Loosing weight

I don’t work on Fridays and so to get my frame of mind set right I never think of just Friday, always saying in my mind “rest and relax Fridays” and it works a treat. During the week when I’m feeling a little out of control I just think to myself “only a couple of days till rest and relax Friday” and I usually calm right down.  The technique only works because I’m very protective of Fridays and always work hard to keep them relaxing.

Today started off just fine, 30 minutes meditation, an early walk and then reading at Caffe Nero, but by 10:30 it was pouring with rain and I was soaked by the time I got home and my shoulders and ankles were killing me. Worse I had a pile of admin to work through that I had been putting off all week, including bills to pay, arranging to get a leaking roof fixed, filling in the police form to confirm I was the guilty party speeding and on it went for an hour. The hour from hell ended with a long and fruitless phone call with a lovely lady in HR trying to get errors in my benefits package corrected, which would have been less frustrating if I hadn’t already sent her all the same information in an email a week before that “she was too busy to read”.

In hindsight maybe the day didn’t start off quite as well as I thought because I weighed myself.  I’ve been trying to loose 10 pounds and 5″ of belly fat for 6 months, every time I get to within 4lb of my target my weight seems to just pile back on, even though I’m always eating less calories than I’m theoretically consuming.  It’s discouraging, this week I put on 2lb which seems to defy physics, but the scales don’t lie (maybe).  So this morning I decided to go back to a 2:5 day fasting pattern in a final desperate attempt to win out over a metabolism that just seems to want to keep me at 11 stone, even though my waist size says I need to be 7lb lighter.

Although normally I walk for exercise I just couldn’t face another day in the rain (the wettest January for a 100 years) so I got out the exercise bike and watched TV for a change, working my way through a backlog of Horizon episodes, the most entertaining of which was Sugar or Fat.  My current preference is too eat a high fat, moderate protein, moderate carb diet, that is low in sugar and processed food and high in whole foods.  I eat according to the 80/20 principle, ie 80% wholefoods, 20% processed.  The programme had a lot of flaws but the conclusions seemed sound,  extreme diets are bad, neither fat nor carbs are inherently evil, and that the real danger is food that combine fat and carbs.  The programme implied that it was a revelation that foods that were high fat and carbs were a problem, but since high fat/carb foods don’t really exist in nature it shouldn’t have been a surprise.

The real spin off benefit of a day at home was that I got to collect Anna from school at lunch and Tessa mid afternoon, which meant a nice chat in the car and saved them from getting soaked too, of course being teenage girls they didn’t think to take coats with them!

My day ended with a wonderful berry fruit salad with spray cream, watching the wonderful Elementary on TV before reading in the bath.  My current book is The Gates of Rome and I’m loving it!