weeks and went swimming costume browsing this morning. I'm dreading this. I don't even want to try one on, let alone buy one to wear on the beach. I'm going to get a sarong, which should at least mitigate the (very) troublesome thigh area. Together with maybe a sundress or something, I can get away with it  - until I have to get into the water I think! I try to comfort myself that If I stick to it then this time next year I should be able to wear any costume I please but this doesn't help me with my image of myself looking like a beached whale in two very short weeks. Of course, I know I've had this holiday coming for a long time now, I know I should have done something about it earlier, but I didn't. Thankfully we're not a hugely beachy family, so I'll just be able to wear normal stuff for most of the week.

I've decided not to track points whilst I'm away. I don't intend to go 'off plan' as such, but we'll have no access to the Internet  for the week and I'm too new at this to make an educated guess roughly how much is in what. I'll just eat as healthily as I can and keep a close eye on my portions. We're self catering and I'm sure that when we do eat out, I'll be able to find enough healthy alternatives. Hopefully I'm also going to be a lot more active, with swimming and walking planned in so what I'd really love is to come home to a loss. Maybe I'm being wildly naively optimistic about that but you never know!

   

The First Test

So I've been good all week. I've either stayed within or managed to save my points. No bingeing, no eating from 'mouth' or 'head' hunger, self control, pleasurable food. Weight Watchers, or the plan itself, seems to have worked (although, we'll not know until the morning).
But here it is, Sunday night, and I just want to mindlessly eat. Utter mouth hunger. Nothing bad - I don't feel the need to binge as such, but I do want some cheese and crackers, and a sandwich and a mini muffin or maybe some chocolate spread on toast. Or maybe some ham... mhh... ham. I'm not hungry. I'm not really stuffed but I'm not hungry. I'm just feeling that way that got me to the rather hefty size that I am today.
The question is, would a cheese sandwich do it? If yes, then I have saved points this week, I've got exercise points on top of that. I would not be breaking Weight watchers law to have the sandwich and so I should have it. I could stop thinking about it and go to bed with a nommy cheese sandwich in my tummy and I could stop writing this post. But I'm not sure. I'm not really sure I'm supposed to be looking at it that way.
The question is:
Is it OK to continue with bad patterns just because I have the  points to get away with it?

I used to belong to another dieting site (I have form, you see), where only calories were counted. There was a large forum on this site as on Weight watchers. And almost every day, at least one person would come up with something along the lines of  'As long as I stay within my calories, is it OK to eat my own body weight in chocolate bars and skip every other form of nutrition today?'. And the answer from the board respondents would always be a resounding yes, because after all a calorie is a calorie is a calorie right? No! No! Surely, if you have got to a certain degree of overweight, and you have a problem with chocolate, then it can not be OK to do that! Because you might lose the weight - frankly it doesn't strike me as likely, but you might - but as long as you skip meals in order to inhale kitkats then you're always going to have a problem.
By the way, I never did skip meals to eat loads of  junk or drink copious amounts, I would just do that ON TOP of my normal meals.  I'm clever like that.

Anyway, for all my ramblings it looks like writing this all down has worked. I have finally gone off the idea of the cheese. Its my first weigh in tomorrow. I'll be back then.

The Best Summer Cocktail... for only 2.5 points

Ahh, the Mojito.
This is a long, strong cocktail and good value for the points. Easy for me to make because I have a) a lot of mint growing in my garden and b) an electric citrus juice squeezer. Which makes the tedious task of lime squeezing a mere flick of the wrist. Good job I don't have an ice crusher too, or I would drink nothing else!

You will need: (makes 1)

• 1 tsp sugar
• 60 ml white rum
• 30 ml lime juice
• sprigs of mint, leaves & stalk
• handfuls of crushed ice
• soda water to fill glass

Muddle the mint and the sugar together in the bottom of a glass, I used the wrong end of the wooden spoon, until the mint has wilted and combined with the sugar. Stir in the lime juice and rum. Put in your crushed ice - I crushed ice cubes by wrapping them in a tea towel and beating them with a rolling pin, which is also very effective anger management... - and then top up with the soda water. Drink through straw.

Cold Hungry Blues

It's not the control freak in me that makes me dislike my partner cooking my midweek dinner for me - alright, maybe it is a little bit. No, the reason I have to let it him do it sometimes is simply that in our house, the person who cooks doesn't wash up. And my partner hates to wash up.

So, essentially what we have is someone who doesn't enjoy cooking as much as me, can't do it as well as me and doesn't take the same level of care as me, and won't provide an interesting or tasty meal for me simply so that he can avoid doing a chore that he dislikes more than cooking. Add this to the fact that I am on a diet and need to attend to the content and preparation my meals so that I am able to track them properly, my frustration as I watch him over the stove is palpable.

Its not that he can't cook. He really can, but he doesn't care about the cooking. Last night, he cooked pork chops, peas and mash. He didn't put the chops under the grill until the potatoes were cooked and he didn't put the peas on to cook until everything else was done.It wasn't seasoned properly and naturally my mashed potatoes were cold. My request to have no butter in my mash, was met with an internal eye-roll (my partner is a master at this) and a 'you're on a diet then?'. I don't know why I dislike talking to my partner about being on a diet. All I know, is if I had cooked it, he wouldn't have known either way.  Am I a spoilt bitch? Maybe. I know lots of women have to do the cooking and the washing up. But I did do the washing up after eating a fairly crappy meal and I didn't bang the pots and pans around in a passive-aggressive way. Just saying.

Otherwise, the diet is going alright. I haven't gone over my points yet and I've not had any binges. Its only been 5 days but it's something. I haven't eaten anything out of head hunger. I've weighed myself every day (bad, bad) and I've not shown much of a loss . I'm not counting either way since Monday, so I guess it doesn't matter too much yet. I want a significant loss though. That's what first weeks on a diet are for!

227. This is the Worst it Need Ever Be,

It's day two. And here I am, fresh out of the bath, nomming down on a piece of fruit and wondering how I got here. OK. Two out of three of the things in that sentence are true. I have just had a lovely bath and I'm enjoying a banana. But when it comes to wondering how I got to over six stones over my ideal weight, I know exactly how I got here. Binge Eating, Yoyo dieting, Drinking too much. In short, a fairly warped relationship with food and drink that has led me to gaining on average 7 lb a year for the last 12 years. It wasn't all gain, of course, I lost weight several times on low carb diets, good old fashioned diet-and-exercise diets and even normal just eat less and better diets (although never much weight on that one), but the pounds would always pile back on, bringing friends. And so here I am, at the heaviest I have ever been wondering how much I will lose this time and actually, is it worth it because surely I'll just put back on more weight than I'll lose?

It doesn't have to be that way, of course. Some people do lose all the weight and then keep it off long term. I read a depressing (and hopefully incorrect) statistic recently that only 2% of people do that. I think I won't do that as long as my issues remain - as long as I am a compulsive eater, the weight will go back on; as long as I have a 'relationship' with food, rather than it being a fuel for living that can potentially taste really good, the weight will go back on and as long as I use food to celebrate, commiserate, deal with stress and anxiety and block out pain the weight will go back on. I don't know what to do about this (d'uh, would I even be writing these words, would my backside be as big if I had a strategy?) but I'm hoping over the time it takes to lose the weight - and I better had lose the weight - and write this blog that I can go further to working it out.

Its time to be positive, anyway. This really is the worse it need ever be and I could always be lighter than I am today. My first goal is 209lb. And when I get there I'm going to buy myself a lovely pair of celebratory shoes. I will!