I continued on my eating healthily patterns plus, from the day after I published my last post, I actually (finally!) started going to the gym, partly because I said in my post that I would do so and I had visions of having to log back in and say that, yet again, I couldn't be bothered. See, even when no-one else is reading, blogging still serves as a slap around the face in the right direction!
Until...
I went to Brussels at the end of February - ooh not good. I wasn't too bad while I was there, only giving into the craving for chocolate waffles 4 times (in 2 days) but considering that there's soooo good served from the vans they have on the street there (in London we have ice cream vans in the summer, in Brussels, they have waffle vans all year around) I think I did pretty well. Plus, I ate quite healthily apart from the mixture of pastry, chocolate and once ice cream and we spent the whole of the two days we were in Brussels wandering around the city. By this, I don't mean meandering and stopping at cafes watching the world go by from the street but walking from one end of the city to the other and back again. We usually started at 9am, walked until lunch and then again until we got back to our hostel around 11pm. Sunday evening, different parts of our legs started to hurt - the heel of our feet, our thighs, our calves. I felt very virtuous.
However...
I had gotten out of the healthy eating habit with my indulgence in chocolate covered waffles, Belgian beer and pasta (nothing wrong with any of these, but I had been trying to avoid dessert, alcohol and pasta in favour of salad, soup, sandwiches and fruit) and had had a weekend away from the gym. Regardless of the 13 hour days walking, the habit had been broken. For a couple of weeks afterwards, I wallowed in lack of motivation to eat or exercise properly. But I had never quite slid into the days of last year when I would have a Greggs pastie for breakfast and an entire tub of Ben & Jerrys for dinner (I cringe that I used to have this much ice cream, sometimes after I had eaten pitta bread and houmous).
And then...
On Wednesday 18th March (can still remember the date by looking at my calendar) one of our partners in the office told me in the kitchen at work (hopefully, fingers very tightly crossed, not overheard by a rather fit colleague who sits nearby), 'If you look like this being a vegetarian, imagine how much you would weigh if you ate meat.' Now I know that in her culture (in mine too for that matter - I must talk about this in another post), commenting publicly about other peoples' weight is much more commonly accepted but I was so devastated that, although I had my gym things with me, I started thinking, 'What the hell is the point?' I told myself that I didn't need to go to the gym but just to walk past it and see how I felt then. So, after work I went to my singing class, caught the tube home, walked down the street of my gym and turned straight into the reception. I felt so bad with what this woman had said earlier (by this time about 8 hours earlier) but this completely disappeared when I hopped onto the weighing machine at the gym in my workout clothes and saw that I had lost a kilogram and was 97kg. My workout was fierce that night and led to my returning to the gym the next day to do a full gym session followed by salsaerobics and then gym visits twice that weekend as well (4 times between Wednesday and Sunday). Jumpstart - I started eating healthily and going to the gym about 3-4 times every week (some weeks rather less, I must admit!)
Even...
My trip to Paris over the 4 day Easter weekend did not derail me. I was so conscious of what went wrong in Brussels that I was so worried about Paris - land of delicious food! And chocolate! And patisseries! And cheese! But when I got there, I kept looking at the delectable pastries and chocolates in the shop window and thinking, 'You'll be good but nowhere near worth it for me to lose the feeling I have right now.' I had many baguettes with cheese, grapes and strawberries (Paris on a budget necessitates squirrelling away the baguettes that come with the free breakfast at the hostel, shopping at supermarkets and having picnics in the lovely parks) and one tart. I had a friend with whom I hung out in the evenings but the days were mine for powerwalking around the city, around museums, around parks and up and down the Seine. I must have walked all around the city - I only took the metro a total of 3 times (2 of which were to Versailles and back). I felt great (probably looked it too). I look at my pictures from Paris and compare them to the holidays photos from November and you can definitely see the difference in heft around the waist.
But then...
I returned back to London and my life was so hectic that there was no time for the gym. However, I kept on with the Monday morning swing by the supermarket to pick up fruit for the week and continued with soup or paninis from the sandwich place next door. The upshot of all this fruit meant that my skin was so creamy, soft and smooth that I kept stroking my face marvelling at the wonder of it all. By the end of April I weighed 93 kg! Now that probably doesn't seem like a lot - about 8kg lost in 4 months is a trifle pathetic but it's still better than whatever I was in January - I was 98kg in November but I know I put on weight thanks to the all you can eat breakfasts on holiday followed by home cooking during Christmas time. Also, the real figures behind the 8kg dropped since January are the 4kg dropped in 5 weeks.
The plan...
was to get to 89kg by the end of May. May was looking to be really busy - I had a week's holiday planned and then 2 days after I returned, I had to go to West Africa for work until 1st June. I cancelled my gym membership for the month. Although I average a weight loss of 2kg per month, beyond that was losing 2 kg in a week and then stagnating for a few weeks before the next 2 kg loss. Africa as a continent is none too kind to vegetarians and I always lose weight when travelling so I thought I was set. In between the holiday and travelling for work, I popped into Dorothy Perkins in my lunch hour and tried on a pair of size 16 jeans that I managed to button and zip up. Yes, they were tight but the size 18 jeans were looser than the size 16 jeans were tight. I then got home and for the very first time tried on all the clothes that I had banished to the back of the wardrobe because they were embarrasingly tight and so to be relegated for the days of diminished obesity, to find out that some of them fit and some of them were now too big for me. Wondrous day!
Why is it that you're on top of the world one day, losing weight and looking and feeling great and then a day after, it all starts going downhill. I had forgotten that I was working not travelling. We've been going out for and getting provided with lunch and dinner every day (paid for by work). At the beginning, I would still be full from lunch but felt the need to socialise, everyone else was eating dinner plus sometimes I was invited to join the managers for dinner (very good opportunity work-wise that I couldn't turn down and it would have looked a bit strange to join them for dinner when I wasn't eating). After a few days of that, my stomach obviously remembered what it was like to eat this quantity of food and to eat when not hungry so I wouldn't even think that perhaps I should skip dinner. On top of that were all the coffee breaks with cakes and tarts. Oy vey! So I've put on some weight over the past week and a half...
The plan now is to start plotting strategies for when I'm back in London in June and trying to do some damage limitation before I get there. Luckily I'm now the last one left here from the London office and, as of tomorrow, am here on holiday not on work. This should mean that I'm able to regulate what I eat and start walking around the city much more - let's hope so! Fingers crossed that I can at least go back to London, get on the weighing machine and see the same figures that looked back at me the last time I did so.
I'll really be so angry and disappointed with myself if I've let myself gain weight again. I'm tired, so tired, of losing 2kg and then gaining 1.5kg, flatlining for a while and then losing 5kg and gaining 3kg. Repeat.
Apologies for the length of this post - it did have to make up for 4 months of non activity!
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