On being accountable

So, at the top of the page you’ll notice that I’ve called this a diet/food blog hybrid. And so far I’ve perhaps concentrated more on the foodie blogging thing. As with most diet bloggers that I’ve ever read, silence tends not to be a good sign when it comes to diets. It generally means that everything is going a little bit wrong.

Let’s cut to the weight loss chase. I’ve lost a total of 3 stone – that’s 42 pounds. Which is great (cue pat on the back). It has taken me a year and eight months so far – that’s a total of 2.1 pounds a calendar month: I’m pretty firmly in the slow-but-steady (a.k.a. tortoise) category. If I had lost a consistent half pound a week throughout that time my guess is that I would have been a little frustrated – although it is a perfectly reasonable rate of loss. But consistency has often been notably absent during this particular scale-tale. The losses have come in fits and starts, interspersed regularly with periods of maintenance and gain. In some ways I am not too worried about this. When I started on WW back in September 2008 I accepted that ours would probably be a lifelong relationship. Like one of those friendships you make on the first day of primary school – enduring, but with periods in which you drift apart and don’t see each other for months at a time.

The other key fact that you may notice I have not mentioned yet is what I want to lose overall. Setting a goal weight is pretty hard, but when I started I fixed on a total loss of 85 pounds. It’s achievable and puts me at a weight and shape that I know is slim without being thin and that I can maintain with a reasonable amount of success.

The last couple of months have turned into a bit of a hiatus for me for a variety of reasons. My tracking has often fallen by the wayside, as has my enthusiasm for the gym. I have managed to roughly maintain my weight but it’s time to try and get things moving (in the right direction!) again. I have three months until my two year WW “anniversary” and I think a fitting gift to myself would be getting another stone off in that time which would take me to a not-too-shabby 56 pound loss and two-thirds of the way to my final goal.

This is NOT a race just as my way of life now is NOT a diet – there’s no finishing post to look forward to just a slight bunny hop over from “losing” to “maintaining” and I’m not there yet. I am NOT going to beat myself for making mistakes because that is all part of the learning process. I AM going to recommit to tracking what I eat, going back to regular exercise and hopefully seeing the fruits of those labours on the scales.

Recommitment challenge #1: birthday buns lurking two desks behind mine….