Monday evening, 07-10-24, my first tip and a personal story

Good evening, everyone!  

Sadly, I missed circuits this morning as I needed to stay in to sign for a delivery.  Of course, it didn't come till the afternoon which is typical but I'm glad I didn't take the risk.

Happily, Lindsey said come to the Wednesday one instead.  So that's all good.

What I ate today

Fruit from the freezer with some yogurt - delicious.

One syn for the chia seeds.

Some of the broccoli and butterbean soup I made yesterday, to which I added some cheese spread for an A and some mixed seeds.

It was lovely and very filling too.

One healthy extra A and one syn.

Later on I had a plum and an orange. 

Dinner was the usual carbonara but with broad beans and mushrooms.  It was very tasty.

One healthy extra A for Italian hard cheese and I had some nuts afterwards so nine syns and a B.

Summary:

two healthy extra As

one healthy extra B

eleven syns

My meal plans for tomorrow:

B:  fruit, yogurt and seeds

L:  quiche (from the freezer) with either tomatoes and mushrooms or a salad, depending on how I feel; fruit

D:  penne arrabbiata using one of the portions of sausage casserole from the freezer; fruit

Exercise: Groove class plus the walk there and back

The Extra Bit

Yesterday, I posted Dr Anna Pleet's top tips for succeeding on a diet.

Mine are a little different, worked for me and are still working while I walk through the undiscovered country of maintaining a weight loss.

I totally get that they wouldn't necessarily suit everyone - this is a very individual thing and leans very heavily on individual character and personality.

This part of my blog is getting longer and longer (sorry) so what I will do is cover one tip each day (do I hear cheers? )

So . . . here is number one and a personal story.

1.  Know why you're doing this and keep it to the forefront of your mind and environment.  What is your goal?  How will you know you have achieved it?  What then?

 There's lots of reasons why.  It could be health, it could be a holiday, a wedding, another occasion, vanity, others relying on you - oh, there are so many reasons why one wants to lose some weight but they don't all necessarily lead to an ongoing lifestyle change.

Short term diets tend to bring short term results.  Once the reason is over, the motivation can vanish.  Not always, I hasten to add, but sometimes.

Long term lifestyle changes are harder (I think) and involve a determination (or necessity) to make changes to all sorts of thing - for ever.

I've been very lucky.  Despite being very very overweight for most of my adult life, apart from the unfitness and generally feeling of bleugh that one gets from eating unhealthy foods, I've not had a lot of medical issues.

I had dodgy ankles that kept turning over, not helped by the weight they had to carry.  That wasn't enough.

I had a breast lump in my fifties that was initially thought to be malignant but turned out to be an intracystic papilloma.  It was removed, the doctor said it wasn't diet related and that was that.  Worrying times but it wasn't enough.

I had high blood pressure as I neared my sixties which I was remarkably careless about and which really didn't bother me nearly as much as it should have done and no-one at my GPs pointed out that some weight loss and a change of diet could help significantly.  So that wasn't enough either.

Then, just as I was getting into retirement , I was ambulanced to hospital with suspected heart problems, pain and a really worrying raise (rise???) in blood pressure (two hundred and something over one hundred and something).
Turned out my heart was absolutely fine, very strong, but I had an internal infection caused by gall stones plus blood clotting issues - the first sample they took clotted before it got to the lab.  So I was admitted, put on a drip, blood thinners, strong antibiotics and meds to lower my blood pressure.
Five days later, I came home feeling a fair bit better and with dietary advice.

It gave my family quite a scare and I felt very bad about that.
I did a fair bit of Googling and found plenty of sensible, reliable advice there too and I also found in the following weeks that if I stepped out of line, food-wise, it really hurt - oh, my word, how it hurt.

Was that enough?  For sure.  I was put on the waiting list for an op and the surgeon told me to follow a very specific and rigid diet he provided and to lose 10% of my body weight.
THAT was my initial motivation and I lost a good four stone or so in six months.

Once the op was done and dusted and things settled down a bit, the weight started coming back a bit and that is when I joined Slimming World after a good chat to a friend, Mel, who had lost lots of weight on SW herself.  I just didn't want all the pain and the rigidity of diet to be wasted.

That was one of the best things I ever did.  The other was deciding to contact Lindsey Abbott regarding some personal training sessions.

And I haven't looked back since.  My motivation is to be fit and healthy.  That includes being a healthy weight, having healthy eating patterns as well as remaining fit and maintaining muscle mass plus keeping my mind engaged and active.  A whole lifestyle, in fact.

My blood pressure is now normal - not normal for someone my age, properly normal-normal (with the meds, but I might want to have a conversation with my GP about that at some point).

The remaining issue is the cholesterol as anyone who follows this blog knows.  That was the motivation for slanting my eating towards the Mediterranean way and I'm loving it.  It's a change that will last me as long as I can live an independent life.

So - work out what your motivation is and never, ever let it fade.