Scrumbles
Dancing Queen
I really wish I wasn't back on this forum making this thread. 
My diet history goes like this:
I was fat from early childhood, became a fat adult and have yo-yo dieted my way up to 17st 5lbs at my biggest 4 years ago. Through the back end of 2011, all of 2012, and the first 4 months of 2013 I worked hard to get down to a modest target of 10st 10lbs and thought that I pretty much had it cracked this time: I knew exactly how many calories a day I needed to maintain me at that weight, so what could go wrong?
A lot, so it seems.
Apart from anything else, I think I basically burnt out. I was so controlled for so long that I no longer had it in me to keep monitoring everything I ate and drank, plus I managed to convince myself that by now I must have sufficiently engrained my good habits that I could relax a bit, right? Wrong. Over the next few months some of those lost pounds gradually started finding me again, and the worst part about it was that even though I was no longer weighing myself regularly, I knew I was gaining weight but couldn't find it in me to do anything about it. So frustrating.
Thankfully, by October I was sufficiently annoyed with myself to take action, and during that winter managed to knuckle down and lose the stone or so I'd regained. Hurrah! Slate wiped clean.
So this time I was going to be alright, yeah? Surely I must have learned that pretending I can eat like a normal-weight person doesn't fly for me, and that I can never, EVER, slacken the reigns, but no Over the summer and autumn of 2014 I totally took my eye off the ball again - worse than in 2013 - and come January this year had done much more damage than the year before. And once again, I knew it was happening but was emotionally completely incapable of facing it and dealing with it. How ridiculous is that?!
I suppose if there's a positive to be found in this, at least I've twice managed to arrest the self-sabotage before I put back all the weight, but it isn't much to be happy about. If this pattern keeps repeating, I'll probably just end up spending longer and longer periods off-plan and less and less time repairing the damage until I'm all the way back to where I started, or likely even heavier! Not a pleasant outlook
So where does that leave me?
Well, I'm still pondering the maintenance conundrum, but my first job is obviously to remove the excess pounds, so at the moment I'm fully focused and locked into a calorie-counting regime that I know will slowly but surely take off the weight. I typically lose 3-4lbs per month eating about 1400-1500 calories a day, and that level of deficit is tolerable as long as I make relatively smart choices about food - if I'm daft enough to eat it all in cake, I can expect to be hungry!
I did consider going low carb again (I lost the bulk of my weight on Atkins combined with calorie-counting) but I decided against it because there are too many things in my daily diet that I would miss, principally potatoes, rice and oats - they are just too useful in the meals I like making and eating to give them up. I am however avoiding bread because I know that for me it's a MAJOR trigger food for bingeing and therefore not worth the risk.
Other than that, there are no particular rules, except that I have to eat my main meal of the day slowly, and I mean s-l-o-w-l-y. I've even started setting a timer and aiming for no less than 20 minutes so that my meal has a proper chance to "land" and my stomach can tell my brain that I am in fact full. I have to say that the food gets a bit cold towards the end of the time, but that's what microwaves are for and in any case, I think it would be worth it because I've found myself far less prone to evening munching since I started doing this.
So to the hard bit...the numbers :sigh:
I'll say now that I'm not going to make these the main focus of this diary. In 2012/13 I was scale-hopping every day, which served a valuable purpose at the time because it allowed me to see the precise nature of my losses (they're governed by my monthly cycle, so the 4 week pattern goes: big loss - small gain - no change - small loss) but is effectively redundant now since I know from experience that this calorie deficit WILL work, and weighing once a month for reassurance is all I really need.
*deep breath*
Start weight (as of this morning): 177lbs
Target weight: 150lbs
So that's 2 stone to shift. At my usual loss rate it'll take about 7 months, though it may take longer if I have a break at some point (I find I can take a week off now and again without too much damage as long as I'm in the right mind set to start with).
In the meantime I can address the yo-yo problem - I guess I've got a nice long time to think about it...
ETA:
Today's grub:-
Breakfast: slice of cake, 431 cals (leftover from Valentine's...I don't normally eat cake for breakfast...honest)
Lunch: half tin of Heinz Minestrone soup, 63 cals
Dinner: Whopping plate of chicken risotto with leeks, red pepper, garlic and celery, sprinkled with crushed crispy bacon and grated mature cheddar, 697 cals (I waited all day for that pile of yumminess, and it was worth every hunger pang, lol)
Dessert: pot of Sainsbury's chocolate mousse, 116 cals
Milk (SS) in teas and coffees, 130 cals
Grand total - 1436 cals
I feel absolutely stuffed since dinner and the chances of me raiding the kitchen tonight are less than zero. Result!
My diet history goes like this:
I was fat from early childhood, became a fat adult and have yo-yo dieted my way up to 17st 5lbs at my biggest 4 years ago. Through the back end of 2011, all of 2012, and the first 4 months of 2013 I worked hard to get down to a modest target of 10st 10lbs and thought that I pretty much had it cracked this time: I knew exactly how many calories a day I needed to maintain me at that weight, so what could go wrong?
A lot, so it seems.
Apart from anything else, I think I basically burnt out. I was so controlled for so long that I no longer had it in me to keep monitoring everything I ate and drank, plus I managed to convince myself that by now I must have sufficiently engrained my good habits that I could relax a bit, right? Wrong. Over the next few months some of those lost pounds gradually started finding me again, and the worst part about it was that even though I was no longer weighing myself regularly, I knew I was gaining weight but couldn't find it in me to do anything about it. So frustrating.
Thankfully, by October I was sufficiently annoyed with myself to take action, and during that winter managed to knuckle down and lose the stone or so I'd regained. Hurrah! Slate wiped clean.
So this time I was going to be alright, yeah? Surely I must have learned that pretending I can eat like a normal-weight person doesn't fly for me, and that I can never, EVER, slacken the reigns, but no
Over the summer and autumn of 2014 I totally took my eye off the ball again - worse than in 2013 - and come January this year had done much more damage than the year before. And once again, I knew it was happening but was emotionally completely incapable of facing it and dealing with it. How ridiculous is that?!I suppose if there's a positive to be found in this, at least I've twice managed to arrest the self-sabotage before I put back all the weight, but it isn't much to be happy about. If this pattern keeps repeating, I'll probably just end up spending longer and longer periods off-plan and less and less time repairing the damage until I'm all the way back to where I started, or likely even heavier! Not a pleasant outlook
So where does that leave me?
Well, I'm still pondering the maintenance conundrum, but my first job is obviously to remove the excess pounds, so at the moment I'm fully focused and locked into a calorie-counting regime that I know will slowly but surely take off the weight. I typically lose 3-4lbs per month eating about 1400-1500 calories a day, and that level of deficit is tolerable as long as I make relatively smart choices about food - if I'm daft enough to eat it all in cake, I can expect to be hungry!
I did consider going low carb again (I lost the bulk of my weight on Atkins combined with calorie-counting) but I decided against it because there are too many things in my daily diet that I would miss, principally potatoes, rice and oats - they are just too useful in the meals I like making and eating to give them up. I am however avoiding bread because I know that for me it's a MAJOR trigger food for bingeing and therefore not worth the risk.
Other than that, there are no particular rules, except that I have to eat my main meal of the day slowly, and I mean s-l-o-w-l-y. I've even started setting a timer and aiming for no less than 20 minutes so that my meal has a proper chance to "land" and my stomach can tell my brain that I am in fact full. I have to say that the food gets a bit cold towards the end of the time, but that's what microwaves are for
and in any case, I think it would be worth it because I've found myself far less prone to evening munching since I started doing this.So to the hard bit...the numbers :sigh:
I'll say now that I'm not going to make these the main focus of this diary. In 2012/13 I was scale-hopping every day, which served a valuable purpose at the time because it allowed me to see the precise nature of my losses (they're governed by my monthly cycle, so the 4 week pattern goes: big loss - small gain - no change - small loss) but is effectively redundant now since I know from experience that this calorie deficit WILL work, and weighing once a month for reassurance is all I really need.
*deep breath*
Start weight (as of this morning): 177lbs
Target weight: 150lbs
So that's 2 stone to shift. At my usual loss rate it'll take about 7 months, though it may take longer if I have a break at some point (I find I can take a week off now and again without too much damage as long as I'm in the right mind set to start with).
In the meantime I can address the yo-yo problem - I guess I've got a nice long time to think about it...
ETA:
Today's grub:-
Breakfast: slice of cake, 431 cals (leftover from Valentine's...I don't normally eat cake for breakfast...honest
)Lunch: half tin of Heinz Minestrone soup, 63 cals
Dinner: Whopping plate of chicken risotto with leeks, red pepper, garlic and celery, sprinkled with crushed crispy bacon and grated mature cheddar, 697 cals (I waited all day for that pile of yumminess, and it was worth every hunger pang, lol)
Dessert: pot of Sainsbury's chocolate mousse, 116 cals
Milk (SS) in teas and coffees, 130 cals
Grand total - 1436 cals
I feel absolutely stuffed since dinner and the chances of me raiding the kitchen tonight are less than zero. Result!
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