That's what I'm talking about!

Weight: 18st 3lb
Loss: 5lb - oh yeah baby!
Total Loss: 64.5lbs (according to my ticker!)

We're heading in the right direction once again, and it feels good. And as well as feeling good, it feels comfortable. I achieved that loss eating well, filling up on healthy food, and using between 5 and 10 syns per day. I used to try not to use my syns, but I've decided this time round that syns are there to use, and they make things much more tolerable in the long term, so syns will be used. I've mainly used them for salad dressings or sauces to perk things up a bit, but the odd cereal bar or slice of toast has been a big help too, and I think could well provide the answer to the age old problem of the 24 hour days I often endure when working.

It helps that there is so much delicious food in season right now. Peaches and nectarines have never been sweeter or juicier, melon is divine, strawberries to die for.

And my most exciting purchase this week? A salad spinner just like my nana used to have!

Something Awesome

I was just catching up on some Blog reading, and I read a brilliant post (one of many!) on Jack Sh*t, Gettin' Fit and I thought it would be a crime not to share it with you. Go, read, enjoy. I imagine you'll be gone for some time!

http://jackfit.blogspot.com/2009/07/reversing-it.html

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!