Back to the little losses again, just .2kg (.4lb) but it makes the total lost a nice round 14kg (30.8lb). Quite satisfying when you look at it like that.
But there is a reason why I've been so quiet and it's completely the wrong reason to be quiet. And it's led me to the sort of place I'd only read about in sensationalist magazines.
Just a quick bit of background. I'm an IT consultant who runs her own business. Things have been very quiet of late. Too quiet. In fact, I've not done any chargeable work since the middle of June.
Understandably, I'm a bit of a mess at the moment. I'm depressed about not working, I'm anxious about money, I'm scared about feeling helpless.
And despite my great loss last week, the fact that I'm fitting into a bunch of different clothes and a whole lot of other good stuff that's happened, my motivation has plummeted.
I made chocolate brownie cake for my mum's birthday two weeks ago. I had a small piece and gave most of the leftovers away. My husband threw the rest in the bin.
Late that week, it was all I could do not to dig through the rubbish and get the cake. And eat it.
I've only read about things like that in magazine articles and tell-all autobiographies. I never thought I would be the sort of person to even contemplate it.
I didn't get the cake out of the bin. I didn't sink that far, but that's how low I'm feeling right now.
It's hard to admit. It's harder to blog about. I hate feeling this way.
Most of my lack of motivation is manifesting itself as slothing about in my track pants watching bad daytime television. Despite my intellect telling me that exercise will give me the endorphins I need to help feel better, it's all I can do to drag myself out of bed.
I feel like rubbish, but I've promised myself I'll get my exercise done this week. I managed to work out yesterday and today, even going for a walk in the pouring rain.
The exercise won't be enough to dig me out of the hole, but it stops me from digging it any deeper.
Finally, a big loss! A whole kilo (2.2lbs) this week. Very gratifying. It's something I've needed. I don't mind the little losses week after week, but you need the odd decent loss to feel like you're making some progress.
Of course, I'm just grateful to still be losing and to not hit a plateau.
All good news, but the weekend proved I'm a long way from managing my relationship with food.
I'd volunteered to cook lunch for the family to help celebrate my mum's 60th birthday. I'd selected a couple of recipes out of delicious. that seemed simple and, well, delicious. I'd made the decision ahead of time that I would not count points, I'd simply enjoy the meal and the company.
It started Saturday night. I decided to cook her birthday cake the night before as our oven can be somewhat tempermental. It was chocolate brownie cake served with chocolate and caramel sauce, ice cream and sugar shards (I told you I wasn't counting points!).
The oven was appalling (a 35 minute cooking time blew out to 1hr and 25 minutes), so the cake sank in the middle. I'd not bought enough chocolate to make the chocolate sauce. The recipe for the caramel sauce produced something khaki coloured and pretty ordinary tasting. When I picked up the sheet of toffee to make the sugar shards it shattered in my hands all over the floor. The springform cake pan had rusted shut and I sliced one thumb trying to get the cake out with a butter knife. Finally, I sliced the other thumb trying to cut the bottom off the cake when the paper lining the bottom of the pan refused to peel off cleanly.
Now, this sort of thing would be enough to piss anyone off. Me? I lost it completely, I was in tears. Not from frustration, but because food still equals love to me and if my cake wasn't perfect, then my family would not believe I loved them enough.
Nevermind the fact that it WAS delicious and they loved it and took home seconds, at that moment, I was not showing enough love because my cake wasn't perfect.
And all the while I was eating cake batter or chocolate chips or the caramel sauce to try to calm myself down.
How fucked up is that?
I feel like I'm such a long way away from separating food from the way I express my emotions. I know it's central to my successfully achieving my goals and maintaining them.
At least I can identify what I'm doing, after I've done it, but being able to take the step to stop myself before I do it feels so far away.
So, what is your relationship with food like and do you use it emotionally?
It's monthly measuring time, so out came the tape measure.
A nice little loss, 7cm (2.8"). But the most important thing is that a lot of that came off my hips! One of the very last places I usually lose weight (hips 'n thighs, I'm a pear shaped girl) and yet off it comes.
I owe it all to the divine Ms Stumptuous and her dedication to squats. They are tightening up the junk in the trunk and making me feel all powerful. Don't listen to the myths about squats and what they can do, listen to Mistress Krista, she preaches the truth!
I'm also really focussing in on my water consumption.
I have to drink 3 litres of water a day. I NEED to drink that. If I don't, my skin dries out and goes scaly, my face ages by about 10 years and my lips split and crack. I get dizzy, tired and grumpy. Worse, I eat when I'm actually thirsty and my body is crying out for water.
And yet, do I manage to drink it? Hell no. Despite trying to make it easy for myself by getting a 750ml water bottle so that I know that if I empty it 4 times, I've got my daily quota.
I'll drink a piddly 2 bottles or maybe get to 3, but my body is not happy.
So I've set myself a time limit. The first bottle has to be consumed in the first three hours after I get up. The second bottle in the next three hours and so on. I'll drill myself hard on this for the next week and see if I can't get back into the water drinking habit.
Now I just have to prepare myself for all the peeing...
Another little .3kg (.7lbs) loss this week. I keep saying that a little loss is better than no loss at all, but it's starting to get pretty tedious.
The girl at weigh-in on Monday night smiled encouragingly and said, "Good for you! You come in every week and chip away at it!" She's right, but I could do without feeling like a beaver trying to nibble away at a redwood.
The body fat percentage dropped by 1.1%, which was gratifying and I'm hoping that when I measure myself on Friday, the tape measure will have reassuring things to say too. Hell, it has to otherwise I wouldn't fit into those old jeans of mine!
There's a thread running on PDTD about how we reward ourselves for losing weight.
I'm big on rewards. Hell, if I hadn't kept rewarding myself with food, I wouldn't even be here. But I respond well to praise, feedback and rewards.
It's something we don't do often enough. Here we are, trying to learn new behaviours, to modify ourselves in ways that are often difficult and uncomfortable, and yet many of us don't reward ourselves for the effort.
If it's an absolute trial to get up in the morning and go for a walk, then reward yourself when you do. It doesn't have to be something big, buy yourself a flower, take a bubble bath with the phone off the hook, go and sample some new perfume. But do something to say, "Go me!" Reward yourself for good behaviour and chances are, you'll keep doing it. After all, rewarding ourselves with food seems to be enormously successful.
I've added a reward to my Goals list.
It's kind of big.
I've decided that around the halfway mark, I've earned an iPod. I decided that not only will 15-17.5kg (33-38.5lbs) be the most weight I've ever lost in any one attempt, but having it will make walking even more enjoyable, which will encourage me to walk even more.
It's a big reward. Bigger than the reward I've got planned for goal. But 22 weeks in and with only tiny amounts of weight coming off, I need something else to aim for. At the rate I'm losing at the moment, it won't be for another 10 weeks or something. But I think I'm worth it.
In breaking news, Tree left the house wearing a pair of jeans that haven't fitted her properly in at least 18 months and a white linen shirt that she hasn't been able to squeeze into for about 2 years.
Eyewitnesses report that she looked hot.
It is unclear whether a national holiday will be scheduled to celebrate this event, but we will keep you informed with regular updates.
We now return you to your scheduled programming.
If you have read this, it is your sworn duty to tell at least one other person, even a complete stranger, this exciting news. Go on, off you go, I'll wait for you...
Good news this week, just a little loss again, but a loss is better than a gain! Down another .2kg (.4 lb). Would like a more substantial loss, but as long as I'm losing, I'm not complaining.
Also, I'm patting myself on the head for achieving something else. This is the most weight I've ever lost with Weight Watchers. This is my third attempt. On my first, I wasn't really into it and only lost about 5-6kg (11-13lbs) before I gave it all away. The second time I dropped 11.1kg (24.4lbs). So I'm already ahead of the game, and I'm not even halfway there!
Which brings me to my conundrum.
I don't know what my goal weight really is.
I've got 65kg (143lbs) up there, because that's what Weight Watchers recommends and it's the upper limit of the BMI for my height.
But then I bought a set of body fat scales on the weekend. I measured my body fat percentage and did a little math. While I'm not entirely sure on the numbers, it sounds like that 65kg would mean that I'm going to be below 25% body fat, which is the lowest end of the healthy scale. A friend, Shane, who lifts weights and knows about this sort of stuff, advised somewhere between 66kg and 72kg. My original goal was 70kg.
I'm a solid girl. I always have been. I'm also lifting weights, so I'm beginning to think that 65kg is not a good goal for me.
At my lowest weight (which I never recorded) I looked like a Chupa Chup. I was all head with a little stick-figure body. Not attractive. I don't want to go back there again. I want to look sleek and healthy and rounded. I want hips and boobs and a little tummy. I want a womanly figure and I'm not interested in being 'cut' or defined.
Now, I could just blunder along until I hit a size that appealed to me and just stop, but I rather like having a goal to work to. If 65kg is going to turn me into a stick figure, I don't want to use that as a goal.
Can anyone offer any advice?
I'll also be posting this to the PDTD forums, so apologies to anyone who reads both.