Very pleased...

and a little amazed, to be honest!

I haven't posted about my weight loss journey since back in February but I've still been plodding along.  I've had plenty of weeks where my weight has just stayed the same, along with small losses of 1lb at-a-time, but since my last post I'm now down a total of 29lbs 😊

I realise that "slow and steady wins the race" is a good adage when it comes to trying to shed excess weight and I've definitely been taking that road!  However, I'm also very much aware that my losses would be much more consistent if I were actually following the Slimming World plan as it's meant to be rather than my somewhat lackadaisical approach 😏  My aim going forward is to knuckle down, as it were, and properly get on board with the plan.  Whilst I am, of course, thrilled with my total loss so far I'm also well aware that with having such a lot of excess weight still to shift, dilly-dallying around with the plan won't be so helpful in the long term.

The next step, therefore, is to take time to actually get my meals properly organised and planned out, as per the Slimming World plan.  That way, hopefully I'll be seeing you in the not-too-distant future with news of further weight loss 😊

 

Still weeing for Britain...

 ...albeit slightly less than in my last weight-loss journey post 😉

Having lost a further 8lbs since my last post ~ 15lbs in total so far ~ I am now a quarter of the way towards my first target, which I am very happy about as I'm sure you can imagine!  Ultimately I have a huge amount of weight to lose, but breaking that down into interim goals does make it a little easier.  It's less overwhelming aiming for smaller goals than to be constantly thinking about the "big picture", in other words just taking baby steps along the journey 😊

Obviously I don't look any different at the moment, but I have noticed some changes within myself.  I'm feeling less bloated, and my feet, ankles and calves are very much less swollen than they were.  I guess I've been retaining a lot of fluid.....which would, of course, explain all the weeing since altering my eating habits😏  I think I'm due for  another of my regular appointments with the Nurse Practitioner at my GP surgery soon, and it will be interesting to see if this is having any effect on my high blood pressure.

Whilst, as I say, I don't look any different my clothes are already feeling a little looser, which I'm pretty sure is because of being less bloated.  My jeans and dresses are suddenly a tad longer than they were ~ a slightly less swollen stomach to hold them higher, I presume 😄

It's been a very good start, I think, but I'm well aware that the weight loss will slow down ~ I just have to keep taking those little steps one-at-a-time.  I'll be back with another update when the next 7lbs has gone. 

Weeing for Britain!

Is that Too Much Information, my lovelies???  Oh well, you should know by now that I try not to shy away from the less salubrious aspects of my life 😄

In my last "weight-loss journey" post I mentioned that I would share with you how things were progressing, although I had already privately decided that I wouldn't be posting about said journey every week.  Instead, I'm going to post when I reach certain milestones along the way ~ I'm pretty sure you don't want a blow-by-blow account of my weekly weigh-in 😉  I have personal goals to aim for that I will post about as I (hopefully!) reach them, as well as letting you know each time I lose 7lbs.  So I guess now is as good a time as any to let you know that I have in fact lost 8lbs!

Although I have rejoined Slimming World as an online member, I haven't actually started following their weight-loss plan yet.  Since the New Year I have been making slight alterations to my eating habits, though, whilst using up the things I had in the freezer that had a higher fat content than I want to consume going forward.  The main change has been in the amount of bread that I've been eating ~ note that I say "bread", not "grains" 😉

We already have porridge three times a week and I  add a good handful of frozen cherries to mine, plus a level desert-spoon of lemon curd.  Previously the other mornings would be a couple of slices of toast topped with butter, one slice with marmalade and the other usually with Marmite.  Then lunchtime would usually be something-on-toast, a sandwich or other bread product.  I've now made a conscious decision to only have "bread" once a day, plus I'm no longer buying the goat butter that I used to have.  On the non-porridge days I'm instead now having a couple of Weetabix, topped with milk and a good dollop of my favourite yoghurt ~ FAGE Total 0% yogurt.  If I do decide to have toast for breakfast, I now have one slice just with marmalade and the other with a thin smear of the spreadable butter that Adrian likes to make it easier to then spread some Marmite over.

I am still having bread at lunchtime on the porridge/Weetabix days if I fancy it, but I spread over a thin layer of Hellman's Light Mayonnaise instead of using butter.  If I could trust myself to only spread a thin scraping of my beloved goat butter I would still be using it, but alas I know myself well enough to realise that that's not going to happen 😏  On the days that I have had toast for breakfast, though, I don't have bread at lunchtime.  Instead I will have stir-fry vegetables with, say, tuna, or perhaps a cheese omelette.  We really like Cathedral City cheese and have recently changed over to their lighter mature cheddar ~ we like it just as much as the full-fat version.  Some days I will have a really big bowl of soup, but now omit the bread that I would previously have had to accompany it!  I've also rediscovered a taste for celery and often have a couple of sticks with whatever lunch I'm having ~ it's satisfyingly crunchy, and much better for my health than a packet of crisps 😉  Actually, to be fair to myself, I cut waaaay back on my crisp consumption some months ago because of the high blood-pressure and pre-diabetes issues.  I'm also eating more fruit and a good deal less chocolate than before.

All of which, I suspect, is what has lead to the marked increase in weeing that I am currently experiencing.  I'm sure that once I get more into the swing of the Slimming World plan, everything will start to calm down a tad!

So watch this space for news of the next half stone loss which, fingers crossed, won't be too far off 😊  

 

Downsizing.....

.....myself, not my craft room this time 😏 

I had to think long and hard about whether or not to talk about this publicly as it's a journey that I've attempted to make so many times over the last 50 years or so.  To be honest, I couldn't even begin to tell you how many times I've started a new weight-loss regime, none of which (obviously!) have lasted longer than a few weeks at most and with any weight I managed to lose rapidly piling back on again.  Actually, that's not entirely accurate in that I successfully lost about five stone back in around 2002.  However I got totally knocked off track and put all that weight back on again, plus a whole load more *sigh*

My health, though, over the past few years has not been good, with 2025 in particular seemingly being just one bloody thing after another 😒  It's become very apparent to me that each time I have a new health hiccup I'm just not "bouncing back", as it were, in quite the same way that I would have done when I was younger.  Now, I do realise that some of being rather less resilient than I might once have been will probably be down to getting older, but I'm also very aware that being so overweight really isn't helping my health situation in the slightest.

It's a bit sad, really, that I've allowed myself to just get bigger and bigger over these last 50-odd years, and I've often wondered if I would be as big as I am if I'd never actually tried to lose weight when I was young.  The photo above was taken in about 1983 (I was 22 years old) and at the time I thought that I was hugely overweight, even though I patently wasn't.  I was about 12 stone (168 pounds), which I realise would have put me in the overweight BMI category for my then height of 5'6" (I've since lost over an inch in height as I've got older 😳), but I certainly wasn't as big as I had convinced myself I was.  However, each time I attempted to get slimmer I just didn't seem able to stick with it and ended up being bigger than before.

Since I was a teenager I had compared myself unfavourably with my school friends, most of whom did indeed weigh less than me.  However, what had also never dawned on me was that I was also a fair bit taller than most of my friends, in fact during my early senior school years in particular I was taller than a lot of the boys in my year group too!  I think what cemented this feeling of being huge compared to the others was a maths lesson we had in our first year at senior school.  It was teaching us about averages, and the teacher in his wisdom decided that the ideal way to do this was by weighing every child in the class and dividing the total amount by the number of pupils.  Of course we all then knew how much each of us weighed and I was quite mortified to discover that at 8st 12lbs I was the second heaviest girl in the class!  Even now, over 50 years later, that "lesson" has stayed in my mind!

And I can also see that it didn't help growing up with a mother who was somewhat obsessed with being overweight herself.  I don't think I can really remember a time when Mum wasn't trying to lose weight on some diet plan or another.  But conversely she was also very much a "comfort-eater", a habit that I picked up too.  She was bigger than she perhaps should have been but again, like myself, she really wasn't as huge as she imagined herself to be.  Looking back I think that she was rather hung up on the fact that she was so much slimmer when she was first married, forgetting that she had three pregnancies over the course of five years and wasn't very well for the first two ~ I'm the eldest, with the child between myself and my sister sadly being stillborn ~ which I think triggered depression which she tried to damp down with comfort-eating.  There seem to have been a fair amount of overweight women on my Mum's side of the family, and whilst it would be sort of comforting to think that perhaps it's genetics, I rather suspect it's more of a learned behaviour and lifestyle issue!

So the upshot of this rather long post is just to say that 2026 has got to see me seriously tackling my weight issues.  I shall be 65 years old next June and I know that if I don't get to grips with this as a matter of some urgency, it really may become too late to change things.  The run-up to Christmas, though, is definitely not a good time to start a weight-loss campaign but what I can do over the next few weeks is carefully plan out what direction I should move in.  That way, once Christmas and the New Year are both out of the way, I will be ready to start the journey with no excuses 😉  I'm not sure if I will be brave enough to share with you my actual weight, certainly not to start with anyway, but I will share how things are progressing.  I'm hoping that there will be plenty of "ups" to tell you about, but I will be honest about the not-so-good times too 😊