moderate

I’ve just had a good hour on the cross trainer, exercise bike and treadmill using the fat burner programme. My fitness has really improved, I was beginning to fear I wouldn’t get over the Christmas slump!

My friend has started the Kellogg Special K diet and I said I would do it with her but I haven’t quite been sticking to it. Instead of one main meal and two bowls of Special K I’ve been having one main meal and two much much smaller meals. I want to do something I can stick to, although I haven’t told her that as I don’t want to put her off it if that’s what she wants to do.

If my new pedometer is correct I used just 380 calories all afternoon and evening. Including a 45 minute stint in the gym. No wonder the weight isn’t coming off. I eat like a manual worker and spend all my time sitting down.

I’m sorry that I haven’t been very good at leaving messages on people’s blogs and sending booster notes. I do appreciate it when I get them.

I did well this morning. I discovered a little known secret … do you ever feel you need to eat chocolate before going to do something unpleasant like attend a lesson?

Isn’t it much nicer to get a big cup of camomile tea and savour the warmth of that through the lesson instead? That’s what I did this morning.

I was great all day until dinnertime. Unfortunately I chose french fries with my dinner and followed it up with a bag of sweets. Argh argh argh argh argh. I was just hungry basically and not using my common sense. If I’d been more alert I would have had a banana instead of the sweets, which were nasty and sugary anyway.

Seriously though, I’ve been thinking. I’m 30 years old now. I think I’ve sorted through nearly all the issues I needed to sort out in order to become a fully fledged adult. I don’t want to be too personal here so I may sound vague.

1. I learned to stand on my own two feet emotionally and not be tied to my parents.

2. I learned not to take myself so seriously and to stop behaving as if I was the centre of the universe.

3. I always had this feeling that I was meant to pick one thing and learn to do it well. I dithered between many things and got frustrated. I have now picked and I feel at peace with that.

The 4th thing, the last thing that’s stopping me from being a fully fledged grown up and moving onto issues that fully fledged grown ups have to deal with, is my comfort eating. I must stop doing that.

I don’t know why I have this semi-religious idea that life is a series of tests that we have to work through and learn from to move to the next stage. But I do think like that.

I woke up at 4am and thought “this really isn’t complicated, I just have to stop eating crap.”

I think the problem is that I don’t actually believe in my heart that I can lose the weight. So whenever I do stop eating rubbish and the weight starts to come off I feel surprised. In my heart I wouldn’t be surprised if I lived on salad and it made no difference whatsoever.

Why am I so illogical?

Let’s all repeat together.

If we stop eating rubbish we will lose weight.

I don’t have much to report either in way of progress or anything else. Just logging in to keep the habit going.

I haven’t blogged for a few days. I also fell off the wagon. Ahem. It was a major falling off, just a creeping in of all those little bad habits that add up to a lot of extra fat.

I can see the end of the tunnel with my course. The next month and a week are going to be really really busy. Then there will be the dissertation and then hoooray. Freedom.

Okaaaaaay, I have just proved the point that if you try cutting out chocolate completely you end up falling off the wagon and overdosing on it.  I also had a glass of wine.

However, my skin is better and I do feel like I’ve lost some weight. I’ll just have to see what the scales say this Sunday.

I’m not doing too badly. I had chicken with broccoli and noodles for lunch. I’m feeling a bit splllttght (made up a new word there) because my career doesn’t seem to be sorting itself out. I started out in one field, lost confidence, moved into another and realised I wasn’t tough enough (I’m quite a gentle softly softly kind of character) so am trying to get experience in an adjacent field — which also seems to require the same hard edged toughness.

It’s too late to go back into the thing I started out with, but there is an adjacent field that definitely doesn’t require people to be tough. It actually requires them to be patient and softly spoken. But heck oh heck, it requires further qualifications (which I can’t afford on top of this).

My family are hassling me. My sister has it in her head that I’m a dreamer who expects jobs to be perfect and that’s why I haven’t settled into a career. Basically I had a sense of direction, lost confidence, tried to make good by moving into something else and realised that it didn’t suit my character (because of my lack of hard skinned toughness).

I’ve been volunteering the last two days so haven’t had the chance to post. Yesterday I was so busy I only had the chance for a sandwich for lunch and another for dinner. Then this morning I didn’t get a chance for breakfast, had an undercooked jacket potato with cheese for lunch and a stomach upset two hours later.

I expected the stomach upset because of the two sandwiches the day before. I don’t know why but it always happens when I eat like that. I don’t know whether it’s the wheat or what. I don’t have a lot of bread usually.

I went and broke my chocolate rule this evening. It didn’t taste that good so I don’t think I’m on a downward slope.

I’ve done some brisk walking but no gym the last two days.

Can anyone tell me how to give other buddies the thumbs up? I like getting thumbs up but I don’t know where they’re originating from.

I’m enjoying my new identity as a teetotaler.  I’m not a great drinker but here on this course I’ve been going to the pub rather a lot. It’s not doing my purse or my weight any good. Alcohol is empty calories. I’ve also seen people being silly because they’re drunk and I just think “why get involved in this?”