Monday 31 December 2012

Damage done...

OK, not as bad as I thought.
I'm 11 stone 6 (160 pounds)


For this week only, as a kick start, I'm going to be eating 1000 calories per day.
After that it will be 1200.
I've managed to fit some quite tasty food into even the 1000 calories so hopefully it shouldn't be too tough!

For dinner tonight I will be eating chicken breast, grilled tomatoes and a sprinkling of cheese. My family will have the same with the addition of pasta. I've even got a 10 calorie jelly for pudding. :)

This is where I think I will find it tricky. Making meals that both I and my family can enjoy. I don't want to obviously be ''on a diet'' and giving my young daughters a complex about eating.
I have to accept though there will be some meals they have that will be a bit of a no-no for me. Like when they have lasagne with masses of cheese and white sauce. I won't even be able to begin calorie-counting that!

Sunday 30 December 2012

The Time Has Come (Well, nearly...)






Well finally, I'm about to embark on this weight loss regime for The Last Time!

I'm super excited. Although it's a New Year thing I'm actually starting tomorrow.

My weigh in day will be Monday mornings so it made sense to start a day early. The last of the crap is being eaten today. Not that there's much left in the house now anyway.

I will weigh in tomorrow and report the damage here. It's going to be bad. I've eaten my weight in chocolate this Christmas so will probably be adjusting the start weight on that ticker tomorrow!

Feeling very motivated.


Wednesday 26 December 2012

Goodbye chocolate

Well, these past few days I have consumed more chocolate than I could ever imagine! It's true, I'm a fully fledged chocoholic and chocolate has always been my downfall. I can take or leave anything, but chocolate.

About 10 years ago I gave up eating chocolate completely for about 6 months! Yes, I hear the gasps of my fellow chocoholics. That is amazing if you are the kind who cannot get through a day without the stuff. I remember eventually I didn't want to eat it anymore and it felt great. Goodness knows why I started eating it again. Maybe over-confidence; thinking I had 'cracked it' and I was no longer addicted and could eat it in moderation? Well, NO! It was not to be and very soon after I started eating it again, I was hooked. It's like a (slightly less serious) version of being an alcoholic. Once an addict, always an addict.



Much of the time my daily food intake has been about 50 per cent chocolate. It's ridiculous. It makes me physically feel crap. I don't sleep well, I feel lethargic. Oh yeah, and it's made me fat.

I've done it before and damn it I will do it again. I will completely give up chocolate this New Year. Forever. It may sound extreme but I don't get any true benefit from having it in my life. Time and time again I have failed at eating it in moderation. It's all or nothing with me. So, for the sake of my health, and figure, I've got to go with nothing.

Friday 21 December 2012

Friends and food

Had a lovely get together with my friends last night at one friend's flat. These are my 2 best friends since school.

A little Christmas fest. Was great fun. She decorated her dining table with a Christmas tablecloth and crackers and cooked a lovely meal. 

A lot of our meet ups revolve around food, really. We often tend to go to this one particular friend's flat (she has no children so there's no distractions from letting our hair down!) and she'll cook a meal or we'll go to the pub involving eating out as well as drink. 



We're not really ''go shopping'' friends or ''beauty salon trips'' friends. 
We have done WeightWatchers together before though. That was always fun, trying to be ''good'' with eating when we are such a bad influence on each other!

I hope once I start trying to lose weight in January I won't become a weight loss bore. It will be a shame to have to keep saying ''no I can't eat this or that'' or ''just a tiny piece, please'' or ''no pudding for me'' but unfortunately never saying no is what's got me to this weight in the first place!

Tuesday 18 December 2012

No Biggest Loser?!

I have just discovered there will be no 2013 series of The Biggest Loser UK. 

OK, OK, I know it was never on par with the American Biggest Loser show. The losses were never as astounding. The trainers were not quite as scary as Bob and Jillian. But I still loved watching. 

As I love ALL fat /fitness /weight loss related shows. Supersize vs Superskinny, Fat Families, there was a show some footballer's wife/ ex-singer, Louise Redknapp did where she aimed to get to size 0. Love them all! My husband can't stand them but I'm obsessed with them.

Apparently the viewing figures for Biggest Loser UK were down last year compared with previous years which is a shame as I thought they had their best year last year in terms of weight loss. Some of the contestants looked pretty amazing at the end.

Oh well, the new series of Biggest Loser USA will be starting soon and hopefully will get screened here soon after.




Saturday 15 December 2012

Why is a pound never enough?

I WILL NOT treat this as some kind of race this time. 
I WILL be happy if I lose a pound each week.
2 or 3 pound losses are NOT (always) realistic or to be expected after the first couple of weeks.


This is how my WeightWatchers experience used to always go (this is not recommended by WW but just my own stupid interpretation) ....

*Weigh In on Friday morning. 
*Have a great loss.
*Have a kind celebratory binge Friday night. Takeaway, chocolates... Way beyond my extra ''weeklies'' (weeklies are extra ProPoints you get to use for snacks or treats or basically however you choose)
*Not completely keep track of my eating Saturday.
*Go slightly over my points on a Sunday.
*Think ''shit!'' Monday.
*Spend from Monday until Friday morning's weigh-in living on about 500 cals a day to make up for the excess I consumed at the weekend.
*Feel very hungry and irritable.
*Weigh In on Friday morning.
*Have a great loss.

and repeat......

Such madness. I tended to lose 2 or 3 pounds a week but Monday to Friday I was utterly miserable. I really need to get some balance this time and be happy if I lose ''just'' a pound.

I looked on the WeightWatchers chat boards the other day and noticed somebody on there started mid- August at 10st 8 (148 pounds) and they now weigh 8st 12 (124 pounds). August to now really doesn't seem all that long and in fact the majority of weeks she seems to have lost 1 pound.

If I 'only' lost a pound EVERY week starting in January I would be at my goal weight at the end of the Summer. That may seem a little way off but it's better than spending another year messing around with dieting extremes and spending next Christmas at the current weight I am now (or worse heavier still).

Now, obviously I would be happier with a 2 pound loss than a 1 pound loss but I'm not going to let it become all consuming.

Here's to the slow path!

Wednesday 12 December 2012

Can tell I'm putting ON weight.

Ok, so the drawback of me waiting until New Year to start this diet is that in the meantime it's like I have free reign to just stuff myself silly. Uch, why must I view it like that? 
The plan was to try to get into better habits this month in order to start the diet properly in January. (I use the word 'diet', I mean lifestyle change but diet is much quicker to type.) : D

I seem to be failing at that though and every time I fancy eating something (which is pretty constant at the moment) I just think ''It's fine, I'll lose any extra weight in January'' But at this rate I'm going to have about 5 extra stones to lose!

Maybe it would seem the sensible thing to just start now, sod the whole dramatic 'New Year New Me' approach. But I need that. I need the hype and excitement of starting this in the New Year or I think it will just end as any other of my pathetic attempts at losing this weight. 

I read somewhere that 95% of people who start new year diets give up. I will be that 5%!!

Monday 10 December 2012

When I weigh in.

When do you weigh? Is there a particular reason why or just habit?

When I'm attempting to lose weight I weigh in every morning. 
Always first thing after going to the toilet (ahem...)
I don't weigh totally naked as many do, but I do tend to wear very lightweight pyjamas.
I use my set of WeightWatchers scales in the bathroom.

My actual Weigh In day is a Sunday so any fluctuations in weight between the Sundays I take with a pinch of salt and don't get too despondent / or my hopes up. I just like to weigh in each morning as it makes me feel more in control and motivated. It keeps my mind on the mission.

When I'm not on a weight loss mission (like now, as I'm starting 1st Jan) I don't bother hopping on the scales at all. It's too depressing.
Right now the scales are not my friend!



Saturday 8 December 2012

This is interesting

Something I came across,

''Can diet sodas actually make you gain weight?
Diet soda contains fewer, or no, calories compared with the sugared versions, but recent studies have shown that people who drink diet soda tend to gain more weight than those who drink regular soda.
The reason may be that the brain can't be fooled by the artificial sweeteners found in many diet drinks and foods. While the sweet taste of diet soda may satisfy the palate, the body feels swindled out of the calorie rush it was expecting That may only whet the appetite, encouraging diet-soda-consumers to seek out sugar from other sources., or alter their metabolism as if they had actually consumed the sugar — both of which may lead to weight gain.
Another reason may involve the amped up sweetness of artificial sugars, which are 100 times sweeter than natural sugar. It's possible that people who eat a lot of artificially sugared foods become so accustomed to intense levels of sweet that their palates can no longer appreciate natural flavors, of fruit or other foods. Since natural foods are more nutritious than artificially processed alternatives, people may start to choose less healthy foods overall.
The evidence is still coming in, but it's an area of intense research to figure out how our bodies react to the mismatch between artificially sweetened taste and the absence of corresponding calories.''

I'm considering giving up on Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke. I've never liked it as much as the 'full fat' versions. I think I will just have a couple of glasses of the proper stuff at the weekends from now on. Rather than drinking the Diet stuff on a daily basis, which I do now.
Just hoping I can manage without that daily 'fix'

Anybody else successfully given up 'Diet Crack', as I've heard it referred to? 
 


Thursday 6 December 2012

Inspirational weight loss alert!

Great weight loss lady!

Cacia said: 'I'd had enough of being overweight. I have a four-year-old daughter called Isabelle and being overweight was having a huge impact on my life'Cacia was thrilled to be able to wear her dream, size 10 wedding dress on her big day

Binge Eating

This a quite a problem for me.

I would say it's kind of gradually crept upon me 5 years ago (age 23 when I weighed 9 stone *126 pounds*), getting progressively worse and the binges bigger.

So, I would say the binges started when my eldest was almost 3. I would drop her at nursery each day and on the way home I would pass the corner shop. Now, I've always been fond of a chocolate bar (most chocolate bars, really) and I would nip in, pick up a newspaper and a Twirl bar. As time went on, it was like one Twirl bar wasn't quite enough. So I would get 2 bars of chocolate. Have one when I got home and one for later. Now, somewhere along the line this turned into huge sharing bags of things like Maltesers.
I could never pass that corner shop without going in. I don't know if anyone else can relate but I would feel really anxious if I even considered NOT going in. It's like I needed my fix.

Anyway fast forward to now and if I go into the supermarket for say, a loaf of bread, I come out with multi-packs of chocolate bars, cakes, milkshake, triple sandwiches, crisps and, if I'm lucky, I remember to actually get the sodding loaf of bread! Again, the anxiety arises if I even consider leaving the supermarket with just the loaf of bread. I will bring it home and stuff my face with as much as I can possibly manage. I do this at least 3 times a week. Even the days I don't binge, I'm constantly eating far too much rubbish. I must say, the temptation to be sick has never cropped up with me. For that I'm thankful.

Obviously this must stop. I've put on over 2 stones (I'm surprised it's not more) in these 5 years. It's not healthy and it's not cheap.

I WILL succeed this time.

Wednesday 5 December 2012

The Final Countdown


So, my intention is to start this THING on 1st January 2013
If I start now it will be doomed to failure with Christmas coming up so early on. I want the best crack at this because, as my Blog name suggests, this is The Last Time. In the meantime I'm trying to tone down my bingeing (deep sigh) and embrace healthier foods a bit more.

I will be 30 in January and my most recent WeightWatchers attempt a few months back was with the intention of getting slim for the big 3 0! Erm, well that went well. Ahem...

JANUARY-THE PLAN: *1200 calorie per day. (I'm a shorty and do nothing particularly physical so 1200 cals seems to be the general advice on those calculators)
                                         *Join the gym. (My youngest will be starting nursery 3 mornings a week in the New Year so will be perfect opportunity)


****Well Christmas is definitely upon us. My middle daughter has her Christmas Play coming up and I've only just discovered she is going to be a donkey (THE donkey, I believe) 
Now, I'm not a 'crafty' mum. Not for love nor money can I sew, so buying a Donkey outfit was my only option. So this morning I power walk (yep, getting into the fitness swing already) up to Asda and, after much frantic searching, can not find anything resembling any kind of Christmas outfit at all. 
The shop assistants are all in a huddle having a bit of a mothers meeting by the sounds of it so do I go and pester them? Well normally I would be too shy to but I NEEDED this outfit so I go and interrupt. One staff member positively jumped away from me and busied herself with some paperwork while another kindly led me to a little end aisle where, she forewarned me, they had almost sold out of all outfits. I discovered a handful of Santa outfits and 1, YES 1. donkey outfit left! Overjoyed I thanked the member of staff and grabbed the donkey costume. 
Then I discovered the 'problem' It was for Age 1-2 years. My daughter is 6! (and has a rather bigger than average head, bless her) What to do? Well, it does seem a 'big' 1-2 years size, I convince myself. Maybe, it could fit? I ignore all rational thought and buy it.
I'm now awaiting ''home time'' to pick my daughter up from school, get her home and wrestle this baby outfit on her. I don't think she will be too impressed. Think I'll cut the age tag out....****

Tuesday 4 December 2012

Who am I? Where am I? And what have you done with my chocolate?!

Hello! Hi! Salut! Guten Tag! ....erm *struggles to remember any other foreign language greetings*

I'm a 29 year old layyydie living in the South of England with a bit of weight to lose. I seem to be in a constant cycle of stop-start diets and binge eating, with an ever growing waistline!

A blog seemed a good idea for an ''outlet'' as the professionals like to say. It will hopefully keep me motivated when the going gets tough. So here's me starting the first of what I imagine will be many, many ramblings.

I'm incredibly nosey so have enjoyed having a snoop at other blogs. Hopefully others will enjoy reading mine too. *needy*



  Mr Happy Wavy Bananaman (I really should eat more of these and less chocolate)