Who Wants to Lose the Flab? Me!!!!
I'm back on a diet!!!
So I've had another disappointing weigh in, which is why I'm here blogging about it. This afternoon I went to fat club, the false woo hoo congratulations from the lady doubling up as the cash taker and master slayer of dieting dreams gave me the bad news, I'd lost an amazing half a pound. This isn't the first week this has happened, it'the third and consecutive one at that. The diet on the 6th August with a promising weight loss of two pounds, both in the first and second week. Week three is where things started to go wrong. Nobody turned up from Slimming World to weigh people, because it was bank holiday, so by the time I went back two weeks after the last weigh in, I'd hit a problem that being over those two weeks, I'd lost 1lb. Having that lost week, I was unable to identify where I'd gone wrong, although to be fair, my diet, in terms of the meals that I eat is consistent. to date I have lost a huge and encouraging 5.5lb.
The problem that I currently have, particularly this week, is that my diet, in terms of the food that I've eaten has been spot on and to try and stop any small weight losses occurring again I'd worked my arse off at the gym and or the pool, so for all that to lose half a pound, gave me a really negative psychological hit last night and rightly so, I think. At this point I can totally understand why people give up and that's where you really need to have good reason why you want to lose the weight, otherwise you're going to say, stuff it.
They say, if you give 100%, you'll lose weight, I guess they're not lying, because you are, but what do you need to do, in order to consistently lose 2lb a week? Even after the first week of being so, so good to lose just 2lb was really disappointing.
I've been trying to lose weight for about a year now, but started and then stopped and this went on and on and on. What's given me the drive this time to stick to the diet arae two factors, firstly, I started seeing photographs and I didn't recognise myself in them; this happened on a couple of occasions, the second and probably the most upsetting reason was that when people haven't seen you for a while, you can almost read their minds, when they say to themselves, "She's put on weight". They didn't need to say anything, you can just read their minds. Whether unfortunately or fortunately for me, I was meeting up with a lot of sailing friends, who I only see once in a while, and each one of those friends, were clearly thinking the same, so I knew that I had to do something about it, particualry as it was a weekend I'd been dreading.
In the past year alone, I've managed to put on over over 10lbs. The last time I signed up to Slimming World I was actually 10lbs lighter, so losing this extra weight is just the start before I actually tackle my fundamental problem of shifting the other weight, which hopefully I'll do during the Autumn and into the Winter because I've got a couple of weddings November and December and want to feel confident and enjoy the nights.
Day 1 : Tuesday 11 September 2018
The morning after the Dorito night before, it's back to the routine, especially after waking up in the night feeling ill and needing to reach for indigestion tablets, I've only eaten food that's on the free list for four weeks and so my stomach was complaining and rightly so.
I wrote a blog about ditching branded diets earlier in the year and I've already forgotten what I wrote until, I started writing this one and thinking about what I am eating and just having lunch I've remembered why I did ditch the branded diet, because although you're able to eat endless amounts from a list of 'free food', it's not actually free because it's still got a calorific value. To find out more about my Slimming World diet, I'm going to use Lose It!! running it in conjunction for one week to see what calories I'm actually consuming and trying to identify, if this is my problem, whilst not modifying my diet, when I see that I'm near my calorie limit.
For those of you who don't know about Lose It!!, it's an online calorie counter, very similar is My Fitness Pal, which was mentioned to me last week. It is really good and I can't remember why I came off of that diet, I'm guessing that I wasn't really that motivated at the time. It is a really good concept, for those of you old enough to remember calorie counting, it's just a 21st Century version of that, once you've used a food it stores the information for you and you can also scan products with the bar code, which is exactly what I did with the king prawns I had at lunch today. After putting my information into the Lose It!! for breakfast, it left me with 155 calories for lunch, 243 for dinner and 150 for snacks. Even if you're not dieting it's a really interesting tool to have to just keep a track of what you're eating.
I'm off to the pool this afternoon and as much as I don't self-promote, I'm a very good freestyle swimmer, although unfit at the moment, I have technique that allows me to be efficient and swim extremely well, but I always push myself in the pool and when I finish I am exhausted and gasping for breadth, I know that I've worked and that goes back again to the same question, why am I not losing the weight. So I've decided to conduct a little experiement, I'm going to carry on with the Slimming World diet, but I'm going to mirror it with the Lose It!! to see what calories I'm actually consuming. I've already, by just having breakfast and lunch today realised the calories that I've had already.After putting my information into the Lose It!! app for breakfast, it left me with 155 calories for lunch, 243 for dinner and 150 for snacks. So even though I'm eating 100% healthy food on Slimming World, which is described as free food, I'm still packing away the calories, even though techniqually, I can eat as much as I want.
Day 2: Wednesday 12 September 2018
There's nothing like the first length of freestyle when you hit the pool, you just feel so free and calm and when I do that first length, I'm always glad that I went swimming. I improved my time and the number of lengths, I always try to increase by a minimum of two.
How did the first day of the experiment go? I would say, interesting. I logged everything I ate and have already noticed that I would be exceeding my calorie allocation on a daily basis, by about 200-300 calories if I were just using the Slimming World plan. Why? A certain brand of yoguart, anybody who does Slimming World will no straight away to which brand I'm referring to. Just based on this, I'm consuming at the lowest level an additional 1,400 calories per week. I might as well be enjoying a Curly Wurly every day. So my first alteration is to just have one yoguart with my breakfast. The second alteration is to not have a hard boiled egg with my lunch salad, it's an additional extra which has become a habit. Taking the egg out has saves another 77 calories a day; in a week that's another 539 calories a week saved.
Keep a track of my progress and my little experiment on my Slimming World diet.