Sue81

Work kicked off yesterday. The budget was due to have been finished by Wednesday next week and late yesterday we find out that they want it finished for Monday. I was not in the best of moods last night but 45 minutes of wii boxing soon sorted that.  I like to pretend the opponents are people from work, well it beats actually hitting them.

I had to get into work early this morning and I struggle to get out of bad at my usual time let alone early, so this morning I only had time for either a shower or breakfast, a quick assessment of the situation meant it had to be the shower, so no breakfast.

When I get into work I find out that actually the budget needs to be finished for 4:00pm this afternoon, great!
With everything that was going on I missed the sandwich vans turning up and didn’t have time to go out for anything else, so lunch today was two packets of crisps, an inch square of shortbread and a mini cookie. That was the best that a vending machine and someone’s leaving cakes could offer and was eaten mainly to stop me passing out. I was a complete b*tch all day. I get cranky when I’m hungry. I finally left work at 7:00pm with the laptop in tow with more work to do over the weekend.

Friday is my food shop night and I had no food in the house, so I went as usual. Not a great idea. I was hungry and not feeling good at all. That is never a good mix. I was doing ok until I got to the reduced section. I always take a quick look in case I can pickup something I don’t usually have. To cut a long story short I bought food I shouldn’t have and when I got home I ate them, including two chocolate croissants.

I knew what I was doing and I still did it. My brain wasn’t in charge tonight.

Well after my eating session I paid a quick trip to the bathroom and of cause, guess what it is TOM. My cycle is all over the place ocassionally every other week and sometimes clearing off for a few months and scaring me half to death, so  I often realise I kinda had an excuse for not behaving my best after the fact.

I’m due to weigh in tomorrow and I doubt it will be a loss, but I may get a pleasant surprise. Either way back onto it tomorrow morning.

Thanks for all the advice about my issue in my last post. I managed to track down the local equivalent today (over here we appear to have deflatine, windeze or if like me you’re a cheapo, shops own trapped wind relief), I’ll try it out and see if it helps.

I apologise in advance for the tone and subject matter of this post. Those of a sensitive nature may want to stop reading now.

Ok so pre warned, I’ll continue. I’ve been eating a lot more pulses, green leafy vegetables and fibre recently. It’s great stuff, fills me up and is low GI but with it has come an unwelcome side-effect. Yes I’m talking wind.

When I’m alone in my flat it isn’t much of a problem, okay so I might have to open a window occasionally but hey at least it keeps your feet warm in bed. However I work in an open plan office and it’s not ideal.

I’m not talking about small ladylike little wafts but window shattering, children scaring, small animal gassing types.
I work for an airline and I’m currently doing a project on emissions, which is in danger of getting a little too close to home.

Seriously does anyone know of any effective ways of combating this? I’d rather my colleagues didn’t start to avoid spending time near me.

In response to a couple of comments from my last post, yes I caved and ate the chocolate but only a square and it was bitter as anything so that’ll teach me. The rest was polished off by my colleagues on Monday.
I guess I also need to remember a lot of people on here are not English and some things need translating. Pasties are a savoury. The usual one here is a cornish or devon pasty, which is shortcrust pastry filled with chunks of beef, carrots, onion and swede or turnip with gravy.

Well I went for my walk into town yesterday. I don’t know how far I walked but I didn’t do the abbreviated version, I barely stopped and I was gone for two hours. I’ve recently moved and live a bit further out than before. I certainly knew I’d done it. I’m way too sedentary usually.

I’m living in the Southwest of England and foodwise it is known for one main thing pasties. We even have a pasty van deliver to work (it’s painful sitting there when half the office have a pasty). There are about a dozen pasty shops in town and the smell wafts out of every single one of them. Along with the usual fast food joints and my personal favourite subway, it was a bit of a temptation challenge but I managed to resist everyone. I did pop into a new deli on the way home but I picked a nice pork and basil sandwich with no mayo or anything on granary.

Good stuff but perhaps I shouldn’t have worn my new trainers. My feet were a bit painful when I got back but hey I’m not usually on them for two hours solid.  The problems have come when I woke up this morning. My back and both my knees are extremely painful.  My right knee can give my jip at the best of times but the other one is usually okay and my back is not one of my problem areas. I’ve walked in and around town before and never felt like this so I guess I’m gonna put it down to the new shoes or it could be unrelated but I don’t know what else I’ve done.
Anyone got any good tips for the pain?

On another note I’m a member of a consumer opinion panel which dates back to well before I considered giving the weight loss another go. Basically every few months they send a product to test through the post, you try it and then fill in a survey and they send you a few quid in vouchers. I’ve had all sorts in the past, microwave rice, pasta sauce etc.
Yesterday I got back from town to find a package waiting for me. It was from them and it’s a bar of dark chocolate!
To do the survey I only need to eat a couple of squares and then I could take the rest into work for the gannets to devour. The question is can I just eat two squares?
Chocolate has never been my weakness, I’m much more dangerous around carbs (I have been known to eat a full loaf of bread when the mood takes me) and I know I can leave it sitting there if it is unopened but if it’s opened I might just eat the lot.
Well it is staying there for now, I have a nice piece of beef in the oven which I’m going to have with a few new potatoes and a shed load of veg.

Pain and chocolate are not a good combo to have to deal with.

Well I’ve stuck this week. It’s not ideal but at least it’s not a gain. Bit more exercise needed this week and looking a bit more carefully at what I’m eating might help as well.

So I’m going to take a walk into town this morning and get myself moving. I’m having my bowl of porridge (oatmeal) to set me up.

It’s been a mixed week other than this as well (I’m sure they are often linked). Work was all over the place, comments along the line of “I know you’re juggling lots of things and have no help but…” were getting irritating and still no-one would tell me if or when my assistant was coming back.
So I finally got round to calling a recruitment consultant on Tuesday, who reckoned he had a good chance of finding me the type of work I want to do, where I want to be. Great stuff.
Fast forward to Thursday and I find out at work I’m getting a bonus for working on a project last year, but my assistant will not be returning so I get to recruit a new one. On the whole positive.
Last night the recruitment consultant rang back, he’d had a chance to look over my CV and needed my consent to approach three companies. We discussed that awkward topic of salary and he thinks I’m currently underpaid by about a third, which was a shock, I was hoping for an increase but I didn’t think it would be that much.

So life is moving on just need to get the weight loss back on track.

Right time for that walk.

So I’m late home from work and I should have eaten by now but dinner is no problem, I have a bit of roast beef left over from yesterday and a stir fry pack in the fridge, 5 minutes and I’m sorted.

Only one issue, I sit down have the first bit and eeeeuuuugggghhhh the stir fry has gone off and I didn’t realise until I tried to eat it.

So now I’m grilling a chicken breast and boiling some carrots, not the most exciting dinner but it’s gone 8pm and I’m hungry!

This is a repost of something I put on the forums just after I joined but I’ve since realised that with the weight of blog posts perhaps people don’t read the forums as much. I also wanted this as a record in my blog. 

This is not meant to be taken as derogatory to anyone but just a statement of how I feel and I hope it will do some good to someone. I’m sure a few of us have experience this but reminding everyone what it was like might help the next generation.

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I’ve seen a few threads here about overweight children written from the point of view of the parent but I haven’t seen any from the point of view of the child.

I’m 26 and I went on my first diet at 8 years old. It was a necessity, I was significantly overweight and had started being bullied.
My mother has always been slightly overweight so we went on a diet together, it being adapted for a child. I think I had then about 10-12lbs to lose and it was advised that I try to lose it very slowly, consequently my mother got to her target weight before I did and lost interest in the diet. I never did get down to the correct weight and before long I had put back on the weight I had lost and some more and so it started again.

This pattern was repeated many times over the next 10 years and never at any point did I get close to my target weight. I was enthusiastic the first couple of times but after that it all seemed so hard.
All the products in the house were low fat or low calorie so when I started a new diet I didn’t get the immediate results of switching like some people do.

The bullying continued and it wasn’t just from other children. My grandma made the cruelest comments about how I looked but then gave me sweets. I understand she was quite commplementary about me behind my back but still.
It wasn’t made any easier by my younger brother who is built like a whippet always tending towards being underweight if anything. He didn’t understand the situation and still doesn’t. My mum would buy sweets and things from him which I wasn’t allowed to have. They were however in the house and I soon found ways of getting them or other things if they were available. It is hard for a child to be restricted but to see others get what they want.

Don’t think I blame my family for the state I am in now but there were things they could have done differently that might have helped. If I had got this under control the first time it became a problem, I might not be where I am now.

If your child needs to lose weight give them all the support they need. If you are controlling what your child is eating but they are not losing weight, chances are they are cheating in some way, find out how and put a stop to it. If you have more than one child try not to give to the rest if one is being denied, it will only make the whole process harder.

Being overweight throughout my childhood, teens and into my twenties has destroyed my self-esteem and stopped me from thoroughly enjoying my life up until this point.

Please if you have overweight children help them to beat the problem as early as possible. I don’t want others to go through what I have gone through.

First of all thank you for all the positive comments on my last post. I had a little cry on Thursday night but feeling much better now.

This week has been a bit all over the place foodwise so I wasn’t expecting great results but I lost 3lbs and I’m now under 300lbs.  This has given me a boost to try to make good progress next week.

I’m finding this site inspirational, knowing other people are going through the same things and having the same problems is helping me to continue with this even when I tempted to jack it all in.

The last few days haven’t been great, work is stressful and I’ve been struggling to be motivated to eat right. Today has been the worst one of the lot.

I live a few hundred miles away from my family but I ring my mum every couple of days. I’m begining to wonder why I bother.

My name has been in the Financial Times today as a result of my passing my exams. This is a one off and will never happen again. I reminded my mum last night and when I rang for a quick chat tonight she told me she didn’t bother to buy a paper. Is it too much to ask that they make the effort just once, I worked so hard for this, can they not try to be proud.

On top of this she proceeds to tell me about the deep fried fish cakes she had for dinner last night and how she is going out to a restaurant tomorrow night and what she might have. I had to cut the call short, she was really winding me up. I’m trying hard to change my eating habits but I’m struggling and this doesn’t help.
I still need to find out if she deliberately gave me stuff as a child a drug which is actually an anti-travel sickness medication but has the side effect of calming kids down and used to be prescribed for what they thought were hyperactive children. I used to cough a lot at night and when I was stressed or excited (I was told it was cough medicine, I don’t know if she knew the truth). I was actually asthmatic.

It’s also another Valentines Day that I’m on my own again. I’ve been single for a long time. Hey I know it’s just another day but listening to people in the office talking about their plans for tonight has made me a little bit a sad I don’t have anyone to share this with.

I guess I’m on a downer again at the moment, sorry some of my posts aren’t exactly positive but writing this might just stop me eating a whole loaf of bread or a giant portion of mashed potato which is what I feel like doing now. You can’t substitute food for love but I’m tempted yet again to give it a damn good try.

Well week three is gone and the scales this morning said I had lost another 2lbs. I’m happy it’s a nice steady weightloss.

I know I could have been more hardcore last week and will try to do that this week. I think my portions have still been too large. To that end I have bought a new set of kitchen scales which might actually weigh correctly.

It might help if I actually remembered to make my packed lunch or take it to work!

Work is still stressful but that is nothing new. This time of year can often mean working very late (11pm) which tends to involve someone nipping out to KFC to grab a couple of buckets. That hasn’t happened yet so far but it could be problematic if it does. I need something I can keep in my drawer at work for emergencies.
We have access to a kettle and a microwave and it has to be low gi (so soup is out).
Any ideas?

I love my food to be strong tasting and I have found in the past when I am eating healthily that if I’m cooking quickly food can be quite bland.
It’s easier at the weekend when I have time but when I’m late home from work and hungry if my dinner is bland I’m more likely to want to snack.
Well I was looking round the supermarket this week and I came across herbs and spices in a tube. They looked different and were on special offer so I bought a chilli, a ginger and a garlic. You freeze them and use them when you want. Quick check on the back and they aren’t full of fat or anything.
They are great, I’ve just had a stir-fry and in the past I would have used a sauce which tasted great but probably doubled the calories of the meal. I used just a very little of each and they were very powerful.
I love ginger in stir-frys but I could never be bothered to peal and chop up a tiny bit of ginger, with this it is straight out of the freezer and into the wok.
I don’t want this to sound like an advert but I think this might help. It’ll help me get flavour into food in a hurry and also avoid the risky issue of chopping up chillis (I always end up touching somewhere I shouldn’t!).