Oh go on... you deserve it!

How many times have you justified eating something you know you shouldn't "because you deserve it"?

I used to do it a lot. I used to have the thought that there wasn't much else good in my life, not much else to enjoy and so I deserved to treat myself with food.

It is completely ingrained in our culture, well probably just about every culture to celebrate (or commiserate) with food. Feasts and goodies to eat for anniversaries, birthdays, weddings, deaths, passing exams, behaving ourselves and so on. So when you feel like cheering yourself up, you eat something yummy, after all you deserve it.

It is a habit truly hard to shake.

Trouble is, anniversaries, birthdays, weddings, deaths, passing exams, are all very well, but they don't occur every day.

If you become in the habit of eating something just to make yourself happy on a daily basis, it is time to look elsewhere. It may be time to look into why you rely on food to make you happy, and why you think you deserve copious amounts of 'treats'.

If you are choosing to justify eating large quantities of unhealthy food on a regular basis, because you 'deserve it', it is perhaps time to think about what you are actually doing to yourself.

Well that is the conclusion I came to anyway. Treats and fine foods and alcohol are wonderful in moderation. But on a regular basis they weren't doing me any good. They were making me fat. And being fat is unhealthy. I didn't want to be unhealthy. I wanted to wake up in the morning and feel physically fantastic. I decided that I deserved that. And as I started to achieve that, you know what, it started to make me feel happier than any chocolate bar or packet of crisps ever did (Maybe not a glass of wine though..haha!).

Recently I lost sight of this goal for absolute health. I was feeling so good and healthy. I wasn't rewarding myself with food. But I stopped a little short of the goal posts. I am still in an "unhealthy" weight range. So although I feel so much better, I am not at the 'peak' yet. I now can't wait to get there. Because if I feel this good now, who knows how much better it will get?

Another thing, I no longer reward my children with junk food either. It has gotten to the point where I feel guilty if they consume large amounts of sugar and fat. Such foods have caused my father to develop type 2 diabetes and I don't want them to end up the same way. He didn't deserve that and they deserve better.

And so do we all.

What we deserve are healthy bodies that work efficiently, that move without effort and look good. What those bodies deserve is clean, nourishing, healthy food.

So, if you are teetering on the brink of eating something you shouldn't, and wishing to 'treat' yourself, perhaps think about what your body actually needs. What your body truly wants.

Fruit, vegetables, lean protein, wholegrains, healthy oil, water.

Oh go on...

You deserve it!

Don't think about a giant willy!

I said DON'T think about a giant willy!

Seriously do as you are told. Get that giant willy out of your brain.

STOP thinking about a giant willy!!

I told you NOT to think about a giant willy. Why are you insisting on doing it anyway?

Saucy minx. (Or whatever the male equivalent is...don't know if I have any male readers anyway...)

OK. I'm trying to make a point. One of the first rules of behaviour management I learnt as a trainee teacher was to tell children what you wanted them to do, not what you didn't want them to do.

As in:

"Sit quietly at your desks"

Rather than

"Stop talking"

And whaddaya know... it works.... to some extent anyway.

The theory is that children don't hear the 'don't'. The end of the instruction sticks in their brain. And so they want to do it more. I think it is a real psychological phenomeneonenemon, but I can't be bovered to look it up...soz.

It is the same as the giant willy (you're thinking about it again aren't you.... tsk tsk).

By mentioning something, it makes a mental image and it sticks in your brain. Never mind the 'don't'.

Likewise if you keep thinking of something and talking about it, it becomes more important, because you are giving it so much brain time. So if you obsess about something, it becomes a bigger issue and because it is a bigger issue it becomes more important and you can't stop thinking about it and before you know it you can't think of anything else.... Aaaaaaarrrggghhhhh!

So lets apply this to weight loss.

You wake up in the morning and you think, today I am going to be a good little WWer and I am not going to eat that cake that is sitting in the cupboard. No I am not.......

mmmmmmm cake.........

And you try and take your mind off it, and tell yourself "NO! No cake!" but all your stomach hears is "Cake....Cake"

Before you know it you have eaten the cake. (Stop thinking about cake!)

And if you keep thinking I don't want to be fat. I wish I wasn't so fat. All you can concentrate on is how fat you are.

Same with feeling miserable. You think "Oh I am so miserable" and you look at yourself in the mirror and you look miserable and that makes you feel miserable and focus on everything that is miserable.

It's just miserable I tells ya.

So, I reckon we can turn this around.

Instead of thinking of cake and misery and fat.... try and think of what you WANT. As in in the positive:

"This morning I am going to be a good little WWer and I am going to eat filling and healthy food. Gee I can't wait for my morning snack of cardboard...er I mean ryvita. (You don't necessarily have to believe what you are saying). I am going to be so healthy.

I am such a good WWer that soon I will be slim. I can't wait to be svelte! I can't wait to be healthy!
Well I am going to try it to see if it works, all those positive weight loss words in my mind has got to do something hasn't it?

So instead of thinking about what I DON"T want to be and do, think about my weight loss in the positive, affirmative, what I DO WANT to achieve.

But you can still think about giant willies if you want.

Little pickers wear big knickers

As I sit here and type, there are two pieces of leftover pizza on the table, staring up at me. They have got those cute Puss in Boots eyes and they keep raising their eyebrows seductively at me. Well actually of course they don't really have eyes. That would be gross. But metaphorically, I mean. They keep glancing at me, holding my gaze for just a second too long and then looking away. The floozies.

Why I didn't just chuck them in the bin as soon as my sensible 3 year old decided he was full and wasn't just going to eat them just because they were on his plate, I don't know.

I have a thing about leaving food on plates. Or rather NOT leaving food on plates. I have a thing about feeling it is being wasted if it is thrown away. Mind you, I am very careful not to force my children to finish their plates, except veg. I don't want them to get clean-plate-syndrome. But myself. I have long since been conditioned.

I can't get past the "Can't throw it away, it's wasting it. Perfectly good food," mentality.

May as well eat it.


:-O


Terrible. I do it all the time. A few chips here. Half a fish finger there. The end of a sausage here. A piece of garlic bread there.

Funny how I don't quite feel the same about the soggy, cold broccolli. Actually that is never left on the plates because my children gobble up all the veggies first....

Wierdos

Actually I think it is to get them over and done with, so they can get on with enjoying the rest of the food.

But whatever gets them their 5 a day.

Anyway. My Paul McKenna "I can make you slim" book had something interesting to say about it. (Turns out he couldn't but that is a whole nother blog.) He said something along the lines of, once it is cooked, it is wasted anyway. Whether you eat it or not. It is already wasted. What is the point in eating it just to stop it being wasted, if you don't need it? Where is the logic in making yourself fatter just to prevent waste?

Same thing goes for the whole starving kids in Africa thing they used to say.....

Um yeah... there are starving kids in Africa so we in the western world should be fat to compensate????

My mother never actually said that though.  Don't recall having to ever be made to clean my plate either. I did that all by myself, no prompting required! Don't know where I caught clean plate syndrome from.

But still... pretty pointless isn't it? Your stomach is not a rubbish bin.

Part of my new regime is to try and remember that. Both from the leftovers point of view and the processed convenience cr@p. And sorry WW, but I include some of the WW food in that bracket. Their ready meals are pretty dire it has to be said. And the cakey bite things...eugh... would rather only eat one yummy scrummy full fat cake a year than one of those every day.

Anyway, I am rambling .....

Back to the REALLY profound thing I was rabbiting on about...

Oh yeah, don't use your tummy as a bin. Remember... little pickers wear big knickers.

Please note: The use fo the word 'fat' here is not supposed to be emotive.

Me at my thinnest (yesterday) and fattest (2005)

It is widely accepted that if you have an eating disorder, your actions are somewhat beyond your conscious control. If you have an eating disorder you have psychological problems. It may be that you have other problems in life which are generally manifesting themselves through your eating patterns.

It may be that you are attempting to exercise some control in an environment where otherwise you feel you have none. You may be punishing yourself for something you feel you have done. Or something that was done to you.

You may feel worthless.

You may feel that you do not deserve to be healthy or vibrant or loved. You may be so full of self hatred that you push everyone around you to their limits to test their love for you.

You may be so warped in your thinking that you have an exaggerated impression of what your body looks like. It is likely that no matter how many people say nice things about the way you look or how loved you are for you, you struggle to accept what they say as the truth.

Your eating patterns may follow some vicious, self sabotaging cycle which if continued will ulitmately lead to severe health problems or even death.

Now, does any of this sound familiar to you? It certainly does to me and I have never been anorexic or bulimic. I have been overweight though. I have been obese.

Does anybody else find it strange that if you are desperately underweight, society and the medical profession reaches out to you, pities you, supports you.

However if you are desperately overweight you are deemed a self indulgent, lazy failure who lacks any self control over their eating behaviour. And unless you have some further complication such as diabetes, you are pretty much left to your own devices.

Hmmmm, it makes me pretty sad really. The number of blogs I have read on WW tell me that there is much more going on than simply the sins of greed and sloth.

I have been brought to tears by people's stories, I have certainly been brought to tears by my own. Some of the problems preceeded the weight gain. Others are a consequence of it. Many people are living a constant battle between themselves and within themselves and this serves to make them fatter.

Yet from society there is no empathy. There is no attempt to gain insight as to why some of these people are overweight due to their messed up psyches. In fact there is often the complete opposite. People thinking they are entitled to comment, advise or insult a person regarding their largeness. As if that is going to help.

It doesn't really cross people's minds that overeating can be an eating disorder too.

Now I am not saying everyone has "issues" and that is why they are fat. Nor am I saying that it should absolve them of responsibility for making healthy choices. I just wish there was a bit more understanding and help available, as there is for other eating disorders.

Everyone is searching for the answer, the magic bullet, the cure for the epidemic that is becoming obesity. Perhaps if there were more attempts at getting to the root of the psychological causes of somebody's overeating, more individuals would actually succeed in becoming the best, healthiest version of themselves they could be.

Just sayin'

If you change nothing, nothing will change.

Last week I went over my pointage allowance somewhat… We went away for the weekend and one of the evenings I gorged on Maltesers and wine. I woke up with a sugar and booze hangover, felt physically bleurgh and rather annoyed with myself. Do you know what my first thought was?

Was it, “Oh well, I really enjoyed that, but I will move on and eat healthily for the rest of the week and it shouldn’t be too bad come weigh in”?

Oh –ho-ho-ho-ho-nooooooo it wasn’t. That would be the thinking of a logical, rational, level headed person……..

Was it “Aaaggghhhhh I am so wracked with guilt, I have totally learned my lesson and will be a perfect little weight watcher from here on in”?

Nope that is also a little too sensible.

SO what were my twisted, emotionally charged thoughts that morning?

Well, you may know what I was thinking….you may have been there too….

I thought,

“Ahhhhh sod it. I’ve blown it now, may as well go down to the hotel buffet breakfast and gorge myself silly. After all I have spoiled it for his week anyway…..


W
T
F


Is that all about????

Yeah because when I drop my phone on the floor, instead of picking it up and checking it is OK and trying not to drop it again, I stamp on it and throw it against the wall, just to make sure it is REALLY broken…

When I spill a drop of milk on the countertop at breakfast time, I go back and get the whole 3 litre bottle and pour it all over the entire kitchen.

When I trip and stumble on a stair, I throw myself head first down the rest, I have given myself a little bruise... I may as well GO AND BREAK EVERY DARN BONE IN MY BODY….

Ummm..... no.

SO why the whole “I have gone over on my points and eaten too much, therefore I may as well binge myself into oblivion” mentality with a weight loss slip up? I don’t get it AT ALL!

Luckily (for me but not her) I was met at the brekkie buffet with the sight of a VERY large lady helping herself to a VERY large plate of fried food and it brought me to my senses. No! I thought. I am not going to stuff myself just because I stuffed myself yesterday. That makes no sense what soever. It is now all about damage limitation. So instead of a big plate of fried brekkie, 2 croissants and a huge muffin (which is what I really wanted) I ate a big bowl of fresh fruit salad and one croissant. Yep, aren't I good? And it was yum.

What is that quote?… uh….

“If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got”

Yeah, that's the one. I don’t want that anymore. I don’t want the messed up thinking. I don’t want the guilt. I don’t want the all or nothing mentality. I don’t want the self-sabotage. I don’t want the completely mindless eating for the sake of eating. I don’t want to just keep gorging and gorging.

I don’t want to be fat.

I want to be healthy. Physically and mentally.

Damage limitation.

There is no way I can go through life depriving myself of cake and chocolate and bread and cheese... No way. But just because I have the odd slip up here and there, doesn't mean I need to throw in the towel.  Instead, I just need to hoik my big fat bottom back onto the wagon and carry on carrying on.

In the light of the moon, a little egg lay on a leaf

Ok so it was inevitable really.....
After all my hard work for weeks and weeks, the cracks start to appear...

Yep I gained weight this week. I was expecting it. I am not going to say all that stuff about how I accept it, how I am moving on, how I own it blah blah blah....

But I did deserve it.

And actually it seems to be a part of my pattern. I will show you my graph one of these days.... more spikes than a punk rocker in a cactus patch. But the general trend is downwards.

And that is what counts.

So why the gain? I hear you ask.

We-he-he-he-hellllllll.......

It all began on a cold windy Sunday last week. I just could not stop munching. It was seriously bad. Everytime I passed the cupboard I grabbed something. In the words of the great Mick Jagger, I could not "get no satisfaction".

It was then that I realised I had "Very Hungry Caterpillar" syndrome (VHCS). Yes this is a true, medical scientific phenomenenmeonenon.

As in...

On Monday I ate through one bag of rice crackers, but I was still hungry.
On Tuesday I ate through two packets of Belvita biscuits but I was still hungry.
On Wednesday I ate through three muesli bars but I was still hungry.
On Thursday I ate through four bananas but I was still hungry.
On Friday I ate through five squares of chocolate but I was still hungry.

The next morning was Saturday....

You know what's coming don't you,

The next morning was Saturday... and in addition to having VHCS I also had manflu.... and MEGA PMT....

So yes the next morning was Saturday and I ate through one piece of chocolate cake, one ice cream cone, one pickle, one slice of swiss cheese, one slice of salami, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie, one sausage, one cupcake and one slice of water melon...

And that night I had a stomach ache.....


Turns out it was actually period pains, but is very fitting for my story...


The next day was Sunday again

And then we went away on a road trip....


:-O


Let's just say, I tried VERY VERY hard and I think I limited the damage somewhat. So instead of a Big Mac Meal with a shake at the obligatory McD's road trip stop.... the only time I will let my children eat it.... I had a Cheeseburger and a garden salad.

I packed LOADS of fruit and ate that instead of bags of sweets. I ate rice cakes instead of chips and so on.

But I didn't track my food and I did overeat.

Plus I have gone 3 days without exercise..... aaaaaggghhhhh...... about to go for a run as I have the shakes....

So yes I gained. I gained 2lbs of porkiness. But that was not all I gained, I gained a deeper understanding of myself. I now know that I cannot BEAR the taste of McD's and have conditioned myself to automatically vomit if I have to step foot in the place. I now understand that Hogsbreath cafes (akin to Harvesters I guess) are incapable of serving anything that isn't deep fried unless it is steak... next time I will have the steak.... um.... next time may be a long time....
I have learned that if I spend the evening drinking wine and eating maltesers in bed with my hubby while watching TV (total hotel luxury) I will wake up feeling like UTTER sh!te the next morning. So not worth it, plus I felt too rough to go for a run even though I packed my gear.... tut tut shame on me.

I almost needed that 'weak'end to remind me how different I feel when I don't eat healthily. It is actually quite amazing the difference.

Anyway, back home and back on track... with a vengeance.

I have 3 and a half weeks until we go to Vanuatu. I want to lose 6lbs by then. To do that I am aiming for 2lbs a week for the next 3 weeks. Rather a big aim for me and my track record but not impossible.

So 6lbs in 3 weeks. Filling and healthy, tracking and exercising all the way.

And in case you were wondering about my health, the manflu only lasted a day, so obviously wasn't that after all, must've just been a woman snuffle. And re: the VHCS... seems to be better and I have eaten through one nice big green leaf (plus the rest of the salad) and I do indeed feel much better.

(PS: Credit to Eric Carle for discovering VHCS)

Spiderman, spiderman, does whatever a spider can...and a bit of phwoar!

So today I went to my new gym. It seems quite funky, and is pretty cheap for gym memberships and the best bit is you aren't tied in for a year. They have loads of machines and all the latest stuff like kettlebells, punchbags, eliptical machines... (Do I sound like I know what I am talking about?...... Good because I don't.)

I mainly want to go for classes and am considering getting a personal trainer on a monthly basis to set me a programme. I feel very fit and important saying that.

It seems very much a 'beautiful people' type of place so I fit in very well....haha. Normally I would be quite intimidated by a place like this as I am a) not very brave and b) very self conscious. But you know what? I think I am past caring. I am at an age where I feel like, you know what, I have as much right to be there as anyone and who actually cares about insignificant me anyway?...

SO I decided to do this class called "TRX Bodyweb". Sounded about as scarey as I could imagine, here is the blurb:

"Hang from the durable RIP:60™ ropes to push, pull, lift and lower your body through Spiderman like moves for a total body suspension workout that also super-strengthens your core."

Ahem..

Yes, in for a penny in for a pound I say.

So I timidly tiptoe in five minutes before the class begins. Trying to look both very small and insignificant, while also very fit and muscular, neither of which I can pull off, but nevermind, I try to look like I belong there.. ahem...

Let me just say at this point, this is a pretty BIG deal for me as I am a) not very brave and b) very self conscious.. oh yeah, I already said that...

Ok anyway. So I am standing there waiting for the class to start and a few people trickle in and this guy standing next to me asks me if I have done this class before. I look up and notice he is rather easy on the eye. I am a little taken aback as easy-on-the-eye guys don't usually speak to me (other than my husband of course ;-)).  Aaaaanyway... I smile and stammer...I mean say, "No, and actually I'm a little terrified" at which point he laughs and says him too...and I think wistfully that this NEVER used to happen when I was young and single. Turns out he is the class instructer and so has to talk to me as part of his job anyway haha.

Anyway the class starts and it appears we are to use these rope things on pulleys hanging from the ceiling to use our own body weight to do all these moves.






OH








MY









GOD



Is all I can say. B*gger me it was hard. Five minutes in and I am red as a beetroot, thinking, thank god I am not single and on the pull. But I give it my all.

Ten minutes in I am starting to wonder why I decided this was a good idea and fifteen minutes in I am about to die.

Just when I think I will pass out we have to flip over, putting our feet in the pulleys. Um... yeah. So I am on hands and knees with my feet hanging into these rope things and we have to do this move where we bring our knees into our chest and back again. Sort of like a plank suspended in mid air combined with stomach crunches upside down..

And all I can think is, I feel like I am in some kind of sex contraption... ahem... and because I am oh so mature, I get the giggles. Just for the record, it is impossible to concentrate on doing upsidedown stomach crunch plank moves with your legs tied up and giggle at the same time so I ended up in a bit of a tangle.

Anyway the torture, I mean class ended after half an hour and I tried to walk out with grace and dignity but they didn't want to walk with me as my legs were like jelly. I mean literally, I could barely walk. So I manage to get myself out of the room, find the stretching area and flop I mean sit down on a mat and pretend to stretch (so that I can recover enough to get myself to the changing room).

Next thing I know, hot instructor comes over and asks me whether I enjoyed the class. I am beyond red, puce in the face, more than a little 'glowing' with sweat and all I can manage is a grin and a sort of nod.

Needless to say

I will DEFINITELY be going again next week as it was fan bl00dy tastic.