As has been previously documented, I became thoroughly disillusioned and completely fell off the wagon. And so here I am, ninety sodding pounds more than my lightest weight in 2011 and extremely annoyed with myself. I'm even more annoyed by the fact that I've managed to pack on eighteen of those pounds in the last two months!! I'm pretty sure it's entirely due to eating far too much and not being terribly active, but I did have my annual blood test on Monday and if there is anything amiss that should flag it up.
I could make a hell of a lot of excuses for having reached this weight, but I'm not going to do that. As my sister-in-law is fond of saying, it is what it is. This is where I'm at, and this is what I have to deal with. All I can do is get on with it!
I've actually been thinking about what to do for several months. Quite literally: I have a notebook in which I've been jotting thoughts and ideas as to what works best for me. I have in the past followed Weight Watchers and Slimming World, and like them both (I found the discipline of WW much more suited to my greedy ways!), and there can't be too many other diets that I haven't tried.
What I've decided to do is to allot myself a set number of calories that I HAVE to eat each day, in actual nourishing food terms, and an additional 200 calories a day that I can have if I want them. Where I'm going with this idea is in basic terms vaguely similar to the WW plan I started off on (the last time around; I've done a fair few different WW plans in my time!). By this I mean that it used to be the case that we had a set number of daily points, but could choose to save some of them or have a splurge and use some one day and have fewer points the next. It's been five years, so I am hazy on the amount of points you could save (I want to say four a day, but no more than twelve in total could be saved and they had to be consumed within that week). The plan then changed to give you a set amount of daily points and an additional 49 weeklies; it may seem exactly the same, but trust me, it isn't. For me personally, it encouraged poor nutrition and bad choices, because I would normally end up spending all my weeklies on complete rubbish (crisps and chocolate!) rather than on extra proper food, and somehow I had developed this habit of saving several daily points to spend on rubbish, too.
Anyway, I wanted to take a more nutritionally sound approach to what I eat. Slimming World used to annoy me because it takes (to my mind) more planning than WW, and Healthy Extras and a restrictive approach to certain carbohydrates were definite sticking points for me at times. I did have a go at Extra Easy, but it seems to me that the information I was given to follow it online was incomplete - I never bothered to chase that up, and to be honest with there being so little US presence, I didn't want to sign up to do that online again over here as it was not the best-presented web site and there were really not that many folk following it so not much in the way of online support.
Say what you will about WW, for site layout and ease of use, it is pretty good, and there are a great many wonderful folk who've passed that way. Some have become friends, and a great source of support and comfort through not just weight loss but the general guff that life likes to throw at us.
I have a Fitbit Charge. I use that to track my steps and other activity and to monitor my sleep pattern (atrocious at best, I'm afraid). There is the ability to log food, weight and the like using the Fitbit Dashboard, and now that there's a Windows Phone app I can log food wherever I am.
My basic idea is that I try to eat no more than 1,600 calories a day of 'real' food, and 200 calories of whatever I please. According to today's log, I've eaten 1,862 calories and could in theory have consumed 3,016 calories given the amount of steps and active minutes I've logged! Hmm....I'm also trying to get a minimum of 10,000 steps in, with sixty active minutes each day (today was 110 minutes and over 16,000 steps).
I may expand on this in more detail, once I find out if it actually DOES work for me!
Apart from having blood drawn on Monday, I had my annual check up. Blood pressure 150/100 - not at all good. Admittedly this was before the blood draw, I had taken 15 mg of valium because I have such an awful phobia of needles so didn't *feel* scared, but I'm pretty sure there was a part of my brain that was gibbering in a corner somewhere about the big scary needle that was soon to become intimately enmeshed in my poor vein! At any rate, we doubled that medication and also doubled my anti-depressant because I'm experiencing symptoms of depression and have been for some time. I don't think I'm having a major depressive episode (I have dysthmia, which is a persistent low mood with the occasional huge black hole into which I sink; usually these holes crop up every five to seven years, and I am overdue for one; I just seem to be angrier and less my usual self, rather than actually feeling horribly, overwhelmingly low.) I've been on a pretty low dose of an anti-depressant for the past nine years, and last changed meds about seven years ago, so I am overdue a review. I'm waiting for a psychiatric referral which will likely take a couple of months to come through.
Before anything else, though, a nurse weighed me. I expected to be 200 and something pounds - I was a hair less than two months ago. Somehow I've managed to cram on almost twenty pounds, and am juuuuuuuuuust over the 300 pound mark by a hair. I am seriously annoyed with myself about this, and determined to change that. As my own scales had surfaced but have been reburied in the garage during a general sorting-out (we moved over eighteen months ago and half the stuff we brought is still in boxes in the garage, there's no room for the car in there!), the physician's assistant was quite happy with my request that I pop in and nip on to their horribly accurate digital scales once a month. I'd rather weigh myself once a month, as I find the weekly weigh in somewhat onerous at times, especially when it's been an up and down sort of a time or a plateau.
So that's it for the time being: I'll likely blog as and when something occurs to me to blog about, to record milestones, post interesting recipes and so on and so forth. Not that I'm expecting much in the way of readers!
Say what you will about WW, for site layout and ease of use, it is pretty good, and there are a great many wonderful folk who've passed that way. Some have become friends, and a great source of support and comfort through not just weight loss but the general guff that life likes to throw at us.
I have a Fitbit Charge. I use that to track my steps and other activity and to monitor my sleep pattern (atrocious at best, I'm afraid). There is the ability to log food, weight and the like using the Fitbit Dashboard, and now that there's a Windows Phone app I can log food wherever I am.
My basic idea is that I try to eat no more than 1,600 calories a day of 'real' food, and 200 calories of whatever I please. According to today's log, I've eaten 1,862 calories and could in theory have consumed 3,016 calories given the amount of steps and active minutes I've logged! Hmm....I'm also trying to get a minimum of 10,000 steps in, with sixty active minutes each day (today was 110 minutes and over 16,000 steps).
I may expand on this in more detail, once I find out if it actually DOES work for me!
Apart from having blood drawn on Monday, I had my annual check up. Blood pressure 150/100 - not at all good. Admittedly this was before the blood draw, I had taken 15 mg of valium because I have such an awful phobia of needles so didn't *feel* scared, but I'm pretty sure there was a part of my brain that was gibbering in a corner somewhere about the big scary needle that was soon to become intimately enmeshed in my poor vein! At any rate, we doubled that medication and also doubled my anti-depressant because I'm experiencing symptoms of depression and have been for some time. I don't think I'm having a major depressive episode (I have dysthmia, which is a persistent low mood with the occasional huge black hole into which I sink; usually these holes crop up every five to seven years, and I am overdue for one; I just seem to be angrier and less my usual self, rather than actually feeling horribly, overwhelmingly low.) I've been on a pretty low dose of an anti-depressant for the past nine years, and last changed meds about seven years ago, so I am overdue a review. I'm waiting for a psychiatric referral which will likely take a couple of months to come through.
Before anything else, though, a nurse weighed me. I expected to be 200 and something pounds - I was a hair less than two months ago. Somehow I've managed to cram on almost twenty pounds, and am juuuuuuuuuust over the 300 pound mark by a hair. I am seriously annoyed with myself about this, and determined to change that. As my own scales had surfaced but have been reburied in the garage during a general sorting-out (we moved over eighteen months ago and half the stuff we brought is still in boxes in the garage, there's no room for the car in there!), the physician's assistant was quite happy with my request that I pop in and nip on to their horribly accurate digital scales once a month. I'd rather weigh myself once a month, as I find the weekly weigh in somewhat onerous at times, especially when it's been an up and down sort of a time or a plateau.
So that's it for the time being: I'll likely blog as and when something occurs to me to blog about, to record milestones, post interesting recipes and so on and so forth. Not that I'm expecting much in the way of readers!
No comments:
Post a Comment