A Month of Mondays

A Month of Mondays. IN YOUR FACE SCIENCE!!!!!

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garf

It has been a very special week in the diet department.

For those in need of a recap, I am assigned 30 daily points in my Weight Watchers regimen, and an additional 42 to spread through the week. Last week, I ate all of my daily points and my 42 weekly points. And another 35 points on top of that so basically I squeezed in a whole extra day. Three of these meals were had out, where it is hard to say how accurately I could estimate the ingredients but if anything they were probably under rather than over estimated. In the terms of raw maths, my diet week was a fail.

I lost one and a bit kilos.

Yup, you read that right. For the first time in quite some time my sad little weigh in app sent me an automatic Well Done Fatty message following my data input this morning. What the hell?

One initially looks for the obvious fake success tricks, however I am pretty sure that I’m not especially dehydrated nor at a hormonally favourable point for a weigh in.  I did not exercise any harder or more frequently than usual. Actually more than my mere points were against me- there were a couple of late nights and a highly skewed level of carbohydrate consumption in the mix also. I think I had a bit of chocolate every day at work. Sometimes two. Following on from this, the majority of my extra points were not spent on sensible stuff like chicken breast and plain baked potatoes oh no- more like a curry, a couple of gins and now I think of it a rather smashing Lindor bar in the cinema that I forgot to point until now so that pushes my overpoints up by another 10.

I don’t know how this loss has happened, all observation data is in direct contraction of the results,  but I have 2 observations. The first is that because I carried on tracking even though I knew I wasn’t doing very well, well, I knew I wasn’t doing very well, and this made me rethink a couple of choices over the end of the week. For the first time ever I sat in our favourite Saturday breakfast spot and jotted up the damage on their menu options and strayed away from my usual avocado toast option to a surprisingly points-cheaper veggie ‘fry’ up. I also skipped out on naan bread with the Saturday curry-in-law visit and swapped my rice allowance for an extra popadum. I made myself go out on a little Sunday run that I could have easily avoided and resisted the call of that cornflake Ritter bar in the cupboard last night because I knew I had really already done badly enough. Keeping a real note of how off the rails I was going actually saved me from going any further astray, when it usually has the opposite effect of making me think oh fuck it then make mine a large one, it’s not like it can get any worse.

The second point of note is that I had a relatively relaxed week. I got in some outdoorsy time and had a nice night out with a good friend to a not-good film. Work was ok, apart from that irksome thing of having to actually get up in the mornings and go there and I ditched more than half of my usual TV binge time in favour of a thick blanket and a good book. Nothing to write home about. No traumas either.

Hmm.

Anyway, it’s only a week, anything could happen, and I’m not about to abandon the plan or advocate doubling down on points three days a week. I do feel more inclined to keep a very close eye on this though. Until next time.

BMI Today: Still unfavourable

How do I feel today? Fine. As in OK actually fine, not meh fine.

Did I stay on points last week? As above.

How bad was the weekend? Positively restrained by recent standards.

Insights: Again, as above.

Best Thing I Ate All Week:  A massive bowl of lentils and chorizo with veg and too much garlic. A whopping 19 point dinner which was pushed up with peas and a corn on the cob on the side. Fab.

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A Month of Mondays- Pass the lettuce!

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garfUnsurprisingly, living without a kitchen for just over a week whilst having one set of parental units staying and the other set on standby for a blow out birthday lunch has not resulted in me having a good loss to report.

If you aren’t cooking for yourself, accurately calculating weight watchers points is nigh on impossible. I would also hazard to say that when faced with nothing more than a kettle and a plug in blender in terms of cooking equipment it is pretty much impossible to stick to the plan anyway. I had two workmen and my mother to account for from a fridge and bread basket which I can promise you is not an easy fix with one vegetarian and two fussy sods prone to hangry fits. It was 8 days in total. There were takeaways and pub visits amounting to, I think, four hot meals provided by others. The rest was accounted for from ruthless attacks on the cheese, cold meat and quiche section of my local co op.

I put on this week.

200g.

Yip, my weigh in after a good ten days off target, eating cheese and drinking too much has resulted in a gain of roughly one fifth of a kilo. I don’t know how this isn’t 10 times this much, but I’m going to take it gladly and crack on. Oddly enough by the fourth or fifth day living on Camembert sandwiches and hummus pots both the Mr and myself reported feeling generally pretty crap. He was full of flu-like symptoms and I was visibly bloaty, pale and gross. More so than usual. Come Saturday morning, when the cooker was back in and the sink had a drain we trundled off to fill our German discount trolley of choice with a massive amount of vegetables. Peas and green cabbage never tasted so necessary. Other than the obvious win of my spanking new floor tiles and worktops, I am not proud of nor happy about any of this. I feel like I should go back to my scales and ask for some appropriate punishment because this is not right. Ok so it was stressful so there were some adrenaline calories burned and I moved a couple of things about and de-weeded my entire garden but that can’t account for this much straying. For every hour I ran I spent three on the sofa introducing the Mothership to House Of Cards. I sense a full week on the rails only to go up a couple of kilos next week, and I will have to take that one on the rapidly developing double-chins.

Mantra for this week is mass hydration and excessive greenery. I’m actually looking forwards to it. Now where did I leave that grapefruit……..

A Month Of Mondays- Death By Hangover

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garf

I have less than zero motivation to get this post written, which is why it is probably more important than the ones I actually want to do.

My week on the Weight Watchers wagon went really well, for as long as it was actually The Week and not The Week’s sexy older sister The Weekend, who always gets you into trouble one way or another. It usually goes to shit around Friday lunch time but I made it past dinner this time, enjoying a fat curry and even a mass cookie within my weekly limits, left with two days of standard eating and 1 extra weekly point to get through until Monday. It all could have been fine. But for the fact that I was desperately overdue a long haul sofa-bitching session with my bestie.

It all could have been fine, but for Gin.

Urch. Skip to an early Saturday morning start where someone developed the most intensely temple-throbbing dehydration head of the last five years and someone else couldn’t manage to brush their teeth without retching on the reminders of a Tanqueray too far. Skip to the kind of bone shaking, soul sucking hangover than necessitates crawling into a dark space with three packets of biscuits and listening to The Sound Of Silence on loop until you fade out of consciousness.

sticks

seafood sticks, soft white rolls and too much mayo. Hangover Heaven.

It isn’t the empty calories in booze that should stop dieters from drinking- it is the day after. Because I could have made amends for as much gin and slimline as you can fit into a six hour session, but I can’t catch up with the constant carbohydrate stream that was required to allow me to function through the subsequent Saturday. It started with a frankly life saving bacon sarnie, which needn’t have broken the day but along with that was a large latte too, leaving me roughly 10 points at a hazardous guess to stay within limits. This was at 10am. By the time my lunch date came around, after resisting the urge to cry and/or vomit in the hairdressers more than once, my willpower was oddly high and I opted for a simple veggie pasta plate for lunch, no cheese. Yeah, and some icecream. So that was that. Buggered. After some more retail therapy I found myself limping through M&S on the long walk back to my car just as the next sugar low hit me and after some saintly browsing and a good self-talking-to as I passed the cookie aisle, I scored myself two supergreen salads, a skinny tzatsiki, some celery hearts and a box of cherry tomatoes.  Plus, my ultimate hangover want of those gross fabricated pink seafood stick things that have had no actual seafood anywhere near them, ever. I love those things, and they are pretty low in points. The additional submarine rolls and ready mixed prawn cocktail were not. Shit.

I told myself some of it was for The Mr. I told myself that there was lots of hydration in all that celery. I told myself I would be asleep before I had the chance to eat that much of it.

Shit.

It’s hard to maintain the will to stick to veg and live off your own bodyfat when your body is a toxic waste ground of gin and artificial sweeteners and you are home alone for the evening with no witnesses other than Dr Foster on catch up, and frankly she’s not one to take a moral highground as far as I’m concerned.

In a roundabout way, this is what leads me to pimp out Weight Watchers. Because today, despite eating (at a rough guess) about double what I should have eaten for the week (mostly over the last two days of the week), I have stayed exactly the same weight. No loss, no less of me or my arse but hey, no more either. In net terms, it’s like I never had any of it! So it’s fine. Sort of.

I will do better. I have to, because I am now at the age where a hangover lasts an hour for every year you have been alive and cannot be fixed with a can of redbull and liberal application of hobnobs.

BMI Today: 30.5, still half a point past the official obesity point.

How do I feel today? Like an old lady who should know better but would/will do it again.

Did I stay on points last week? Until Friday, yes. I racked up quite a few fit points too with a reasonable physio run, three shopping miles walked on Saturday and a long slow Sunday walk. Yes, I know that doesn’t make it OK.

How bad was the weekend? See entire above post. I had fish and chips for Sunday lunch too as I was still recovering and too weak to order the sad salad. I have saved this information until now in the hope that the judgier people stopped reading at the summary.

Insights: I did actually select a lot of veg and dips from a direct craving, and they did make me feel much better and I wonder if when your day to day habits are better, you actually crave healthier crap when you’re ill, even if it is self inflicted. The mere concept of my old hangover favourite of a spicy pizza and endless toblerone would have actually killed me before I made it home. In fact it is making me feel a bit queasy now.

Best Thing I Ate All Week:  A supergreen salad and frekeh tahini grain salad thing from Marks & Spencer, in the late afternoon throws of my suffering. Bloody nice, and not too evil on the grand scale of diet things. Positively angelic vs the rest of the day.

See you next week, when I will be building a new kitchen. What could go wrong?!?!?!

 

The Skinny Thing: A Month Of Mondays.

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garf

I’ve done OK since we last checked in on my weight loss thing. By OK, I mean I haven’t put any weight on. In fact I don’t think my weight has moved more than about half a kilo either way since June. This is surprising, as I have had some seriously bingey DGAF periods in this time and my exercise patterns have been all over to the place due to training for a long run then quite abruptly stopping all movement for fear of re-upsetting my idiot calf muscles (who hate me). I have been horrible at using my Weight Watchers app consistently for no good reason other than that I can’t be arsed, but I have fallen into some good habits from when I was using it all the time and it’s these habits that I think have steered me away from piling on the pounds again over a long summer of too many G&Ts. Still, on looking at my lack of progress of late I found myself considering dumping Weight Watchers and trying a Slimming World regime again. In fact, I was going to start this very day, which is a Monday.

Like my childhood hero Garfield, I hate Mondays, and like most cycling dieters I can happily kid myself into believing that I can reset my self discipline against all the odds on the most soul testing day of the week. Apparently Monday is the most common day that people start a diet. No surprise there really. It’s a new day, the start of the week, and a convenient excuse to cram in 48 hours of beer and pizza over the weekend before embarking on your New Lifestyle. I have voted Monday for a few reasons. First off, see the above weekend-of-beer-and-pizza explanation. Second off, the only Slimming World meeting I could conceivably attend is on a Monday night. Third off, my Weight Watchers week is set to reset for points and a weigh in on a Monday, so it seemed the right day to switch.

I am not going to switch to Slimming World this Monday, however.

There are multiple reasons for this turnaround, and not just that I enjoy living as a total hypocrite. First- Slimming Word is (comparatively) very expensive compared to my WW app. Second- I hate Mondays and am never going to attend a weigh and shame session on a Monday night because I will be PJed up and on my sofa well before 1900hrs. Lastly, and most relevantly- I don’t bloody need to.

I. Don’t. Bloody. Need. To.

I know what to do. I know how to do it. Switching over to limitless pasta and potatoes with a different set of books to calculate the same equation is only going to offer a temporary relief by changing up the rules and tricking myself into thinking I don’t miss eating cake all the time. So I am sticking with the double-dubyas but I am also going to give myself a new Monday accountability tool, which is basically you people*. Because I know I can’t stand to join a class and be conventionally social about this and no one but me knows what goes into my app, so I will fit my chosen virtual lifestyle and have a check-in session here, on a Monday. Maybe it will force me to reflect more and own up to my downfalls. Maybe I will learn something or say something funny about buttercream icing or the size of my arse. Maybe I will start to hate Tuesdays instead.

*Yes, i did just call you a tool.

BMI Today: 30.5 which puts me a half a point into the obese category. Shit.

How do I feel today? Generally amused by and mildly ashamed of myself.

Did I stay on points last week? hahahaha, no. Not even a bit.

How bad was the weekend? In practical terms I achieved a lot over the weekend, including a ton of lugging crap in and out of the garden and two very long walks with the Mr. My cruddy calf is getting better. As usual I over carbed but didn’t have any crazy desserts or sweet stuffs. I did put away 2/3 of a bottle of white wine and a couple of full tilt G&Ts since finishing work on Friday.

Insights: Er……..not really. Other than that I really like gin.

Best Thing I Ate All Week: Roast beef and yorkshires for Sunday roast. I don’t want to know how that should have pointed.

So I guess I’ll see you next week.