End of Foundation phase - 60.5 lbs lighter!

I was weighed this afternoon at the last session of the Foundation phase and, over the past 2 weeks, I've lost another 5.5 lbs.

Today's session was spent looking back, moving forward and saying goodbye to each other - even though all of us except my friend / colleague Donna are moving onto Development, where we simply keep on with the food packs until we've reached our desired weight. Donna's moving onto Route to Management, where she'll start reintroducing food next week - lucky thing!

It's been very heartening for me to compare the following photos:

(I included the blurry one because it's got a neater profile and makes me look just that little bit slimmer!)

It's the weirdest thing to look at the January photo of me and wonder who that person is. I was dismayed at the time how my face looked. Even weirder is to realise that I'm beginning to recognise myself again in photos. Oh, I remember her!

I seem to be back on the wagon / back on track / making better choices about my food plan. I was / am still having such a hankering for real food... but today's session was very encouraging, remembering how far I've come (especially when I see those photos) and how well I was doing before I fell off the wagon. Coming off the food plan only once makes it so much easier to do it again AND harder to stay back on it. I kind of knew that would happen and that's why I was determined not to do it for so long. I intend to get back to that solid mindset, it's kind of confusing how it slipped, I couldn't tell you precisely why...

It's a bit disheartening to see how little I've managed to raise for the charities. So much for £2000 by the end of April! Oh well... I'm grateful for all the donations and sponsorship that have come in. I'll be sending out an email in the next few days, to see if people want to pay me now or continue with sponsorship til I've reached my goal.

I'm especially grateful to all of you who have donated money for the costs of Lighter Life, I genuinely couldn't have done it without you. I'm earning a little bit more money now with extra work through Rag Tag n Textile, but I'm still penny pinching like mad! Donna and I will be going through to the Black Isle for our different Lighter Life sessions on different days now so we won't be sharing the cost of transport anymore either. There are plans afoot for more work for me but it's always a slow process to raise the necessary funding. In the meantime I have little spare time to work out other ways to make money!

Onwards and upwards!

Next week I start on the Development phase, on Thursday afternoons now. If my Gaelic class resumes on Thursday evenings (it's undecided at the moment) I'll have to change my LL day to Wednesday evening, which will be kind of tough, travelling through after work and driving home late in the evening, especially after the summer when it gets dark again... On a positive note, we drove back tonight in full daylight and I have months of that to look forward to - fantastic!

Development will be interesting as they'll be building on the tools we've learned in Foundation. It'll be a totally different group of people, though 4 of us from my Foundation group will be there. We're used to about 6 or 7 of us but the Development group can be as big as 20! So it's all change and will be interesting to see how different it is. I'm looking forward to playing blaring music while I drive back and forth on my own!

Another 2.5 lbs, milk week and bad choices

I'm very late with this report. Can't remember why now! Last week I was away in Uist so missed the weekly session. The week before that - 14 April - I lost another 2.5 lbs, bringing me (frustratingly!) up to 1 lb short of 4 stones weight loss. As a fortnight will have passed by the next weigh in, I'm bound to be over 4 stone this week.

This past week has been our 13th and higher calorie week. NICE guidelines recommend only 12 weeks on very low calorie diets (VLCD) so we are upping our calories to 1000 a day this week by adding milk (or soya milk) to our packs. It's been nice to be able to drink tea and coffee again, as I don't like either black. I've actually been finding it hard to get through the 400 mls of semi skimmed milk each day. I've also felt unusually stiff and wonder if this could possibly be the effect of reintroducing milk to my diet... so I'm using soya milk for the packs and ordinary milk for my yummy cups - nay, pots! - of tea.

This coming Tuesday is the last day of Foundation and I'll move onto Development during the following week. I'm still unsure of what day to choose - Wednesday at 7.30 pm or Thursday at 4.30 pm - until I know if my Gaelic class, block 2 of which ends this week, is going to continue on Thursdays.

Last weekend (17 - 19 April) I was lucky enough to be invited by my friend Sandy to go to the Knoydart's 10 Music Festival with her and her son Tim. We were camping and I didn't envisage any difficulties with the diet over that weekend. In the end, though, with the prospect of a weekend of only sweet shakes and bars, I succumbed to the temptation of a venison burger (Bad Choice No 1). My ill-thought-out logic dictated that at least it was protein, shouldn't knock me out of ketosis (fat burning) and wouldn't make that much difference. Of course it's a big increase in calories so that will have made a difference. I didn't intend to eat any of the "bap" (I usually call it a roll but this was most definitely a cottonwool-like bap!) but ended up nibbling on half of it. Worse than that though, I requested one chocolate finger biscuit from Tim and then later binged on about 10 of them, they were so more-ish (Bad Choice No 2). Ho hum...

This past week I spent 2 nights in Lochmaddy, North Uist, and this time succumbed to local seaweed-fed lamb steak at the Lochmaddy Hotel... (Bad Choice No 3) again with the logic of it being protein and therefore not knocking me out of ketosis. I asked for none of the onion rings, fried mushrooms and chips that came with it and for a green salad instead. It was in fact served with the green salad - and the onion rings, mushrooms and chips!! I gave up then and crumbled (Bad Choice No 4)!! I ate the 3 onion rings, the several mushrooms, half of the chips (with mayonnaise - eek!) and only half of the lamb.

My body wasn't too happy with that venison burger. It might have been that I'd barely slept the night before but, after I'd eaten it, I immediately had to go and have a nap! I was also only able to eat half of the lamb. My stomach will have shrunk, of course - in the past I'd have eaten the whole lot without thinking.

Neither time was the food worth it. The burger was - ok. The lamb was - ok (nothing like as great as I expected). Mostly I enjoyed the chips! Oh and the chocolate fingers. Carbs and sugar are my trigger foods, to be sure.

Since then I've struggled with wanting to eat more, to eat conventional food again. I discovered a LL banoffee pie recipe and made it up for the 2nd time this week. A quarter is the equivalent of one food pack and, because it contains 2 bars, only a half can be eaten in one day. On Friday and Saturday nights just past, I ate an extra quarter each night - meaning I've eaten the equivalent of 5 packs each day. I always feared that breaking the diet - choosing to eat outside of my food plan, rather - would be a slippery slope and it looks like I might just have been right. Today I've managed to get back on the wagon and am determined to stay there from now on. It's definitely harder to stay on it when you've already fallen off once...

The weight loss is a lot slower than it was - can't tell yet how the bad choices have affected it - and it's definitely much less exciting that way! While I'm really delighted with the amount I've lost, I'm very aware that I have a long way to go. I'm about to embark on another 13 week period and am very likely to have another one to go after that too. I'm very aware that my "diet buddy", Donna, is about to reintroduce conventional food as she embarks on the Road to Management phase, and I wish it was me! I look at photos of myself and see I'm still really big. They don't match the idea I have of myself in my head, knowing that I can get into old clothes and even feel my hip bones through my skin now! I can't say I'm exactly discouraged but it feels like a very long haul right now...

Another 2 lbs lost this week

This is a late report because my internet service went down last Sunday and I only got it back up again tonight. I've been a bit lost without it!

Only 2 lbs lost this week but that's fine as I lost so much over the past 3 weeks that I was finding it a bit hard to come to terms with! More on that another time.

So I didn't make it to 4 stone this week - only 3 st 10.5 lbs - but maybe next week.