Tag Archives: diet

Willpower Testing Lab

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now, , ,

cat

So I’m heading out of town again this weekend, just for a couple of days – one of my closest friends lives a couple of hours north of here, and this same weekend every year there’s a large craft fair near to where she lives – it marks start of the run up to Christmas for me, since it’s chock full of Christmassy things. We go every year, and have a really lovely day out. You know the type of thing…there are some really unusual gifts, everything from hand finished cashmere shawls, beautiful statement jewellery, clothing and accessories to unique art works and beautiful house things. Oh yes, and the food hall.

What can I tell you about the food hall..?  I’m salivating at the thought. Most of it is home-made produce from local artisans who come and proudly display their wares…it’s an aladdin’s cave of speciality breads, cupcakes, flavoured vodka and gin, fudge, brownies, pies, sausages…olive oils, handmade chocolates, unique cheeses and amazing homemade chutneys. To be fair, that barely scratches the surface – it’s beyond awesome. And all the vendors give away free samples to tempt your palette and entice you into buying.

On a scale of 1-10, just exactly how much enticing do you reckon it’s taken in the past, to get this fat girl to stagger away at the end of the day under the weight of a dozen or more carrier bags..? “Would you like to try a…” “YES PLEASE!”  Yeah, that’s about how much. This time of year has invariably also coincided with the start of the pre-Christmas diet (which has been just as successful as the New Year diet, the Pre-Easter diet, the Post-Easter diet, the summer holiday diet, and the post-summer holiday diet) and as traditions go, the Living North Fair has also been the undoing of the pre-Christmas diet on pretty much an annual basis ever since we started going.

So it’s with a certain amount of trepidation that I’m looking forward to the weekend, because genuinely, it’s going to be a real test of my willpower. Here’s what usually happens. My friend, who by nature is one of life’s most nurturing people will ask me as we head towards the weekend what I would like to eat when I arrive on Friday. Am I dieting? Does a bear shit in the woods?  “Yes, I’m dieting but don’t put yourself to any trouble, I’ll eat what you eat, as long as I can point it”. And I usually do, after downing two large gin and tonics and the majority of the pre-dinner nachos and dip which I always say I’m not going to eat, but which I eat anyway.

Saturday morning usually starts with my friend cooking bacon sandwiches, which I accept with enthusiasm because this year – whichever year it’s been – I’m not going to eat anything from the food hall, I’m just going to look, so best have a decent breakfast. Did you know you can look with the inside of your mouth? It seems you can, I have perfected the skill over the last 5 or so years. By the time I’ve worked my way around all the stalls and sampled every scrap of whatever’s on offer, not to mention tasting the outputs from the cookery demonstrations I am groaning with food, having gained 10lbs over the course of one afternoon, and having left with enough food to last until the New Year diet starts. I mean I’ve blown the pre-Christmas one now, right?

This year, it’s going to be different. I’m telling you about it, and I’m accountable to you guys. I shall plan ahead, check in about dinner plans, agree there will be no nachos within spitting distance of me, and on Saturday I am going to have some samples…but I shall eat fruit for breakfast, and I’ll allocate myself a generous points budget for freebies so I don’t feel deprived. Then a light dinner will see me right.

I wonder whether any of the stands will have luxury polishing cloths so I can touch up my halo on Sunday morning.. 🙂

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Skinny on Purpose

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now, , ,

bulb

I can’t remember which blog post it was, but a few days ago I alluded to some of the homework I’d done when I was seeing my hookie spooky magic lady, and it prompted me to look back through some of the sessions we did and the reflections she always encouraged me to write down afterwards.  I was fairly self-aware even before I started talking to her, but I genuinely had some real light-bulb moments during the times that we sat and chatted back and forth about…well, stuff.

One of the biggest revelations to me was that skinny people weren’t generally skinny by accident. I mean yes of course you always get the odd smug string bean here and there who takes great delight in telling you that they can eat what they like without putting on a pound…I don’t know about you but I always want to enquire whether they’d like to chew on my fist, that being the case. But generally skinny people are skinny because they choose to be skinny.

Which basically means that if they eat out in a restaurant, they might look at the menu (just like I do), and immediately start salivating over the calorie-tastic menu options (just like I do) but after mentally calculating how many calories are in the dish they most like the look of (I don’t do that) they decide against it in favour of a skinny girl option (I don’t do that either 🙁 ). Up to that point, I hadn’t given much thought to how the mind of a skinny person operated, because even at the points in my life where I qualified as a string bean, I wasn’t there long enough to really settle into the mindset of being a skinny person.

I mean yes, for swathes of my life I’ve been in the sweet spot and almost evangelical about the food choices I made because I was on my way down the sizes, but in terms of it just being something I did naturally, unbidden when I wasn’t actually on a diet…no. It would never have even occurred to me to participate in such madness.

It was a revelation, genuinely a light switching on in my head. It made me accept that I had to be accountable for my choices, be they good or bad you know? Every choice has consequences and being a grown up means understanding and accepting the consequences before you make the choice. I could no longer bemoan the fact that I put weight on easily when all these people *sweeping motion of fat arm* could eat what they liked without getting fat. The light bulb switching on made me realise that the reason they didn’t get fat was because making the choice to be skinny was a constant in their life where it never had been in mine. Who knew!

I’d love to say that following that realisation I immediately started making all the right choices and from there it’s been plain sailing…of course it hasn’t.  I’ve talked a lot over the last few weeks about finding the sweet spot, and if you’re not there, you’re not there. Knowledge doesn’t even come close to equalling power if your head’s not in the right place. Ask any fat girl about the theory of losing weight and they can almost certainly reel off more info than your average skinny string bean expert. Putting it into practise is something entirely different though mm?

But I’m there now. I’m making those choices now. And per my BHAG, when I arrive into skinny town, instead of throwing caution to the wind, I’m going to carry on making grown-up-accept-the-consequences skinny choices, because now I get it. I know have to.

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Reflections on the Week

Diet update, Freeform thoughts, In the here & now, ,

weekI love Sunday mornings…it’s usually the day where I don’t need to wake to an alarm. Charlie the dog sleeps in my bedroom and he knows that when I’m awake and no alarm has sounded he’s in with the chance of a cuddle. Lately we’ve taken to reading the Sunday papers together on line with his little cold nose pressed into the crook of my arm, as well as the Skinny Girl messages that have come in overnight, since I usually post right before I go to sleep.

It’s been quite a week. My first week following the weight watchers food plan instead of a low-carb regime. It’s gone well – went a bit mad the first couple of days eating fruit which is a huge no-no on a carb free diet, and it’s fair to say that my insides reacted to this change of diet in fairly predictable fashion. Who knew a fat lass could move so fast eh?  Ussain Bolt might have felt a bit intimidated if he’d clocked my personal best somewhere around Tuesday as I sprinted to….ah ok, TMI, right?

Considering I had two days out at conference where the main hall was surrounded by food stalls, freebies, suppliers wanting to give away samples of goodies left right and centre, topped off by a gala dinner where I could only estimate points, I managed to ignore the asshole in my head and keep the faith. I had a brief encounter with the bastard in the bathroom this morning and I’m happy to report than another pound has melted away. Ten pounds would have been better but I’ll take a pound. I’m still in the game.

What else can I share…ah yes, I’ve done a little bit of development on the Skinny Girl website. I’ve tweaked the content on a few of the pages, and most exciting of all I’ve added a subscription facility – yey! This means that should you want a link sending to your inbox every time I make a new post, so you can read it hot off the press or get to the post with just one click, you can become a subscriber and that will happen as if by magic! You’ll see the little box underneath the top ten posts list, just to the right of where your eyes are now…I promise not to share your email address or bombard you with crap. Have a poke around, let me know what you think of the changes…any feedback welcome!

We’ve had visitors from 43 countries so far since the beginning of October – that’s pretty bloody awesome don’t you think?  And this week, somebody posted a comment on the Daily Mail website under an article about dieting where they gave a shout out to our blog…visitors went through the roof. You can imagine the excitement here at Skinny Towers, I was beside myself!

So for every single one of you who loves the blog and has shared posts and told people about it, thank you so much, I’m insanely in love with each and every one of you. As my support network grows, so does yours and I think what we’re building is really special.

Have a great week 🙂

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Switching It Up

Diet update, In the here & now, , ,

hippo

Well it had to be done. You know my attitude to standing on the dreaded scales, and it’s probably what, five or six weeks since I did it? Diet is going well, or should I say my motivation level remains at an all time high thanks in no small measure to writing my blog, and to you lot in the posse for your lovely posts and emails. I’m still front and centre of the sweet spot…BUT. I don’t appear to be skinny yet. Which to be honest is pissing me right off. I mean it’s all relative isn’t it, I know I’m not going to break out the skinny girl in like 10 minutes, but I’d hoped to be at least one dress size smaller by now and I’m not feeling it. So this morning I had a face-off with the bitch in my bathroom.

(Please do excuse my fruity language especially if you’ve joined us for the first time…I don’t generally have a potty mouth but since I’ve named the asshole in my head his power to upset me has diminished quite considerably, so I’ve adopted it as a strategy. The scales have been duly re-named.)

AAARGH. It’s the good news/bad news thing. I’m 5lbs down since my last attempt to make friends with the number on the scale – cast your mind back to last time, I had a sour mood for days afterward. So 5lbs off is good on the one hand but I’ve gotta be honest, I’d expected more. Shit. No wonder my clothes aren’t hanging off me yet. Right then, well I refuse to be fed up about it, but I need to switch this up a bit and I know exactly how I’m going to do it. I’m going to change my diet of choice.

Whatever diet we all choose to follow, if we stick to it it’s going to show results, right? Low carb diets in the past have worked fairly quickly for me but this time I’m not getting there any faster than I would if I was following a broader food plan, therefore having given it a good go over the last couple of months, I’m going to ‘spend’ my food budget in a different way. I’ve been toying with the idea for a couple of weeks anyway – I’ve had to think about what’s going to happen on holiday, given that champagne is a no-no on a carb free diet and I need to feel in control but not limited. So, I’m going to fish out all my weight watchers paraphernalia and crack on with that and see how I go on. The next couple of days should be interesting as my body adjusts to a new regime.

It may make you smile to know that I’ve just had a very predictable dialogue with the asshole in my head…“why don’t you have the weekend off then, and start on Monday..new diet, new week? You could have a Chinese tonight, no need to go mad but how about some noodles? I know you can have those on weight watchers anyway, but if you start officially on Monday you can eat Chinese tonight without it coming out of your weekly points”…he thought he was going to score an easy victory there. No chance asshole, get back in your box. No chink in this armour buddy, better luck next time fu

Have a good week everyone and thanks for your continuing support…it makes a big wide world of difference 🙂

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Feast or famine

In the here & now, Reflections on past times, , ,

yo-yo-dieting

Over the years I’ve probably tried every diet going. All the usual suspects – the ones where you rock up to fat class once a week, pay your subs and hop on the scales, then sit down for ‘the talk’ – some of them were quite good and the diets do work if you stick to them. The meal plans are flexible, it’s normal food, yadder yadder yadder…it’s just a bloody long slog when you have lots to lose.

And yes I know, I’m looking at it all wrong. The long game gets you into a healthy eating pattern, it’s habit forming, you learn about nutrition, get support…I get it. Only I never really did get it. I always got so far, then got stuck. Bored, impatient, call it whatever you like but sooner or later the asshole would get a lucky strike and BAM I’d come tumbling out of the naughty tree, hitting every branch on the way down. And that’d be it, goodnight Vienna, out of the game. Shackles off, bring on the buns.

Same thing with the other diets I’ve tried. I’ve existed on packs of space dust and hermetically sealed ping meals delivered to my door every week for weeks on end –  2 minutes in the microwave guaranteed to produce a tasty portion-controlled meal. Some of them were actually ok, but then considering I practically had to re-mortgage my house for portions that wouldn’t look out of place on the sodding yellow brick road, they ought to be.

Again with the boredom though…I rarely managed to see it through. The one thing I’ve never considered is weight loss surgery, because I recognise that the problem is 100% in my head. I’d be the one liquidising mars bars or finding new ways to drink fish and chips through a straw if my stomach was the size of a thimble.

Some of the diets I’ve tried have dipped into the psychology of weight loss – the liquid diet in particular came with a big element of homework and group therapy. I found it fascinating and it really did work. For a while. Mainly down to the speed of loss I think, I didn’t have time to be bored, in fact it was exhilarating. I wish I could do it again but I gag at the thought of that chalky soup now.

I guess where I’m going with this, is that despite understanding the concept of a balanced diet, the science of expending more energy than you take in if you want to lose weight and even the psychology behind identifying the triggers which set me off, I’ve spent practically my whole adult life either losing the weight, or putting it back on again. I’ve probably lost and gained around 1000lbs or more over the last 30 years. It seems knowledge isn’t power after all.

How many cycles of despair, followed by determination, hope, success, celebration, pride, self-destruct and back to despair can one girl go through in one lifetime? Lots – the answer is lots. When I hit that sweet spot, and I’m in the zone, life is good. When I’m not, I binge. For me, there’s never been a middle ground. I really want it to be different this time…to coin a phrase, I’m too old for this shit.

So anyway, just to manage your expectations…when I reach the end goal, if my victory dance is done with a donut in my left hand don’t be too surprised, and I hope you’re in this for the long haul because when I get to where I want to be, well that’s when I’m going to really going to need my support network to help me stay there 🙂

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