So, didn’t go to the gym (this is getting to be a habit, one which I don’t like.) Sister was unfortuately not in a fit state to go, so even though I’d organised guest passes etc., we ended up not doing much. We did walk everywhere on Saturday, but since we had pizza and bruschetta on Friday night, as well as some other appalling choice, I think the two are cancelled out.

Do you ever have those experiences where you just go, “I used to be that person”? I was talking about how we’d eaten terribly this weekend and I’d need to do some exercise, but my sister pipes up and says, “I think I was actually quite good.” And I realised that once upon a time, I was like that too, in my pre-tracking days. How easy it is to forget the bacon and egg muffin and hash brown, and the cheesecake, muffin, far too many hot chocolates when one doesn’t need to justify to oneself why you did it. I’m not judging her, and I wasn’t going to argue with her - what’s the point? - but I did have a little smile to myself. I did eat poorly, and so did she, but sometimes you just have to get over it.

So I am attempting (again) to get back on track. Doesn’t it just sometimes feel like this is a cycle I go through once every two or so weeks? It really annoys me. I just want to get it together and be good at this. But I’m not, so I just keep working.

Posted at 4:02 pm | 1 Comment »

I have a tendancy to get a little obsessive about the mind-games of weight loss. And I go through phases where I want to find out everything to do with it. For a while it was reading books, then it was the Weight Watchers websites, and when I’m in Oz I regularly buy Cosmo’s and Women’s Health, and now I’m going through the Jillian Michael’s podcast phase, and reading Craig Harper’s blog.

The Craig Harper blog is something I pop into whenever I see a headline that makes me go, “Hmmm…”, so I’m not a hard-corer (and I know there are some out there.) I haven’t read Fattitude (although I would like to.) But I came across this post the other day, and I think this is a particularly interesting fact:

1. The woman I was speaking with had lost 7 kgs (15.4 lbs) since New Years day 2009. Now… in order to regain that weight eating chocolate only, she would need to consume 53,900 calories of milk chocolate (her preference) and that would have to be without expending any energy - which is obviously impossible. How many calories did she actually consume on her Saturday night choc binge? 625. That is, 1 x 125 gram block of milk chocolate. How many of those 125 gram blocks would she need to eat to regain all of her weight? Eighty six - and that would be on top of her normal daily (healthy) eating - because her normal healthy diet would take care of her energy requirements for the day and the excess cals from the choc would provide the additional energy for the weight gain. Do I need to say any more? So was her “I blew it” response something of a ridiculous and inappropriate over-reaction? And then some.

I’m posting this because I want to remember this fact for when I do ‘blow it’. What it means is that, regardless of how you go in the next week — the only way to truely ‘blow it’ is to give up.

And I’m not going to do that.

Posted at 5:58 pm | No Comments »

I think that, come tomorrow, I will be officially settled enough to get back on track — properly. I’m still sick, but at least now I can bound up the stairs rather than drag myself up them, and the breathing thing does seem to be happening a little easier. I’m still tired but that should hopefully be fixed by going to bed early — again.

And I’m tired of excuses. You know you’ve gone on too long with them when you’re the one who is tired. There’s this saying “Excuses are lies you tell yourself.” Which is cool. Although I like to think illness is a reasonably valid one, particularly since I’m a bit of a wimp when I’m sick. And now I’m set; I have a place to live, I have groceries, I know my area reasonably well. Tomorrow (around noon) I will buy a scarf to wear when running. And perhaps a long-sleeved shirt or three. This exercise thing is important and it’s important to me to get on top of it.

So I’m hitting the sack in about 15 minutes. Even though that means I’ll have spent a large portion of my day sleeping. (In fact, I was awake from 8am to 2pm, then again from 6:30 to now. So about 9 hours, which just seems a little sad.) I do feel a little better, though. And tomorrow morning, just after dawn (which sounds so much more committed that ‘around 9:30am’), I’ll go for a run. A nice run. A polite one, which is not too hard. And all will be well.

Posted at 8:03 am | No Comments »