Tag Archive for 'losing weight'

Non-Scale Victories

Published
by
thetoad
on 4 April 2008
in Dieting, Excercise, Food and Losing Weight
. 1 Comment

In the business of losing weight I think that sometimes you don’t feel like you’re winning unless the scales show a reduction in number. All the effort you put in can feel, frustratingly, a waste of time and in finding out at your weigh in you have stayed the same or put on some weight everything good that you did that week disappears out of your mind and we only focus on the negative and bad things we did previous to the weigh in. I am guilty of this, but this week my BFF Gemma, pointed out to me something called “a non scale victory” and I just thought that was the most fantastic concept.

Basically a non scale victory could be resisting a pudding when you’re out for a meal and feeling good about it rather than deprived because it’s a non scale victory! Or going for run or walk when the weather conditions are adverse.

I have found that whilst I am still under the effects of the depo injection and every pound I manage to lose takes a large amount of effort, that it is important to focus on all the small changes that I am making each day rather than what the scales say. Then when the effects of the injection finally wear off, I won’t have to particularly change my dieting behaviour to lose weight as I will already have all my good habits and exercise routine established.

This week I am focusing on drinking lots of water. Even though there was an article in the newspaper and it was on the radio that a new study has found that drinking lots of water has no more benefits than just drinking lots of any liquid, surely water is better than drinking litres of caffeine containing coffee! They’ll probably change their minds next week and there will be another study out saying it is of benefit.

The stand in leader at Weight Watchers on Tuesday was very very slim – the difference in seeing her and her before picture was astounding, one of the most dramatic leader “before and after” pictures I have seen. Looking at her, you would have thought maybe she’d lost a stone or something to get to goal. So if someone so slim that has achieved such a good loss and maintained it for 18 years, as she had, tells me to drink more water I am going to listen! So a daily non scale victory is drinking all of my 2 litres of water that I filter and pour into a bottle each morning. I have already had a pint of water and have yet to have a coffee!

My non-scale victory last night was making THE DELIA CURRY! Yesterday morning my special spices arrived to much excitement and glee. I got the tandoori masala blend from www.seasonedpioneers.co.uk and was so very impressed with the speed at which my spices arrived – I only ordered them Tuesday morning! I needed a few other ingredients which I picked up at lunch time, but the curry is very simple in that you don’t need lots of things to create it. The magic lies in the special seasoned pioneers spices!
So basically you brown your chicken – I used fry light, not the specified groundnut oil, I don’t think you can tell the difference and it does have an impact on your points! Take the browned chicken out of the pan. Using a mini-chopper, or my case, the chopper attachment to my stick blender, chop up an onion, 2 cloves garlic and some ‘Very Lazy Ginger’ from EPC. Blitz the mixture then adding more spray oil, fry the onion mixture gently for five minutes. Then stir in 4 teaspoons of the tandoori masala spice into the onion mixture for a minute or so, return the chicken to the pan, stir around to combine, then add a 200ml tub of half fat crème fraiche. Simmer gently with the lid on – I kept stirring as I was slightly concerned it might stick as it made a very thick sauce – for 15 minutes and that is it! It works out at 7.5 points a portion and makes enough for two!

Think Delia and her hubby like hot curries as the resulting gorgeous curry was very warm – ok for me as I like hotter curries, but TuT doesn’t like things too hot, so next time I make it, I will use 3 teaspoons of the spiced masala instead of four. A great success and makes you feel quite proud when you produce an authentic tasting curry without having used a jar!

So I ended the day well within my points even though I’d had a curry for tea and that made me happy. Another non scale victory scored!

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.

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.