Author Archive for thetoadPage 2 of 2

Diet Starts On Monday!

Published
by
thetoad
on 31 March 2008
in Dieting, Excercise, Losing Weight and Mental Health
. 0 Comments

So here we are on a Monday and I always think to myself, right! – the diet starts today, we are going to change all the bad habits, eat healthily and lose some weight. This will be the week that changes my dieting lifestyle and will crack the weight loss once and for all. This mentality usually means that on a Sunday I eat a bit more than I should – “diet starts tomorrow” – so it is ok to eat a bit more than I should as I’ll be reining it all in on Monday and being super healthy and super disciplined.

I wouldn’t say since last week’s weigh in I have done anything that deserves a weight loss. For starters, last Monday was Easter Monday and TuT was off work and we did bank holiday stuff like having a homemade chicken and mushroom pie for lunch (small piece of pastry – 5 points – argh!) and going to the cinema, and me not doing any exercise. Tuesday’s weigh in revealed the pound loss – quite disappointing, but it had been the Easter weekend; although mine was entirely chocolate egg free! After Tuesday’s weigh in I decided to be good, but relaxed a bit in myself Tuesday night, knowing weigh in was not for another week and enjoyed a high pointed curry for tea and a couple of wineages in the evening, and did no formal exercise during the day.

Wednesday and we had TuT’s brother and his girlfriend come to stay for the night. The girlfriend arrived with chocolate covered treats and we all went out for a meal which included drinking pints of Stella and lime (!!) and I went over my points for that day. Thursday I was still recovering from my borderline day of illness and our evening meal turned out to be a mixture of convenience foods – savoury rice, pasta and sauce, chicken sticks etc. I was not well enough to cook, we just needed something to go in our tummies for tea that wouldn’t cause a lot of effort or time in the kitchen. It fitted into the points plan – just, but wasn’t the best.

Then Friday comes and we always have a take away, and I treated myself to a gorgeous sandwich from the special sandwich deli shop over the road from us for my lunch. I think the ciabatta bread alone worked out to five points without the filling (coronation chicken – yummy!) and then we had take away pizza for tea.

The borderline mentally unwell days meant I did no exercise all week except for a bit of walking about. I have been sticking to my points over the weekend, just about. But at the higher end of the scale. So I am drawing a line in the sand, I can’t change the fact I was mentally unwell last week and so did not eat so well or do any exercise, it is in the past and I am focusing on the present and what I can do to change things NOW.

So I am closing here for now – it is Monday – Diet Starts TODAY – so I am going out on my bike for a 10km cycle workout, with my Garmin GPS watch so I know how far I have cycled and what work I have done when I upload my cycle ride stats to the computer.

Summer Time Saves The Toad

Published
by
thetoad
on 30 March 2008
in Dieting and Food
. 0 Comments

Hurah for Daylight Saving and welcome British Summer Time! I woke up at what I thought was 5:30am and was totally unable to get back to sleep. I decided to post a blog entry as I have been a bit quiet over the last couple of days and I am always at my most creative first thing in the morning. I turn on the computer at 5:45 and the PC tells me it is actually 6:45 which is what time I get up during the week anyway. So now I don’t feel like a total insomniac freak tapping away on the computer at an unearthly hour on a Sunday as the clocks have changed.

Well, as you can tell from the beautiful post TuT wrote about me sleeping, things haven’t been so brilliant over the last couple of days. I have just felt so depressed and fed up. Things like the depo provera injection and my weight gain and inability to shift the pounds after a valiant first week’s effort just gutted me more than words can say. It really fed into my Borderline thinking and I was pretty mentally unwell. I didn’t shower, the housework got put to one side – including the cooking and laundry and TuT had to put up with a lot.

Saturday dawned yesterday and I still felt the same and didn’t want to get out of bed. My energy levels are at all time low – I have some sort of coldy bug thing, only a slight snuffley nose, but enough of a bug to sap my energy levels. Eventually I was out of bed, showered for the first time in two days (disgusting of me I know) and going to do the weekly grocery shopping with TuT. TuT was wanting to do the shopping online, as you can see from his earlier post, but we haven’t got around to setting it up and I am not confident that I would manage to write a fully comprehensive shopping list that would include all we needed. So often in the supermarket I’ll see something that we need, but I would have neglected to put it on the shopping list. I am sure at some point we will trial an online shop, and thanks so much to Kate for her email giving advice and her experiences about Tesco and Sainsbury’s deliveries, it helped a lot.

We went around Asda, I am still avidly watching ‘Delia’ on Monday nights and wanted to get the Asda mushroom risotto. I’ve got her book so when she does the recipes on Monday night I can find out from the cookery book where to source the ingredients from. After much searching of the freezers we did find the said mushroom risotto – priced at practically £3! TuT with our trusty cardboard “points wheel” worked out each portion was four points. That seemed a lot for a relatively small portion, and Delia jazzed hers up with dried porcini mushrooms and some sort of wine, and I can’t imagine myself at lunch time going to such an effort of reducing dried and fresh mushrooms down with wine and adding them to the frozen risotto. TuT doesn’t like risotto really so if we’d bought it I would have to eat on week day lunches when TuT’s at work. I decided against it!

Delia’s use of frozen mashed potato is something we decided to use and I think it is brilliant. Mashed potato was the bane of my childhood eating as my mum adores the stuff and would eat it with every single meal. We didn’t have it with every single meal, but it wasn’t far off, there weren’t many meals she could fit mashed potato as the obligatory carbohydrate into. Her mash was lumpy and sometimes almost “grey”. I would try anything to disguise the taste and texture, once when we had gammon and pineapple I even poured juice off the tinned pineapple over it – anything to try and make it bearable to eat. Incidentally – don’t try the pineapple trick – it was disgusting! Into adulthood and cooking for myself and TuT, as you can imagine, mashed potato has not made many tea time appearances. When I have made it however I have found it a pain as I want it totally smooth – no lumps, and creamy – but keeping an eye on points from butter and milk. TuT was not overly impressed with the results when I used the stick hand blender on the boiled potatoes and made an almost potato puree – whoops! But frozen mash is ace – 5 minutes or so in the microwave, no peeling or boiling or mashing, and the resulting stuff is very nice. Creamy, no lumps, and if mash had tasted like that in my childhood I would have eaten it no problem!

Today we are going to a science show called ‘Brainiac’ in Brighton, so we decided to have Sunday dinner on Saturday night. I spoke to my younger brother on Friday afternoon and he was cooking a shoulder of lamb in red wine and shallots with his housemates and girlfriend on Friday night, as opposed to them all getting a bit too drunk and lairy at the beginning of the weekend, so doing a roast on Saturday night was inspired by my brother, and not being able to do one today as we are out for the afternoon. TuT wanted mash and roasted potatoes with his beef – no problem there with my trusty frozen mashed potato! And I am afraid, despite trying the Nigella tip of the use of semolina my homemade roasted potatoes are nothing to write home about, so I use the Asda healthy range frozen roast potatoes which are perfectly acceptable and take no time to cook whilst the meat is resting and I am doing everything else.

At 7.15pm we sat down to roast beef and all the trimmings, one thing I don’t cheat on is my Yorkshire Puddings – Toads! – I make them to the Nigella recipe, using four eggs per recipe, getting the tin as hot as possible and putting them into the hottest oven, they rise unbelievably into lots of sand castles. I am quite proud of them when I put them on the table!

The rest of the evening passed nicely. In my desperation to find out about when I could expect to start losing weight at a reasonable rate when I come off the injection I decided to post on the Weight Watchers forums if anyone else had experienced a big gain whilst being on the injection and how long it had taken to start to lose weight once its effects wore off. Thank you to all that posted a reply. It was so nice to find out that my gain of four stone is not unusual, others were reporting large gains, and that once you come off it, following Weight Watchers, a loss of 2 pounds or so a week is possible. Thank you so much to the lovely Gemma that posted a reply and wrote me a lovely email, it has made such a difference to hear from you! I’d like all of you reading this to feel free to mail me with any thoughts, questions, or advice; just follow the link on the top of the page.

Borderline Personality Disorder makes for Disordered Day

Published
by
thetoad
on 27 March 2008
in Mental Health
. 4 Comments

After posting yesterday’s entry things went totally crazy. I suffer from a severe and enduring mental health problem in the form of what is called a Borderline Personality Disorder. It is so called because it is a mental health condition that borders on lots of other mental health problems. I border on symptoms of schizophrenia, manic depression (bipolar), depression and have an Eating Disorder. I suffer from symptoms of these problems, without having enough of the symptoms to have something like Bipolar diagnosed in its entirety. I get very paranoid and lately have been getting really angry.

My anger is just crazy when it comes over me. I shout and totally lose my temper with TuT. I become convinced that my paranoid thoughts are the truth and anyone that disagrees with me just ignites my anger further. When I get into my disordered thinking as a result of my personality disorder I stop being able to care for myself. I don’t eat properly or take showers or baths. I can do dangerous things like self harming; my left arm is a mass of scars from the days when I would channel my anger towards myself. I’ve attempted suicide numerous times, and as recently as last August I locked TuT out of the house and took an overdose. I really am one crazy chick when the Personality Disorder comes out to play and it’s scary.

I am so angry about my weight gain. In gaining weight I have lost so much of myself. My confidence, self esteem and feelings of self worth are all rock bottom; bordering on non existent. When I first starting seeing fiancé TuT I’d lost a lot of weight and was continuing to lose weight. We had a big chat one day in the car coming back from shopping and TuT was saying not to lose any more weight. I agreed with him but said under no circumstances did I want to gain any.

“Just a small gain of a couple of pounds and it’ll destroy me. I won’t go out the house. I will be depressed. I stay this weight and that’s it – no gains!!”

I said with strong emotions running through me. For the first time in my adult life I was a nice size 10/12. I loved buying clothes and getting dressed up. Now my uniform is my black track suit bottoms and blokey black fleece I flinched from TuT.

I know that the gain is not my fault, although I have spent the last 18 months thinking that I have been eating too much, and it is going to take some time before this way of thinking changes and I can enjoy a healthy meal without feeling guilty. I got a fantastic email that really made my day today from a lovely girl called Sara Lake. Her blog, www.sanafit.blogspot.com, is brilliant reading and so inspiring. I had some questions about how she was going about getting fit and slim so I dropped her a mail. Sara replied so quickly and had even taken the time to read this blog and told me she loved the story about the red-coated lady cheering me on when I was running. What was really interesting was what Sara wrote about my weight gain :

“As for your weight gain, I think you can stop blaming yourself. I have seen two cases like this of massive, ‘unexplained’ weightgain. One of them was taking Depo Provera injections (as a nice bonus, she also got full-face acne every time she got the shots), the other was on anti-depressants. Both returned to normal weight once the meds were changed.”

This made me feel so much better, especially the part that once the meds were changed their weights returned to normal. I had TuT frantically searching the web last night to find out how quickly the injection will be out of my system and when I can start to expect to see some improvement on the weight loss front. A part of me wants to stop trying to lose weight until the injection is fully out of my system, but doing this will probably lead to more weight gain and I will have to start from a higher weight once the injection gets out of my system. It just feels so horrible to diet hard at the coal face all week and have no chocolate at Easter to lose a mere pound. And this makes me angry. And Frustrated. The injection is not going to be out of my system until mid-May and this is stressing me out as that’s practically the summer and if I am still this weight into the summer it is going to be the worst thing – no vest tops, no short skirts, no nice dresses. Just me sweating away, probably in the blokey fleece that hides my rolls of flesh and fat.

As you can tell from today’s blog entry and the previous ones, this weight gain and trying to lose it is one of the biggest things on my mind at the moment. It feels like it is always there, never going away or changing or getting any better. This has had a knock-on effect with my mental health problems. TuT is worried that losing weight could flare up my borderline anorexia; when he expresses this I get SO ANGRY because I think he trying to stop me losing weight and wants me to stay fat and miserable. This is not true, I know this, he just wants me to be healthy. But yesterday the lid on the pressure cooker of my mind just exploded and I had probably my first borderline episode since moving. My anger knew no bounds, I believed TuT was playing mind games with me and my paranoia was out of control. All I could think about was how fat I am and there’s nothing I can do about it. I hate not being able to change things. My thoughts went round and round in circles winding me up more and more; getting more and more angry. Things got so out of control that I left the flat and refused to speak to TuT.

Things got so bad that TuT had to leave work as he feared for my safety. The state of mind I’d worked myself into, anything could have happened. He found me outside SpecSavers. He’d attempted to adjust my glasses the previous day and made them worse. This small thing became so important to me – it was essential that I got them adjusted correctly and did it that day, although I was wearing my spare pair. It was one of those days where the smallest things grow into mind-mountain-sized problems.

My glasses were fixed by a lovely optician and I started to feel calmer. TuT arrived and talked to me calmly and accompanied me to the library to return my books and bought me some lunch as I never eat when I have a borderline day. It took me a long time to eat my sandwich and drink my coffee but I felt better afterwards. Gradually things returned to normal, I just felt very very tired.

Today sees me back at the dieting coalface and not so out of control with my mental health. I managed to go out for a run after neglecting it for almost a week. I decided to walk for two minutes and run for three minutes for a total of 4km. This was fine until at the 2km mark it started hailing. Being pelted with sea-side hail hurts!! I managed to get shelter for a little while, but then the hail turned into steady rain and I just had to get wet and get myself home. I was reluctant to go running but TuT persuaded me as I haven’t been for so long. I can’t say I enjoyed getting pelted with hail and getting soaked to the bone wet, but now I am warm and showered I am glad I went for a run afterall, and wouldn’t you know it, the sun is now shining.

Losing My Routine and Weight Related Thoughts

Published
by
thetoad
on 26 March 2008
in Dieting and Losing Weight
. 0 Comments

It feels like Tuesday but I have to remind myself that it is Wednesday. This is a good thing in that it is only two more mornings to get up before the weekend, but bad in that I won’t feel like putting any sort of routine into place as come the weekend, everything changes again. I really hate the way that bank holidays stuff up my routine; it would be ok if I worked as I would just go back to work and everything would feel the same – except for some disorientation about what day of the week it is. However, being unable to partake in employment means my days whilst TuT is at work are up to me to fill productively.

As you can tell from lack of blog entry yesterday, after the Easter Break, I wasn’t so productive yesterday or managed to re-establish my weekday routine. The day started out with Weight Watchers. My first meeting after joining last week. At this meeting for some unknown reason, you are not allowed to be weighed without your shoes on. So you have to either weigh in your shoes (!!!!) or weigh in a pair of slippers or flip flops. Luckily last week, my first weigh in, I got away with weighing in my socks because the meeting had already begun as I was late, and the clerk that was helping with the weighing didn’t notice I’d taken my shoes off. This week however I took along my lightest pair of pink slippers and put those on, took all my jumpers off, and clambered on to the scales.

To reveal I’d lost a pound.

One Pound.

In my first week.

I must be happy about this I know; but I am not. There’s something on the Weight Watchers website that says it’s the equivalent to a box of butter but that doesn’t make me feel any better. In the past when I have been to slimming clubs my first week has always been something between 3 and 5 pounds which always made me feel spurred on and inspired. A lot of hard work to lose a pound just does not inspire. What made it worse was that a girl of a similar age to me joined last week at the same time as me. When we had our new members talk she was saying that she was Cabin Crew i.e. an air hostess. I didn’t think she even needed to lose any weight as she was very slim already, but I can imagine working in Cabin Crew you do need to be as light as possible. She comes back yesterday and had been weighed before me and she had lost SIX and a half pounds! Half a pound off losing half a stone! JEALOUS! I know that she followed the ‘Core’ plan, whilst I am on the ‘Points’ plan and it did make me tempted to try that plan this week, but I just don’t think that the ‘Core’ plan would work with what I cook for TuT and I. I do cook from scratch most nights, but sometimes I do use a jar of ready made curry sauce for example, which I could take off my weekly allowance of 21, but if that happened a couple of nights a week, using points on a ready made sauce, I’d have little left for wineage, a few crisps, or anything else that I would deem a proper treat. I’ll stick to the points plan for the time being.

I should be pleased as I did have four days off over the Easter weekend with TuT and could have quite easily have gained a pound, so to lose and not gain weight is a good thing – especially as I am still under the effects of the injection.

It has made me so angry and so upset the way it has not only destroyed my confidence in my appearance in having gained all this weight, but has taken my actual confidence in myself away. When I went on the injection I was losing a lot of weight fairly rapidly – it wasn’t healthy, but I loved wearing size 10 and 12 clothes and was happy in my appearance and confident. Looking back I stopped losing weight once I went on the injection, but around the same time I moved in with TuT and my eating habits improved from what they were when I lived on my own. I put the halt in weight loss down to this and continued to eat in a healthy way and exercise.

Over TuT and I’s first Christmas together I gained 5 pounds, I didn’t think too much of this – everyone gains weight at Christmas. But despite going back to being more strict with my eating and exercising, the weight didn’t come off, in fact by Easter I’d gained a stone.

I put this down to unhappiness and lack of exercise – I was spending a lot of my days as a “house cat” – not going out, except to walk to the local shop to buy a paper or something.

Then we moved to Northamptonshire to a tiny village in the middle of nowhere and TuT had to use my car as he’d lost his company car in changing jobs. So for two months or so I was an enforced housecat and although I managed to get out on my bike or go for a run, it wasn’t done with any consistency as last summer it continually rained for months on end.

When I eventually got my car back I joined Cannons Gym in Northampton. It was a bit of a drive, but aware of my increasing weight, I didn’t mind. I had a personal training session where upon I was weighed and by this point I’d gained 2 stone 6 pounds. I set about my new gym routine with vigour and tried to embrace carbs as the fuel I’d need for all the exercise I was doing.

The weight never shifted and when we moved to Milton Keynes I persuaded TuT to let me go to the local Weight Watchers meeting. By this point I was now near enough exactly three stone heavier than I had been the previous year. I put this down to eating more and being less strict with myself and not really following any sort of diet, along with a continued dip in my exercise levels. The months of having no car and being stuck inside with the pouring rain outside had established a bad routine of actually being content to stay in all day and do no exercise.

I started doing more exercise to earn bonus points and did manage to lose a couple of pounds, but I was once again eating very little as eating the full points allowance just seemed far far to much food from what I was used to eating normally and I wanted to lose weight, which meant to me, reducing the amount I was eating currently.

I wasn’t in the right frame of mind and the dark winter months were not really the right time to start drastically cutting down on my food intake – in fact, no time is the right time to do this! So I dropped out of Weight Watchers just before Christmas, treated myself to some new size 14 clothes and just decided that I was meant to be a size 14 and try to accept it.

In January we moved to the sea side and I thought finally I’d be able to tackle my weight – long walks and runs by the sea, attending the gym, fresh sea air and healthy food. So almost as soon as we moved here I embarked on a health kick and started doing loads of exercise and expected the weight to start falling off – except, it didn’t and hasn’t.

I know it is down to the injection but it has just made me so sad – the whole of last year I’ve always found someway of blaming myself for my increasing waist line; lack of exercise, eating more, eating more carbs – everything all related to me and having bad eating habits. I haven’t been able to go out for a meal and just order what I wanted without feeling guilty about the extra calories I was eating. In so many ways I have just been so unhappy in the last year all related to my weight and food intake and although in some way it is a relief to find out it wasn’t my fault I have gained all this weight, it is still here, it will take a lot of hard work once the injection does wear off to get rid of it and in the mean time I feel a fat frump with no confidence and rock bottom self esteem.

Win The Weight War!!

Published
by
thetoad
on 20 March 2008
in Losing Weight
. 1 Comment

I posted yesterday all fired up after my 5km run/walk I’d been on – with all those endorphins rushing around my body I couldn’t help but write a positive entry after the gloom of writing about my weight misery the previous day. I am thinking that I should update you all on what happened when I went to see lovely Triage nurse Jane and what has happened since on the battle of my blubber.

I saw Jane, she spoke to me about what I ate and weighed me. I told her I thought it was the Trazodone and Amisulpride combo that was piling the weight on and making it difficult to shift. I then half-heartedly mentioned that I was on the Depot Provera injection – now is not the time for pregnancy! Surprisingly Jane told me that would be the cause of my weight gain and that it is famous for putting weight on.

“Whenever any of my patients go on the injection I warn them that they should be prepared to gain weight.”

Jane said gravely. When I went on the injection nearly two years ago I was very borderline anorexic and spoke at length with the nurse in the North about weight gain. She said it was possible because it increased your appetite. I had ultimate control over my appetite at that time and was pretty used to feeling hungry so if the only way I could gain weight was by eating more, then I would ensure I continued to eat very little.

However, the weight has slowly crept on in the last 18 months since being on it. When I got home I looked on the web and there were similar stories to mine out there, women that had gained three or four stone in the years whilst they had been receiving the injection.

It was a great relief to find out the cause of my weight gain. I spoke to Jane about what I generally eat in a typical day and she could see no problem with what I was eating, although she does want me to keep a food diary for a week and return to see her with it, and of course, I no longer want to use the Depot Provera injections to prevent pregnancy of bambino Toads.

I felt as though a weight had been lifted off my shoulders (if not yet off my body!) – if Jane had confirmed my suspicions that it was the Amisulpride and the Trazodone I would have just had to continue taking them as I am the most stable I have been in a long time on that combination of medication. Whenever I have been taking my medication in the last year since the weight started to creep on, at the back of my mind I have been thinking they are making me fat. For a while I messed about not taking my doses properly thinking that would aid weight loss, but getting mentally poorly at the same time. (and funnily enough, not losing any weight!!)

After seeing Jane I quickly hot footed it to my local Weight Watchers meeting which was taking place the very morning I was seeing Jane – Tuesday mornings at 10am. I was a bit late so had to creep about whilst Melanie conducted the meeting, getting myself weighed with a clerk and signing up for the monthly pass that not only saves me money on my weekly meeting fee, but gives TuT and I access to the ‘e-source’ which contains an online points tracker, recipe builder – basically everything you need to accurately track your points of the food you are cooking and eating.

Finding out my weight wasn’t too much of a shock as I’d already just been weighed at the Surgery with Jane. When I attended Weight Watchers in the North it was Tuesday mornings at 10am with the lovely Jenny. Now it’s Tuesday mornings at 10am with Melanie in the South, but she seems just as lovely – conducting her meeting wearing a pink rabbit ears headband for Easter! At the end of the meeting myself and another newbie spent some time with Melanie as she went through the two plans.

Melanie had joined Weight Watchers nine times before cracking it and losing her weight – it took her 18 months to lose something like 30 pounds, and then she became a Weight Watchers leader. I asked her what was it, on the ninth time, that everything clicked and she lost her weight. Melanie explained that she began staying to the meetings and just taking the programme more seriously, she began cooking whereas previously she would have four or five takeaways a week. I was advised to try the points plan and make small changes this week. I am slightly concerned that I have joined the week before Easter – I am not expecting any eggs – but TuT and I are off together for four days with days out planned and it will take some discipline to stick to my running programme. In some ways I feel as though I have joined the week before Christmas and if I’d realised I might have joined next Tuesday.

But the war on my weight is now waged! I am determined to stick to my points over the Easter weekend and get some sort of weight loss on Tuesday – even if it’s just a pound.

Time is ticking on – it is time to stop writing about weight loss and get out for my run and do something proactive to lose that pound!

“Good Luck Darling!” – Upon My Running

Published
by
thetoad
on 19 March 2008
in Excercise
. 0 Comments

I am just not long in from my run. I can’t say that I was totally in the mood to go this morning, I haven’t been out since Sunday. I know that’s only two days off pounding the coastal path, but I am only in my third week of training and at this tentative stage, mornings spent watching television in my pyjamas and reading library books and magazines are not a so distant memory. This morning the temptation was there to do just that; but after a bit of persuading from The Toad undergoing Training (fiancé TuT) via msn messenger, I was out the door.

I only intended to do 4km. I am training for the 5km Race For Life. My race takes place on 20th July, so at this stage I still have a good couple of months to train, the main thing at this point is that I am running four times a week, no matter what the distance or time. I am lucky that last year TuT treated me to a Garmin GPS training watch, so I know exactly how many kilometres I have run. Today when I hit 2km, the point where I was going to turn around and come back, I thought I’d carry on for the other 0.5km, that on completion of the run would mean I’d done 5km instead of 4km. I did 5km on Sunday and I was feeling ok at 2km, so I carried on to 2.5km and then turned around and ran back.

There I was approaching the 5km mark, Kasabian’s ‘Club Foot’ was beating through my veins via my ipod – “…you’re messin’ with the enemy” I sneered along as I summoned my body to a sprint finish. At which point a crazy red coated old lady with matching pillar box red lip stick moved out of my way, but as I ran past she touched my arm in the way that only the older generation ladies can and said:

“Good luck darling!”

I’d hit my 5km, but after the words of encouragement and kindness I felt I owed it to her to keep going. So I ran the last bit to the road crossing and then stopped my watch having done a little over the 5km I intended to.

I felt brilliant walking back home and wasn’t even disappointed when I plugged the Garmin training watch into the computer to see that I was slightly slower on average than my run on Sunday and didn’t hit my top speed. I was just glad I’d got back in the saddle after yesterday and was back on track with my running training.

I am quite proud of how quickly my running fitness is improving. I started out in February just running a mile – 1.6km, which I was able to jog all of, but I didn’t enjoy it and it was hard to keep a jogging pace up for the duration. Then a little over two weeks ago, just into March, I picked up a health and fitness magazine that came with a free water bottle (in pink as well!) and featured a beginners running programme. This programme means you run further in the beginning stages than just a mile, but you have walk breaks. This seems to be improving my running as it gives me the confidence to run further as you have the security of having walk breaks.

After a week and a half of following the run/walk programme I decided to tackle the distance of 5km to see how I managed it and I did it in just over 40minutes. I didn’t die of exhaustion and was pleased. Until the next day when I got out of bed and was stiff as a board! Walking hurt!

By the following Friday I tackled the 5km distance again, improved on my time and better than that, on the Saturday I didn’t suffer any stiffness in my legs, so on the Sunday, taking Saturday as a rest day, I went out and did 5km again.

So as the lady in red said – “Good Luck Darling!” – I just need to keep my training up and enjoy seeing myself improve.

Watch this space…..

Nothing Tastes As Good As Being Slim Feels

Published
by
thetoad
on 18 March 2008
in Dieting
. 2 Comments

Welcome to the first proper entry on this new and exciting blog.

Last night I was full of happiness and optimism. My fiancé – TuT (Toad undergoing Training) had spent so long setting the website up, making sure my email was working and helping me load up my first entry, everything was good.

I watched my Delia which I really enjoyed and spent the rest of the evening reading and watching television – a pretty typical Monday night. I didn’t have any wineage and going to bed with a low calorie hot chocolate I felt healthy and virtuous, having been swimming and for a brisk 3km walk during the day and cooking a healthy stir fry for tea.

Then I wake up this morning, expecting to feel lighter and happier. I have spent the last hour and a half in floods of tears and have made TuT late for work. He hasn’t even had any breakfast and I feel like living shit about it. I just hate my weight, my appearance, and the fact that the majority of my clothes don’t fit.

When TuT and I moved in together I was a size 10/12 and sometimes if a particular shop was generously sized, an 8. I enjoyed shopping for clothes and the weekend was always a chance to get a little more dressed up than during the week and I was happy with how I looked and felt about myself.

The dark side of being that size for my 5 foot 10 inches frame was that I was achieving the size through strict avoidance of carbohydrates, a sort of Atkins diet that I had fashioned. However, after years of watching fat grams and counting Weight Watchers points, I wasn’t embracing the Atkins philosophy completely by eating mounds of cheese and cooked breakfasts, I was still avoiding the high fat foods as well as the carbohydrates. I just wasn’t eating very much at all.

I wasn’t taking any medication at this time for my mental health problems and the weight was just dropping off me.

“Nothing tastes as good as being slim feels”

Despite the ill health I experienced whilst following such a restricted diet and the fact that in its latter stages I was borderline anorexic, I loved being slim and wearing my size 10 jeans.

Now 18 months down the line I eat a much more varied diet, whilst still trying to be healthy, but including carbohydrates and pretty much all food groups. But I have gained four stone in the last year. I know I am healthier because I don’t permanently have some sort of cold or flu but I feel so bloody FAT. I am a size 14, pushing 16 now and I absolutely HATE IT.

One of the main differences is that I am now on medication to help manage my mental health problems. I take an antipsychotic called Amisulpride and an antidepressant called Trazodone. The weight has pretty much started creeping on slowly since I went on to these two medications. However, my web research this morning has said while it is possible to gain weight on these medications, although it is a rarer side effect than other antidepressants and antipsychotics, it is possible to LOSE WEIGHT whilst taking them.

So I need some sort of diet to follow and need to do a good amount of exercise. I have no idea where to start as TuT and I reckon we are pretty healthy at the moment and there isn’t much I can cut out of my diet. Following my hours of tears this morning I have rung the doctors and I am going to see the lovely Triage nurse, Jane. I saw her a few weeks ago and she was so lovely, so I am hoping she can make me feel better and offer some advice on how to get to a healthier weight and size.

Watch this space…

Delia

Published
by
thetoad
on 17 March 2008
in Food
. 1 Comment

Welcome to my first blog entry; I am going to keep it short – ‘Delia’ is on soon and having stocked up on frozen mashed potato (buying two bags in case there is a Nigella-esque goose fat, frozen mash shortage) I am eager to see what she will be cooking this week.

I like my cookery programmes, I did go through a phase where the UKTV Food Channel was on pretty much permanently during the day and evening. Due to my mental health problems I am unable to work so I do have the luxury of being able to watch television during in the day if I choose. However that choice means that little else gets done, no reading, no cooking the recipes of the said cookery programmes, and now it could mean no updated entry on the blog! So it’s in all our interests just to keep the watching of television to the evenings.

On that note I will close for tonight, watch this space tomorrow for more!