Improvisation

Last night I was looking for a syn free snack, and I had a couple of Healthy Extra A choices in need of being used. I ended improvising with some ingredients from the fridge and cupboards, and it was fabulously tasty so I thought I'd share!

Ingredients:
Corn on the cob
Fry Light (the "butter" version)
Sea salt
Laughing Cow Light cheese triangles
Peppers
Tomatoes
Sainsbury's Be Good To Yourself Sweet Balsamic and Smoked Garlic dressing (0.5 syn)

I sprayed the corn with the fry light, wrapped it in foil and bunged it in the oven for 10 minutes. Once cooked I sprinkled it with some sea salt. While it was cooking I finely chopped the pepper and tomato and mixed them in with the cheese, and added a splash of the dressing to loosen the mix a little. And then I just ate and enjoyed - simples! Obviously it was totally improvised using what was in my house, I'm sure the veg, dressing and cheese variety could be varied without any loss of enjoyment.

I'm happy to report I'm doing well so far this week. 100% on track, no problems to report and I'm peeing for England which is always a good indicator halfway through week one! I'm about to go and make sweetcorn soup for lunch - link to recipe over there <--

Can't wait for Monday now!

Homecoming

Week - what the heck is it now? Shall we call it Week 1?
Weight: 18st 8lbs
Total Loss: Shall I start at zero again? I'll come back to this!

Shiiiiiit! But it's OK, because the reason I have this knowledge is that last night I went back to Slimming World. Is there a way of portraying a wide grin on a blog post? I feel so relieved to be back! I got a lovely warm welcome when I walked in, and I just felt like I'd come home.

So today I have had a lovely familiar Green day, and I have eaten salad freshly picked from my own garden, new potatoes picked last night from my own garden and lots of colourful tasty healthy food. Beige is banished!

I have a happy glow today, all's well in my world, how about you?

Home Grown

I'm not sure whether I've mentioned it before, but I embraced the "grow your own" philosophy this year, and since March I've worked hard in the garden to turn it from a muddy quagmire that I was too embarressed to let visitors into for a smoke, into a haven of lovelinees that can provide us with food and flowers, and be a venue for chilled out afternoons in the sun. It was very hard in the beginning, but it's been worth it I can promise you. I love sitting in my garden now and surveying my little kingdom.

And now it's yeilding actual food! How exciting is that! I have lots of little green tomatoes waiting for some sunshine to ripen them, a reasonable amount of strawberries from plants that I didn't expect to flower until next year, carrots, a host of spring onions, potatoes, lettuce, sweetcorn and enough brambles to keep us in pies and jam for a long time to come! I had some coriander too but the very hot weather recently caused it to go all leggy and flower so now it just looks nice in it's pot. Nothing wrong with looking nice! I've enjoyed having fresh cut flowers from my garden adorning my house too.

This year my intention was to learn from my mistakes, so that next year I could produce successful crops, so anything we get to eat this year is a bonus really. My biggest learning curve in this has been that everything grows much much bigger than I expected! Teeny tiny seeds grow into very large plants! So next year I will sow less and be more prepared to give them room to grow. And I need frogs and birds in my garden to deal with numbers of snails that would give me nightmares if I let myself think about it :shudder:! I lost a lot of my early efforts to the snails and now have to have a daily snail patrol. 6 months ago, if you'd told me I'd be picking snails up with my bare hands I'd have run screaming from the room. Now I just go out there and pick the litle sods of my gorgeous plants and hurl them away.

Dietgirl Shauna has been gardening too, and she has managed to come up with some clever reasons why gardening is like weight loss. This is why she has a book and I don't ;)

Short Circuited.

Wow I'm bad at this blogging malarky lately! It's because I have nothing [good] to report really. I gave WW up because it messed with my head very very badly. I should have seen the signs, it's not the first time it's happened, the "can't stop thinking about food" post was the big clue! So I ended up on a binging spree, which I'm not proud of. But I'm over that now, and levelling back out into normal eating again. Let this be a lesson to me!

Naturally a 3 week binge means I've gained weight :eyeroll: so I'm not loving myself overly much at the moment. My SW exile ends in 2 weeks time though, thank god!

I'm pondering at the moment. What is it that last year made healthy eating seem so very easy, and this year it seems all but impossible for me? Clearly I'm wired up wrong and a fuse has blown somewhere. Someone needs to invent a diet that can fix my head!

It's all about fear.

First of all my apologies for the delay between posts - a busy life coupled with a problem logging in has caused the radio silence. Hopefully the login issue is resolved now, because here I am!

Today I have mostly been wondering what holds us in the grasp of diet plans such as Slimming World and Weight Watchers, or more specifically what makes us shy away from other methods such as very low cal diets (Lighter Life, Cambridge etc) or even surgery?

I'm sure that I'm not the only diet blogger to receive numerous messages suggesting amazing solutions to my problem, or asking me to recommend things to my readers. It's the reason I have my comments set to moderate, and those messages tend to be binned as spam. However I have recently received such a message from a person that I know, used to work with in fact. So this gave him a unique chance to be heard. The message was pretty much the same as everyone else's if I'm honest - scientifically proven shakes, bars and supplements, FDA approval, success stories, and some emotive language thrown in. I'm sure that the "2 shakes and a bar" method of dieting would be effective so why don't I want to try it (yet!)?

Well first of all, I like food. Liking food is of course what has put me where I am today, but I'm not blaming the food for that, and I'm not going to shun it. Every day I have to prepare meals for my family, and that remains true even if I personally am not eating them. I struggle to see how me not eating food would set any kind of positive example for my impressionable 7 year old, and I also fail to see how doing that would in anyway help me learn how to eat healthily. But those concerns aside, there's something else stopping me.

I remember a few years ago, on a diet forum, one lady was having great success on a liquid diet, success I freely admit to envying. But among all the congratulatory posts, there was one member who was a consistent voice of doom. "It's not good for you, it's not healthy, it isn't sustainable, you'll regain all your weight as soon as you start eating" and so on. We all know someone like that don't we?! I don't know whether the person was jealous of the lady's success, genuinely concerned for her health, or just a bit of a bitch. But I do know that there is a perception that anything that is in anyway different from normal is cheating or wrong in someway and a huge part of me wants to avoid any hint of that attitude.

In darker moments I've considered bariatric surgery (gastric band). Witness the outrage and scorned heaped up the lovely Fern Britton when the press revealed that she had undergone bariatric surgery. Why on earth anyone thinks life threatening surgery rendering you unable to enjoy a hearty meal ever again is in any way the easy option or cheating is just beyond me. Fear of death is what keeps me from asking for surgery. Fear of derision isn't far from the door either.

So largely it's about keeping up appearances then. Or certainly avoiding bringing any more negativity into my ife than I have to. It's about fear of the unknown, it's about fear of being hungry, and maybe most of all it's about fear of failure. Imagine how much of a failure I would be if I failed at those last resort options!

I'm not ready for last resorts yet!

Summer Solstice

So it's not going so well. After my last post, I had actually lost a pound, but then for whatever reason, I slid backwards, I can't even pretend I tried to stay on track, and I have had some horrible binges. I know when I've eaten badly because I'm woken from my sleep choking on stomach acid. This used to happen to me a lot, but hasn't been a problem since I started losing weight at Slimming World last year. This week it has happened, and I'm horrified.

I lay awake in bed this morning trying to sort things out in my head. And I've come to the conclusion that I am desperate to be able to get back to my SW class. I miss it. I miss Heather, I miss the support. I miss the food. When I look back, it worked so well for me for months, and when it stopped working so well, that was my own fault.

There's only a few more weeks now of me not being able to get to that class, so I am going to carry on with WW just for damage limitation, and then as soon as I can, I'm going to be back to SW. I know WW has worked so well for so many of you, but for whatever reason it messes with my head. I do think it was starting to reduce my appetite though, right before the binging! So if I can get it back under control then when I return to SW it will be with a smaller appetite and therefore a greater hope of success.

This week in June always seems to represent a turning point for me. I can think of many major changes in my life that have occured around the summer solstice. It is a year ago today since I did the Race For Life, and also a year ago this week since my first weight gain on SW. So I hereby vow that this will be a new turning point and a change for the better. I don't want to binge, I don't want to taste acid, I don't want to be fat, I don't want to die young, I don't want to feel out of breath walking down the road.

I will NOT press that red button!

Beyond The Edge Of Reason

I can't stop thinking about food. I lie in bed awake thinking about food. I sit at my computer looking for ways to make my Points go further. Even as I eat each meal I'm wondering when I can eat the next. I spend ages furtling through my cupboards working out the Points value of each product and wondering how I can possibly utilise it in a low Point meal. Hunger is never far away, and I'm resorting to bizarre food combinations - couscous sandwich? Yum! The best news all week is the discovery that I like my porridge made with water so I can eat more porridge for the same Points - result!

I feel like an alcoholic, constantly seeking my next drink, scary stuff! I'm really wishing this phase would hurry up and be over, my appetite suitabley reduced and my weight steadily falling. I understand that this is a process I need to go through, but Weight Watchers has totally sent me over the edge!