Great progress from everyone and well done @bigdecisionstomake , @BigBessie @LBB2020 and @Backinthedress for the various successes with whooshes, exercise and feeling strong and on track, plus to anyone else I’ve missed from the previous page!
I lost a pound this week, which I’m pleased with and hopefully can manage this most weeks, barring the odd plateau which I know I will have from time to time.
I think I’m finally coming to the end of this bug that I’ve been battling with for coming on two weeks, crazy how long it’s lasted. I regressed a bit on Saturday but seem to be a bit better again today, so fingers crossed that sticks.
I’ve been pretty sedentary during that time, other than managing about 13k steps on Friday, so I’m looking forward to being able to move around a lot more this coming week.
Foodwise, I’m enjoying my homemade soups for lunch still, changing up the flavours so it doesn’t get boring. I also love the soda bread recipe that someone posted on a thread on the weight loss chat pages, can’t remember if it was this one or not!
I do all the cooking in our house (for a combination of reasons) so we have got into the habit of having one takeaway or meal out a week, to give me a break and so I don’t get sick of cooking. However, in recent weeks we’ve changed that to getting an easy cook type of meal from Waitrose or similar. It’s a lot better for the pocket but especially for the calorie count! Last night we had beef bourguignon, roasted parsnips and carrots and a pea, leek and bacon dish. All very tasty, easy and came in at under 600 cal. A bit more processed I suppose than it would be if I made it myself, but compared to a takeaway it’s still a better option.
Dry Jan is still going well too, even with a night out on Friday night I managed to stick happily to the diet tonics.
All in all I’m finding I’m managing to keep on track over the weekends at the moment. I track on Nutra Check and have it set for Easier Days on Fridays and Saturdays, but I haven’t actually been using all of those calories so far. That will change I’m sure when I start having a glass or two of wine on weekends after Dry Jan, but the plan is to keep some of the other habits I’ve been putting in place, so that I can make sure my weekends dont derail my weekly progress during the rest of the year. I need to find a way to introduce a bit of alcohol without going back to drinking the amount I was in the second half of last year. I’m conscious this is a bit off a thing for me and I need to crack it in order to make this go at weight loss successful and sustainable. Or by the end of the year I’ll end up back where I started again.
I just posted on another thread about someone’s post that really hit home, when they said how they had actually tracked a ‘treat day’, and one which was a more restrained one than usual, but it was still a lot of calories and they realised how many calories they would have had on a bigger treat day previously, and that it would clearly have undone what they’d achieved during the week. I know I have been very guilty of this, and tended not to track on treat days / social weekends. I need to be firmer with myself and make sure that I always track, so that I don’t pretend to myself (or be genuinely unaware) of how many calories I’m actually consuming on those days. The hope is that having to face what I’m actually eating / drinking will naturally lead me to have less of it!
Long post! TL;DR, I need to always track - and it’s all the more important on the ‘treat’ / ‘different to normal’ days.