Tag Archives: blowing the budget

Friends With Benefits

In the here & now, , ,

You know how sometimes, you listen to someone wittering on about something, and you want to shake them and turn the mirror round so they can have a good look, and see what you see? Usually that they’re talking shite and the problem is closer to home than they’re prepared to acknowledge, am I right?  Yeah, well that was me on Monday.

I don’t know what’s changed between Monday and now, but I re-read the post yesterday when I was catching up with all your messages, and all I could hear was one big whinge. Poor me, I’m such a victim, I’m trying so hard and it’s not my fault…holy moly what did I sound like. I never play the victim role, but I was definitely trying it on for size wasn’t I? Sorry about that, I feel suitably sheepish. In fact, I feel like a dick.

I’m haven’t really hit a plateau, have I? My recent inertia stems more from the two steps forward and four steps back school of muppetry. I had an email from a lady who suggested I was probably not being honest with myself about what I was eating, and after I’d swallowed my initial response – which may or may not have included a bit of salty language even by my standards – my indignation prompted me to hold the mirror up to myself and take a good long look.

Fuck’s sake. She wasn’t wrong. Looking objectively, I had to acknowledge a bunch of stuff.

There are some things I’m doing really well. I tip out all my thoughts and feelings, and pick the bones of them with those of you who are kind enough to listen three times every week, and that’s what’s helped me achieve longevity on this journey. No way would I still have skin in the game after six hundred and fifty eight days on a diet if you lot hadn’t lent me your ears. I feel supported, and I’d hope those of you on your own journey to Skinny Town feel supported in these pages too. So we got that down, right?

I’m broadly happy with my food plan. Well, as much as I’m ever going to be. Between you and me, I am bored to the back bollocks of counting points, but last week’s switch to No Count has given me a shiny new toy to play with and I’m doing okay. So I can tick that box too.

So, the basics then..? All those things that I know I should do to supplement both of the above, like drinking two or three litres of water every day, and counting points for the dressing I put on my salad, or the honey that I drizzle on my breakfast…huh, so about that… do I really use one level teaspoon’s worth…? I have no idea. I’ve never drizzled it onto a teaspoon, I mean who does that? I guess it’s probably about a teaspoon’s worth, and I count the points on that basis. That’s near enough, isn’t it?

Actually, it’s probably not enough. Not if it’s several times per week’s worth of guess work. As for water…huh. I don’t do that either. I forget, I don’t like the taste, it makes me wee a lot…blah blah blah. I rarely get even half a litre down my neck. I know I should, but I don’t. I have no excuse.

And don’t even get me started on gravy. Come on, I’m a Yorkshire girl, and gravy runs through my veins, in fact most of my meals revolve around it. It’s only since I’ve started following the No Count plan, and my points budget is much smaller,  that I’ve properly read the values again and realised that one point buys me only four tablespoons’ worth of gravy. You’re shitting me, right? I thought it meant four tablespoons’ worth of granules, so I’ve happily been sailing my food through a lake of gravy with every meal, for more than eighteen months. I want to bang my head on the table and wail.

That’s the sound of a penny dropping, right there. I feel like wearing a black armband today, since me and gravy won’t be seeing each other any more. Well, maybe from time to time, sort of like friends with benefits.

I was a bit rattled at the suggestion that I wasn’t being honest with myself, but once again I’m more grateful than I can tell you at the way you lot help me keep it real.

I’d better try harder to read the small print in future, eh 🙂

 

 

Like it..? Tell your friends!
 

Poking My Fat Muscle Memory

In the here & now, ,

I’ll tell you what, I had a bit of a flashback on Wednesday. At the point that I wrote my last blog post I couldn’t wait to get up and at my day, given that I was starting my experiment…it felt like Christmas day and my birthday all rolled into one.

Let me rewind…for those of you not following the weight watchers diet, you probably wonder what I’m banging on about when I mention points…it’s just the way weight watchers carves up a food budget. Every food has a points value in the same way stuff has a calorie value, right? I get 34 points every day, which is a number worked out based on my weight/height/age (and that’s quite a lot because I’m still fat…the nearer I get to Skinny Town the fewer points I’ll get). In addition to that I get 42 more points to spend as and when I like throughout the week.

I don’t always use my weeklies but this experiment I’m doing to try and turbo-charge my weight loss says I should, and what’s more it says I should squash them all in mid-week. So on Wednesday when I get out of bed I was rubbing my hands together in anticipation of scoffing 76 points’ worth of food.

Imagine that. I’m a fat girl on a diet and everything I’ve done over the last 18 months has been about restricting my portion sizes. Not allowing myself to over-indulge. And yet here I am, staring down the barrel of a day where the gloves are off and it’s open season on points…I was so fucking excited I can’t even tell you.

Breakfast was all kinds of awesome. I had two slices of seeded wholemeal toast (3 points per slice) with a teaspoon of butter (2 points) and three scrambled eggs (6 points). Fourteen points for breakfast…I’ve never done that. I was working from home, and mid morning I made myself a coffee with all milk…another 4 points. Lunchtime came and went, and I wasn’t hungry but I made myself have some more toast and a bunch of grapes. 8 points including the butter.

I was seriously full. I’m up to 26 points by now, and normally I’d be panicking a bit at the prospect of only having 8 left for supper. I’d be studying my food plan intently from every angle to try and squeeze maximum mileage out of those last 8 points.

Not on Wednesday…on Wednesday I still had 50 points left in play. So I made moussaka, which is my absolute favourite thing. All fresh ingredients so it still qualified as healthy eating, except there was a fucking mountain of it. 42 points’ worth to be exact. It was a moussaka mountain.

Thing is, as I sat down in the chair, flicked on the TV and started eating, I got this flashback to a life where my world revolved around sitting in a chair with a plate piled high with moussaka, or lasagne, or whatever. It didn’t really matter back then what the hell it was, because simply eating for a long time until I was fit to burst was the attraction. A self-induced food coma, night after night.

On Wednesday, I found myself having to force myself to eat it all. It wasn’t a pleasurable experience, you know? I was uncomfortably full, and I had to keep reminding myself that I was doing it for a reason. It was an experiment. At the same time, I was equally terrified that my Asshole voice would grab a hold of this thing I was doing like some kind of fat muscle memory and start demanding a return to the life I used to live. Yes Dee! That’s IT!! Welcome back to your old life, holy CRAP how we’ve missed this!!!

I couldn’t manage 76 points…wtf is that all about? I scraped 68 and I was done. I finished the rest of my weekly points yesterday, and now I’m back to two days of basic daily points only, before weigh day on Sunday…in many more ways than I have words to describe, it’s a relief.

If I was scoffing cheese balls and Haagen Dazs, 76 points would be a breeze. I could probably do it in ten minutes based on past form. But 76 points’ worth of healthy food felt like it was going to go on until the end of time. Next week, I’ll divvy my weeklies out over three days and make sure I enjoy them. And, honestly? Right now, the fact that my old life looks less and less appealing with every step I take in the direction of Skinny Town makes me much happier than a moussaka mountain ever could 🙂

Like it..? Tell your friends!
 

Two Things Have Happened…

In the here & now, , ,

There’s something distinctly weird happening in my head at the moment. This probably won’t come as a big surprise to those of you who’ve raised an eyebrow here and there over the last 18 months at some of the titter and shit that has tumbled onto this very page…lets be honest, weird stuff happening in my head is not unusual in itself. But when I say weird, I mean different.

I’m used to feeling like I have to dodge bullets on a regular basis. You all know that I regard myself as a food addict, right? Dieting is a challenge for anyone, but if you have a food addiction and you’re trying to lose weight, you are locked into a constant battle. It’s a never-ending negotiation with your own head over what you’re allowed to have, when you’re allowed to have it, and most importantly how much of it is the right amount to have.

And it’s relentless because even after the decision is made I find my asshole voice coming in hard with a rear-guard action trying to re-negotiate. Let’s be honest, what is generally considered amongst normal folk to be the right amount looks to me like it wouldn’t feed a sparrow and the injustice of not having a plate that would feed a small army leaves me seething with resentment. It’s exhausting.

Of late however, it’s felt different. Calmer somehow. And I don’t know that it’s got anything to do with being in the sweet spot, I mean I was fully locked and loaded into the sweet spot when I started this diet eighteen months ago,  for the first few months I didn’t put a foot wrong in terms of eating more than my allocated food budget but the Asshole voice was in constant communication with my willpower and it was tested on an hourly basis. Now, not so much so.

The difference? I’ve more or less excluded sugar from my diet. It’s the only thing I can put my finger on, you know? And before you worry that I’m going to turn into one of these evangelistic preachy teachy kind of bloggers who tells you what to do and how to do it, I’m not, I swear. This blog hasn’t ever been about that, it’s always been more about sharing what’s going on in my head as I try and navigate the path to Skinny Town. But it makes you think, doesn’t it?

I’ve always said that for me, I can stick to my food plan providing I can have the odd treat so I don’t feel deprived. Except my odd treat was way way out of balance with the rest of my diet. I could stick to a daily points allowance, but let’s say I had 35 points to go at, I’d start with the crap and work my way back, you know?

If I count two Mars Bars at 24 points, that means I have 11 points to spend on proper food…fruit for breakfast which is free, salad for lunch which is free and then maybe chicken for supper with a mountain of vegetables which are also free, so I get that stuffed fit to bust feeling but I can still ‘relax’ and eat two Mars Bars because technically I’m not doing anything wrong, right? I stayed within points and look at this innocent face…

Except, having eaten two Mars Bars – or hob-nobs or Daim cake or whatever, it could have been anything – I’d still feel deprived, because two wasn’t three and there were more in the fridge which I wasn’t allowed to have. And having got the taste for them, often the ones in the fridge for another day wouldn’t survive the night because I’d pay forward my food budget then wake up the next day and sulk because I was going to have to live on dust for the rest of the week.

That’s all gone. I’m 61 days food sober, and I haven’t eaten chocolate, or cookies, or crisps, or anything with refined sugar in it except things like maybe low-fat salad cream which has a trace element. Nothing processed that has added sugar, just lots of fresh food. And two things have happened.

The cravings have stopped dead. I’m no longer tortured by the relentless need to eat something sweet. If I haven’t eaten one of something, I don’t crave a second or a third, and I’m no longer even bothered by the thought of it. I mean…this is me we’re talking about. The other thing is I’ve stopped seething with resentment at the fact that I’m on on this journey to begin with.

You can’t help wondering, can you? I started this whole clean eating thing as a bit of an experiment, but actually I have a feeling it’s morphed into a bit of a game changer for me…I’m just going with it, I mean why wouldn’t I? The prospect of not living the rest of my life as a slave to my drug of choice is blowing my mind 🙂

 

Like it..? Tell your friends!
 

Popping My Own Balloon

In the here & now, , ,

It’s funny you know, the vastly different perspectives you gain as you look at your weight-loss journey from a number of different viewpoints along the way. Having emerged from the sugar haze otherwise known as Christmas, I can clearly see that’s exactly what I was surrounded by over the holidays…a sugar haze. If I have to give it my best guess, I reckon a good half of the food in my house over the festive season contained a small mountain of all the wrong things.

Now, I’ve got to take accountability for putting that food in my cupboards in the first place, I know that. I was accompanied on my Christmas food shop by the Asshole voice, like some  naughty child running amok and threatening tantrums left and right unless the trolley filled up with naughties.

The scale of my muppetry was significant…bear in mind that my boy was only off work on Christmas day, my mum is the size of a sparrow with an appetite to match and I’m on a diet. The supermarkets were only closed for one day and yet despite all the above, by the time I’d unpacked my booty I struggled to close my floor-to-ceiling fridge and my cupboards were bursting. All because I lost control on that one shopping expedition.

It wasn’t even bad planning. I’d intended to write a list and stick to it, somewhere around 3am on the night before Christmas eve. I always do that given that our supermarket opens 24 hours a day and at that time it’s usually just me and the people who work there filling up the shelves ready for the last-minute onslaught. There are no crowds and checkout is painless…it’s a stroke of genius and I’ve done it for at least the last 10 years.

Except this year, I called in at a different supermarket the day before my planned trip, on the way from taking mum to a hospital appointment. I hadn’t even written my list, and I’d intended to pick up one specific item. The aisles were surprisingly free of people, the shelves were full and they were playing Christmas music…before I knew it me and my mum were in full swing, ooo’ing and ahh’ing over anything that looked tasty and gleefully lobbing it in the trolley. And it was all downhill from there.

I don’t want to re-hash the food disasters all over again, we’ve shut the door on Christmas 2016 now and it’s a shiny new year…I’m using the example only to illustrate how looking back now, from my New-Year-new-start perspective I can clearly see where the wheels came off. And on some level, whilst I must have known it spelled D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R, not to mention disrespecting all the effort I’d spent losing pounds over the preceding months, I didn’t care. In the moment my perspective was very different.

I’m going to pick at the concept of self-sabotage in a bit more detail as I make my way through January. I remember way back in the early days of my diet writing a blog post called Part Woman, Part Ostrich which resonated with such a lot of you when you read it. I don’t think it would hurt me to look back on some of the posts from around that time…I was doing a lot of writing – and reflecting – and it helped. I have form, in terms of getting so far down the road then popping the balloon of my success with a fucking big pin and watching it blow away in the wind.

Not this time…this is day 10 folks, and it’s all good 🙂

Like it..? Tell your friends!
 

It Was The Mince Pie That Did It

In the here & now, ,

You know, don’t you, when you wake up brimming with determination that today’s the day you’re going to tip your world the right way up again, but then you go downstairs and eat a mince pie for breakfast that the day is going to be one of those days, where the diet turns to shit before you’ve even left the house.

That mince pie totally set me off on the wrong path this morning. Thirty seconds of heaven, followed by an hour in the car on my morning commute where I sat and sulked at my stupidity, and sang along to no songs on the radio. Not even the Mariah Carey All I Want For Christmas song, during which I normally am Mariah Carey for that brief moment in time, usually at the very top of my lungs.

To add insult to injury, I lifted said mince pie out of its foil jacket on the kitchen counter, right next to my new bathroom scales which are sitting on the counter top impassively – we haven’t eyeballed each other yet – waiting to be programmed. Oh yes that’s right, programmed. User one, name ‘fat knacker’. When I figure out which buttons to press I have to enter my height and my age so it can ruin my day in a bells and whistles kind of way by reporting not only my weight but also my BMI and my water content, although how it knows that is anybody’s guess. I already know we’re not going to see eye to eye.

For the first time today, the Asshole voice tested the water by suggesting that I start again on the first Monday in the New Year. I closed him down immediately of course, good grief if it becomes open season between now and then, I’ll be lumbering into January with some serious regained poundage clinging to my arse. No doubt about it. So I’ll just carry on having these exhausting daily negotiations inside my own head about whether I should/shouldn’t/can/can’t/will/won’t eat whatever the fuck I want.

I know I’ve put more weight on. I can feel it on my body. I just don’t know how much because although my new scales arrived last Wednesday they remain in virgin un-stood-on condition. I tried to programme my details in but it didn’t do what the booklet said it would do when I pressed whatever I was supposed to press, so I gave up immediately and decided to try again later. It’s now eight days later and I’ve just not quite worked my way around to having another go.

Avoidance tactics…self-sabotage…mince pies for breakfast. I’m being a pillock.

But I’m still trying. I’m not giving up, and I’m definitely not starting over on the first Monday after New Year. I’m starting again today.

 

Have a great weekend folks…before you go, I’m delighted to share a new guest post on my Thoughts From The Posse page…thank you Jamie for sharing your story, and I’m sure you guys will pitch in with your support like you always do… 🙂

 

Like it..? Tell your friends!