Size 16

Today is a good day. I went shopping and bought bras, trousers, dresses and shoes - and for the first time in ages was pleased at the sizes at which I was buying my clothes.

In the shops today, I was flicking through the sales racks and my eyes were automatically drawn to the size 16s and size 18s (I think this is US sizes 12 and 14 but I'm not sure). I had to keep reminding myself to look one size down. I picked up a few likely selections and took them into the changing rooms. I so badly wanted them to be able to fit that I was actually a bit nervous.

Bras

The only issue about losing weight that bothers me is that it is going to necessitate my breasts shrinking. I love my breasts the way they are. I think the reason for this partly is that they're the only part of my body with which I'm completely happy. I love being able to wear tight, low-cutting (but stomach skimming!) tops. I suppose I hope that they'll draw the attention away from the rest of my body. My bras have been getting a little loose in the cup lately and although I'm thrilled at the weight I have been losing, it's a little sad to run my fingers around the insides of my bras and see that there's space there.

However, I found out today that I've only gone down one cup size - and in addition, I've also gone down a back size - whoppee! Instead of being a 36GG (and, to be honest, the 36 was tight and the only reason it wasn't 38 was that a 36 gave my breasts more much needed support), I'm now a 34G (I think 34 back size is US 90 back size). I'm ecstatic with the 34 and hey, a G cup is still pretty big. I'll take that!

Dresses

I've always worn a size 14 (US size 10?) top. When I was 79kg, I would buy size 14 and when I was 100kg, I would buy size 14. They always fit - mostly because I don't wear shirts and as I have a big chest, it doesn't really matter if tops stretch a little over that area.

This was the first time I was trying on dresses in size 14 and yes, they were summery dresses made of a stretchy material but they fit!

Trousers

The trousers were a different matter. Although all my 18s are too loose for me, I'm just a tad too big to fit comfortably in 16s. Nevertheless, I was determined to buy size 16 trousers today. I think it's better to have too tight trousers so you can remember that you need to lose weight rather than wearing trousers that are swimming and only stay on your body when you cinch them in with a belt. Seriously, I've been wearing jeans lately that if I wasn't wearing a belt would fall past my hips and end up around my knees! Not a good look.

I bought two pairs of trousers - a comfy drawstring pair and a formal gray pair. The drawstrings are just a bit tight but the gray trousers I can't even do up properly. Never mind, they are my new goal trousers - they're really only suitable for winter (not that the summer has been full of warmth and sunshine here). Fingers crossed they'll actually be a bit loose and comfortable once the weather gets cold enough to wear them!

Shoes

No weight loss news connected with my new shoes - I've bought two pairs and I absolutely love them. Both of them are really different from the shoes I have know but I love the colours (one is a metallic dark blue and the other is black with gold studs) and the heels. I feel so tall in them but yet, they're both so comfortable.

I remember when I was in the pit of despair because I had to buy size 16 trousers. Now, I'm over the moon. I went shopping today and bought two size 14 (!) dresses and two size 16 trousers - the first time I've bought size 16 trousers for 4 years. I've never bought a size 14 dress in my life (mostly because back when I could do so, I didn't really wear dresses).

Happy days!

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Weightloss (to be proved)

1) Walk for at least 1/2 an hour at least three times a week - make use of lunch hour

2) Go to the gym at least 4 days a week

3) Three alcoholic drinks maximum a week

4) 7 hours sleep (or more) every night

5) At least one meal of salad a day as well as fruit for breakfast

6) Unlimited fruit and vegetables

7) Blog every day

Let's see how that works for me...

Inactivity masking progress (both forwards and backwards)

This is the most irregular blog in the world. I only seem able to post a couple of times once every couple of months before yet another hiatus. Does anyone notice a pattern?

This losing weight thing is a complete nightmare. I returned from my month away in May to find that I had gained a couple of kg to take me back up to 95kg. I then did so well for weeks, got down to 91kg (9 pounds lost) and then a good friend whom I hadn't seen for a year came to stay and I had an intensive music workshop. Weeks of classes every day after work for 3 hours plus practice when I got home led to some very bad eating and non exercising habits. I went to the gym for the first time in about three weeks a few days ago - 92.9kg (4 pound gain). Argh! I'm so frustrated that I was thinking of giving up. I obviously cannot do this. I simply don't have the force of will required to force myself to run, bike and generally move about neither is the sensible part of my brain able to exercise any form of control over what I put into my mouth.

BUT:

1) I'm trying to break habits that have built up over the past 15 years. I should not expect it to happen in a matter of months.

2) I am going in a generally downward direction. Every 1 kg lost is followed by half of it regained - I'm literally going two steps forward and one step back. I've lost 7-10 kg (15-22 pounds/ between 1-1 1/2 stone overall). For seven months, that's nothing but it's so much better than gaining over a stone.

3) I'm still eating relatively healthily - much better than I was this time last year without a doubt.

4) When I was in the zone, it was so good to be able to run miles at a time without stopping, to be able to push myself in the gym, to bike for 45 minutes, to run for the bus and be the quickest one and to be able to see my friends' faces when they saw me after a year away.

5) I'm still going for the wedding of my cousin-the-could-be model in a few months' time. We've always been compared with each other. I'm fat but clever. She's less good about passing exams but thin and beautiful and now, about to be married. I've not seen her for at least 3 years. I cannot look like this when we next meet.

6) I know I can get it back. I've been here before. This is not as bad as the end of May when I'd spent the whole month being completely sedentary but eating 3 big meals plus 2 cake/ biscuit breaks a day. Then, it was hard getting back into it. Now, my breakfasts have still been good. Lunch is okay 50% of the time. Dinner and snacks is less so but this is because I've had to grab anything possible.

It's all about priorities. For the past 4 weeks, I've been prioritising seeing friends whom I've not seen for a year. I've been prioritising singing. I have not been prioritising losing weight. I thought I could carry on my life in a way close to normal. I can't do it that way. I'm an all or nothing type of person - I either spend 3 hours in the gym after work every day or I do nothing. I can't do that anymore. I need to focus on what's important for me right now, recalibrate the part of my brain that deals with food and exercise so that when I reach my target weight I can ease up a little but not too much! If I spend weeks when all I do is work and gym, then I'm going to break, start fixating on food (because I'm doing nothing else that distracts me from it), go for weeks where there's no exercise and regain the lost weight. I need to find a way to exercise and also do other things by either not trying to go to the gym every day so I can find time for other things or by splitting my evenings between exercise and friends.

I'm on the train going home for the weekend. I will try my best to go to the gym my parents use, but if not, at least to go for a run on both Saturday and Sunday. I will not take complete advantage of delicious home cooked food to scoff as much as I can handle. The food will be there the next time I return. The food will be waiting for me. It's not my last chance. The food will not run out!

When I return, I shall be bringing back a week's worth of food with me - that's lunch. Breakfast will be fruit and dinner salad (but interesting ones). On Monday evening I shall go to the gym and buy food - lovely fruit, vegetables, tofu, paneer which I'll then use for breakfast, smoothies, cous cous salads, tofu salads, paneer salads.

Under 90kg before the end of August (3kg/ 6.38lb lost)? Back on the wagon it is.

Also

I really want to weigh myself to get a starting weight for the next few weeks. I know that I was 93kg at the start of May but have I gone up since then and how much? I'm trying to do calculations of projected weight at the start of August and it's driving me a little crazy not knowing where to start.

Does anyone else do the 'if I lose weight at the rate of xkg per week, in y number of weeks, I'll weight this much' internal monologues with themselves? Sad I know...

Day Two Tick

Day two of my 8 week plan to get down to my weight of 10 years ago has gone quite well. I feel like I'm slowly easing back into my healthy living routine after a month of just being able to eat whatever was available.

For breakfast I had the following:

- 100g blueberries

- 100g raspberries

- 1 banana

- 1 apple

- 1 pear

all chopped up into a big bowl of fruit. Mmmm.....

For lunch I heated up some soup in the microwave - 186 calories, thank you very much. I then resisted the alcohol temptation in the pub after work in favour of tomato juice but succumbed to the can't be arsed to cook so will stop by the bakery for dinner. At least I managed to rein it in for just one cheese bagel - yum!

And my gym dilemma of yesterday was resolved after I realised I had a doctor's appointment this morning before work and couldn't fit the gym in as well. I didn't end up going after work either - my meeting finished at 8.30pm after which I went for a quick 45 minutes to the pub and then onto home.

I have spent the past 30 minutes making my dinner for tomorrow though. The plan is to have fruit again for breakie, chop up some vegetables for a salad lunch and then eat my cooked dinner in between the work event tomorrow and meeting up with my friends afterwards - thereby being healthy and saving money!

Will I make it to the gym tomorrow before work? I feel that the 6.30am starts are a trifle doomed given my general state of sleep deprivation. I had 7 hours last night which gives me an average of 4.5 hours since the weekend. How do other people manage to get early nights?!

Home and Onwards

I'm back in London after one month away and it is weird to be back at work, in my house and on my bed. I was planning on heading to the gym after work today but a combination of 3 hours of sleep on the flight to London and a 7 hour day at work meant that I was just way too knackered.

Instead I went shopping and for £20.82 I bought:

- a bag of apples

- a bag of pears

- 2 boxes of raspberries

- 1 box of blueberries

- 4 fairtrade bananas

- 1 bag of satsumas

- 500g potatoes

- 1 red pepper

- 4 courgettes

- 1 box of tomatoes

- 1 pots of tomato and basil soup

- 2 pots of spinach and nutmeg soup

- 1 pot of yoghurt

I had some soup and bread tonight for dinner but I cannot wait to eat tomorrow. Fruit, I've missed you so much!

I want to start back on my routine of fruit for breakfast, soup or salad for lunch, fruit for snacks and then a cooked dinner. I suspect that I've got this the wrong way around and I should be having the filling meal at lunchtime and the soup/ salad for dinner - but that would involve cooking lunch the night before.

I've torn whether or not to go to the gym tomorrow before work. I really want to start exercising after a whole month away and I'm worried that my meetings will finish too late for me to be able to get proper gym time but I'm sooooo tired.

I'm just impatient to start this already - I want to go on an 8 week exercise and food plan. Why 8 weeks? It's my birthday in a couple of months time and I really, really want to be able to, on that day, get on the weighing machine and see exactly what I would have seen 10 years ago. I started losing weight the autumn after my 16th birthday and I was so close to 'normal' weight before Christmas hit and I decided to 'take a break.' 84kg is quite a symbolic weight for me, in addition to which, it is also across the threshold into overweightdom and away from obesity.

I'm not quite sure whether it's possible but I'm most definitely going to try...

Update

It's been 4 months since I've even looked at this blog. There have been a lot of ups and downs in the meantime - since 18th January when I was 'In the Zone' (was I consciously referencing Britney there?):

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!