I had a bit of a reality check this afternoon as I got on to the Victoria line tube at Euston station.
After feeling quite frankly a little smug at my successful weight loss over the last 2 months I was reminded that I've still got a long way to go before I'm happy with my figure.
My weight gain started when I was 20 heading into my 3rd year of university and moving in with my boyfriend at the time, I decided to go on contraceptive injections. I piled weight on going from 8 stone 3lbs to 10 stone 8 lbs in just 6 months. And the weight naturally congregated in one place.
I got stretch marks - vivid red angry lines across my lower back which shocked me when I caught them in the mirror and my sister advised me that she had only seen stretch marks like that when she was pregnant.
Everyone thought I was pregnant " the girl behind the bar is pregnant" my fellow students whispered amongst themselves and some even asked me outright. One guy, when I said I wasn't expecting pointed at my stomachs and said "then what is that?" "ma big fat belly" became my usual response. I'm not pregnant it's just ma big fat belly.
Over the years I got used to the fact that I had a weird body shape. I didn't like it but I accepted that while the rest of my body had stayed pretty much the same my belly looked that much more out of place and I totally understood the reason people assumed I was expecting.
Social occasions became a nightmare because I could never find a nice dress to wear that didn't look like maternity wear on my odd shaped body.
I thought that I could work it to my advantage however in public places, buses, over crowded tubes etc...surely I would always get a seat, but I don't know what happened to the youth of the last 10 years, but not a single person offered me a seat on the bus...my inner mother to be was outraged while my common sense berated me for being outraged at not getting something I didn't need anyway. I was lazy...as well as fat!
Finally I met someone who didn't notice or care about my odd shaped body and we settled into a fabulous relationship. But we ate lots of takeaways and watched a lot of TV and the rest of my body caught up with my belly...at least I was in proportion!
I made a few attempts at losing weight, tried various diets but even if I lost a bit of weir I lost interest and piled the weight back on.
2 months ago I decided I truly wanted to do something about it. I'm not aiming for 8 stone 3lb but something a little less maternity would be nice. I started counting calories thanks to a brilliant website and iPhone app called My Fitness Pal. I started swimming too - to earn extra calories to eat at the weekend. I calculated my calories and set my limit to 500 less a day.
3500 calories is roughly the equivalent of 1lb of weight loss and I've been losing 1 or 2 lbs a week.
I also started doing strength exercises with free weights to tone up my arms and legs and stomach muscles. When I was 8 st I looked Ill, skin and bone, my head was too big for my body and I looked pale and withdrawn with hollow dark eyes. I don't want to look like that again but I was always afraid that in order to lose my belly I would have to return to that type of figure. But I realised that I could tone and strengthen my muscles while working on the fat loss and hopefully I can gain a nice shape rather than go from chunky to bony.
So I've been feeling pretty good about my weight loss, I can see some improvement myself and I feel healthier, more energetic and stronger. I was particularly excited about visiting friends in London who have been encouraging and advising me on exercise and weightloss because I hoped they would notice a difference better than I can, seeing myself in the mirror everyday and not really registering the change.
So I arrive in London during rush hour and I get on the tube at London Euston and shuffle down the carriage and hold onto the hand rails when a youngish guy attracts my attention and offers me his seat. I frowned and said " no you're ok thanks" then I pondered why he'd offed me a seat and not the clearly older woman in front of me...and then it clicked. 13 years of looking pregnant and the first time someone offers me a seat is when I look slightly less pregnant than before...
Actually the incident made me smile for the duration of the tube ride because it reassured me that there are still a few gentlemanly type young men in the world.
But even so, 12 pounds lighter is great and everything but I've got a long long way to go yet.
Showing posts with label diet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label diet. Show all posts
Friday, 20 July 2012
Sunday, 27 November 2011
Been a while
It's been a while - time passes so fast lately. What a stupid statement that is time passes at a set rate however my notion of the passing of time has changed since I was made redundant in June and started running my own business fulltime. Suddenly I'm constantly working and time seems to pass me by more quickly than when I was employed and clock watching! However that is no excuse as my last blog post was in February. I do have another blog however which related to my business at www.geni-i.co.uk so i have been active in blogging in a sense.
In April a good friend of mine introduced me to a book called "Change Your Genetic Destiny" Also known as The genotype Diet. I assumed it would be a load of nonsense, but the book made sense to me in a way, it wasn't a diet aimed at losing weight but a way of looking at the food you eat and recognising whether the food is right for your body type. I followed a few pages of tests and answered medical and family history questions and eventually I discovered that I am a HUNTER!!
Grrr!
So then I was presented with 2 food lists. One a list a food that I should emphasise in my diet and the other a list of foods I should avoid.
Unfortunately for me the list of foods to avoid included most of the food I ate on a daily basis - it included all but 5 types of cheese, wheat, gluten, corn, barley, rye - so almost any kind of pastry or bread was out and Mushrooms - and I love mushrooms!
But I decded to give it a try. I immedietly started reading labels for everything... i bought free from foods at the local supermarket, became an expert on which gluten free bread tastes the best and started enjoying foods that I'd never considering eating before purely because they were on my good list and so I wanted to try them just to expand my diet!
I also had to give up tea which for me what really hard. It wasn't the caffiene - I as allowed coffee but the tea itself. So i started drinking various green teas until i discovered vanilla flavour red bush.
Almost immedietly I noticed a difference in my energy, i was more alert i felt more confident and able to face challenges. I was constantly doing something, where i had spent my recent years horizontal in front of the TV I found i couldn't sit still, i wanted to be doing something even if it was just cleaning the house.
I noticed that whenever I ate something I shouldn't It gave me bad stomach pains and I also found I was eating less, naturally as if my body was getting the right foods and didn;t need more, I was snacking less and smaller portions filled me up longer.
Over the course a couple of months I lost a stone in weight and went back down to the dress size I'd been throughout my 20s and had recently left 12 months ago for a bigger size.
In the last couple of months however the great effect has worn off. I spend plenty of time horizontal on the sofa and when I eat a bit of real bread or indulge in a pizza it doesn't make me feel bad anymore, perhaps because my body is better able to cope with it. Or perhaps that long list of foods is actually a lot shorter and i just need to test which are the actual foods that I should avoid.
Yesterday I went out to the supermarket to get some weekend supplies, it was payday weekend (which means the checque i paid myself for my wages had cleared) and I intended to do a big monthly Asda online shop (hate going shopping) so I needed a few bits to get us through the weekend. I stood in front of the free from section and looked at the bread rolls and i looked in the basket at the white bread, the bacon and sausages and thought to myself, "I'm sick of this diet" and I went home and savoured eating real bread with my bacon. It was the best thing I've tasted in months!
Having just completed my Asda online shop and spent about £40 less on food than usual as a result of not buying anything gluten free I'm pleased with my decision. Starting a business and taking a massive drop in regular income has made the last few months really hard and an over expensive diet hasn't helped. I do think however that there are people with genuine health issues that have to eat this food, does it really have to be so expensive?
So I will be monitoring myself over the coming weeks to see if going back to the old ways will cause me to gain weight. Since my birthday I've been less than strict and have not put on a single pound in those 3 weeks, so I hope that if I eat sensibly without limiting myself to a small selection of foods (because cutting out wheat and gluten is like trying avoid chemicals - everything is chemicals!) I might be able to avoid putting all that weight back on...and if I don't I'll just have to learn to love the rounder me because our lives are dominated by work and sleep and we should enjoy the free time we have as much as possible. And I love food, so to spend the rest of my life eating bread that tastes like cardboard would be a waste!
In April a good friend of mine introduced me to a book called "Change Your Genetic Destiny" Also known as The genotype Diet. I assumed it would be a load of nonsense, but the book made sense to me in a way, it wasn't a diet aimed at losing weight but a way of looking at the food you eat and recognising whether the food is right for your body type. I followed a few pages of tests and answered medical and family history questions and eventually I discovered that I am a HUNTER!!
Grrr!
So then I was presented with 2 food lists. One a list a food that I should emphasise in my diet and the other a list of foods I should avoid.
Unfortunately for me the list of foods to avoid included most of the food I ate on a daily basis - it included all but 5 types of cheese, wheat, gluten, corn, barley, rye - so almost any kind of pastry or bread was out and Mushrooms - and I love mushrooms!
But I decded to give it a try. I immedietly started reading labels for everything... i bought free from foods at the local supermarket, became an expert on which gluten free bread tastes the best and started enjoying foods that I'd never considering eating before purely because they were on my good list and so I wanted to try them just to expand my diet!
I also had to give up tea which for me what really hard. It wasn't the caffiene - I as allowed coffee but the tea itself. So i started drinking various green teas until i discovered vanilla flavour red bush.
Almost immedietly I noticed a difference in my energy, i was more alert i felt more confident and able to face challenges. I was constantly doing something, where i had spent my recent years horizontal in front of the TV I found i couldn't sit still, i wanted to be doing something even if it was just cleaning the house.
I noticed that whenever I ate something I shouldn't It gave me bad stomach pains and I also found I was eating less, naturally as if my body was getting the right foods and didn;t need more, I was snacking less and smaller portions filled me up longer.
Over the course a couple of months I lost a stone in weight and went back down to the dress size I'd been throughout my 20s and had recently left 12 months ago for a bigger size.
In the last couple of months however the great effect has worn off. I spend plenty of time horizontal on the sofa and when I eat a bit of real bread or indulge in a pizza it doesn't make me feel bad anymore, perhaps because my body is better able to cope with it. Or perhaps that long list of foods is actually a lot shorter and i just need to test which are the actual foods that I should avoid.
Yesterday I went out to the supermarket to get some weekend supplies, it was payday weekend (which means the checque i paid myself for my wages had cleared) and I intended to do a big monthly Asda online shop (hate going shopping) so I needed a few bits to get us through the weekend. I stood in front of the free from section and looked at the bread rolls and i looked in the basket at the white bread, the bacon and sausages and thought to myself, "I'm sick of this diet" and I went home and savoured eating real bread with my bacon. It was the best thing I've tasted in months!
Having just completed my Asda online shop and spent about £40 less on food than usual as a result of not buying anything gluten free I'm pleased with my decision. Starting a business and taking a massive drop in regular income has made the last few months really hard and an over expensive diet hasn't helped. I do think however that there are people with genuine health issues that have to eat this food, does it really have to be so expensive?
So I will be monitoring myself over the coming weeks to see if going back to the old ways will cause me to gain weight. Since my birthday I've been less than strict and have not put on a single pound in those 3 weeks, so I hope that if I eat sensibly without limiting myself to a small selection of foods (because cutting out wheat and gluten is like trying avoid chemicals - everything is chemicals!) I might be able to avoid putting all that weight back on...and if I don't I'll just have to learn to love the rounder me because our lives are dominated by work and sleep and we should enjoy the free time we have as much as possible. And I love food, so to spend the rest of my life eating bread that tastes like cardboard would be a waste!
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
Holiday diets
Well the countdown is on to my summer holiday...my first summer holiday in 4 years, and my first holiday with BBE. First holiday with a boyfriend is huge isn't it? The last (and only) time I went on holiday with a boyfriend I broke up with him as soon as we returned. Seems like holidays can make or break a relationship.
Our holiday may well test us to the limit. Did I mention that my entire family are coming too? My parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary recently and my siblings and I decided to pay for the whole family to go abroad for a week.
The in-laws plus hot sunshiney weather equals the worst holiday ever...but what makes BBE the Best Boyfriend Ever is his ability to understand (after a little guilt trip followed by barefaced blackmail) when he needs to do stuff he doesn't want to do just because I really want him to. And I don't make him do stuff he doesn't want to do very often...afterall I'm the Best Bird Ever!
So the last time my family saw me in a bikini I was still a teenager with a wierd anorexic looking underweight type body. Now I'm worried that the RSPCA might start poking me with sticks mistaking me for a beached whale.
I'm more concerned about getting my kit off in front of my family than in front of BBE. Whenever I complain about weight gain he cheers and quotes the Bare Naked Ladies at me "She's like a baby I'm like a cat, when we're happy we both get fat" he doesn't get fat though, the miserable git! Although he kindly insists he's getting a bit of a belly!
So naturally given that there's a holiday in the near future my thoughts turn to diets...but as with all thoughts of diets they immedietly get over taken by an overwhelming need to eat chocolate. In fact, the closer the holiday gets the more chocolate I eat.
So instead I've decided it would be better to take one for the team and just stay a bit overweight so that everyone else will feel better!
Plan?
Good plan!
Our holiday may well test us to the limit. Did I mention that my entire family are coming too? My parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary recently and my siblings and I decided to pay for the whole family to go abroad for a week.
The in-laws plus hot sunshiney weather equals the worst holiday ever...but what makes BBE the Best Boyfriend Ever is his ability to understand (after a little guilt trip followed by barefaced blackmail) when he needs to do stuff he doesn't want to do just because I really want him to. And I don't make him do stuff he doesn't want to do very often...afterall I'm the Best Bird Ever!
So the last time my family saw me in a bikini I was still a teenager with a wierd anorexic looking underweight type body. Now I'm worried that the RSPCA might start poking me with sticks mistaking me for a beached whale.
I'm more concerned about getting my kit off in front of my family than in front of BBE. Whenever I complain about weight gain he cheers and quotes the Bare Naked Ladies at me "She's like a baby I'm like a cat, when we're happy we both get fat" he doesn't get fat though, the miserable git! Although he kindly insists he's getting a bit of a belly!
So naturally given that there's a holiday in the near future my thoughts turn to diets...but as with all thoughts of diets they immedietly get over taken by an overwhelming need to eat chocolate. In fact, the closer the holiday gets the more chocolate I eat.
So instead I've decided it would be better to take one for the team and just stay a bit overweight so that everyone else will feel better!
Plan?
Good plan!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)