It's been a challenging week, with the kids on half term but having to work all the way through. Thankfully I am supported by amazing family and childcarers. I had a lovely day today with a good friend, taking the children out for lunch and to the Lego movie. The day started particularly well as I weighed myself following yesterday's fast. Finally, finally, I lost that last pound, and an extra one for good measure. I'm now past that 2 stone hurdle and less than a pound away from the next whole stone marker. This makes me feel awesome. After the struggles of the last few weeks I had been wondering if I was going to have to change my approach but I'm now re-committed to sticking with the program. An additional reason to celebrate is that I exchanged contracts on a new house yesterday. I'm hugely excited about moving out of my rental into my own home. It's going to be a busy few months and I'm looking forward to every minute.
First of all, thank-you to everyone who commented on my last post via Facebook, and in fact all my blitherings on over the last six months. Your support is greatly appreciated. One of the lovely ladies in the Facebook group I belong to recently posted a link about how visualisation can help with weight loss (among other things). This can be a hugely powerful technique and is used by successful people in all types of activities.
http://caloriecount.about.com/visualize-weight-loss-success-b325293 We all visualise, constantly. Mostly we are not aware of it. But we have perceptions and mental images that we use to interpret the world around us and our place in it. Having lived through long bouts of depression throughout my life, I know that our minds can act very simplistically in their reactions to events and images around us. It doesn't distinguish between reality and strongly imagined events. One of the causes of depression is the mind constantly imagining negative and untrue outcomes. The treatment of depression often involves using actions and deliberate thought patterns to persuade the brain out of the poor habits that exacerbate the underlying chemical conditions that cause the illness. I know that I have a pretty poor mental image of my body. I do wonder whether this is part of the reason my progress has slowed down recently. There is a phenomenon in the financial markets called resistance or technical trading levels. It happens when a share value approaches a certain level but doesn't break through it. This can happen near a round number in value. For example a stock will trade up from $8 to $9, creeping up towards $10, but when it gets to $9.95 it gets stuck and the price may fall again. Even though investors feel that stock is worth more, the fact that it is getting near a round number prevents them buying. I feel like I'm mentally stuck at a technical limit just below a 2 stone weight loss. I've been so close for so long but just can't seem to get to it. I find it very difficult to imagine losing more weight. I particularly just can't get my head around the idea that I might one day not be overweight. I know I need to get past that if I'm going to get any further but it just seems completely incomprehensible. In the mean time I'll just keep plodding on and hope that I am pleasantly surprised, much as I have been up to this point.
Why is it so much harder to appreciate your own successes than to dwell on perceived failure? I've lost 27 pounds since last August which is a great achievement for me. Up until Christmas this was a rate of over a pound a week. However it's taken over 6 weeks to drop the last 2 of those, and I'm still a pound off the elusive 2 stone mark. Uncharacteristically, this has made me feel it's all a bit pointless and I've been hitting the biscuits. There is no chance of me stopping doing the fasts, but I do wonder if I need to revise my expectations a bit. It's all been going so well I had hoped (assumed?) that it would carry on at much the same rate. I think I may need to accept that as long as it's not going back on, any further losses will be a bonus rather than to be expected. I know that I could change this by more closely monitoring and restricting what I eat (and drink) on non-fast days. Many of the other people I have met who follow this plan and stick carefully to their TDDE (http://thefastdiet.co.uk/how-many-calories-on-a-non-fast-day/) on non-fast days have much more consistent results. But I really don't want to do it. To me that smacks of diets and control and is the road to obsession and misery. I think I eat pretty sensibly on non-fast days. My portion control and snacking habits have completely changed in the last 6 months and I'm happy with my approach to food. The reality is, I need to balance how I want to eat with what I can expect as far as my weight is concerned. The biscuits are a temporary aberration. I remind myself that I've done pretty well so far and whatever happens from here on, I can be proud of the success I have had. I would really, really like to just lose that one more pound though...
Hello strangers. I seem to have fallen out of the habit of writing here, although thankfully not out of the habit of fasting. It's very nearly six months since my first fast day - 6 August 2013. I will be doing my 53rd fast on 6 February and will do a full weigh-in/measure/photos the day after. January has been a very busy month. There wasn't much time to recover after the madness of Christmas before we got into two important family birthdays and a week off work, all of which disrupted the normal routine. I did weigh myself last week, four weeks after the pre-Christmas weigh in, and had lost a single pound. I suspect that despite my best fasting efforts over Christmas I probably put some weight back on, so may have spent the early part of January dropping that off again. Anyway, this puts me just 2 pounds away from a full 2 stone loss since I started, so I am crossing my fingers and being mindful on my non-fast days in the hope that I can hit that target this week. I've decided that going forward I am going to weigh myself every 2 weeks rather than once a month, so I can keep better track of what is and isn't working. I appear to have reached the stage where people have started commenting on my weight loss. In the last week, three different people have mentioned it, and it gives me a boost every time. I definitely feel different. I tried to find something that weighs 2 stone the other day, and ended up with a pile of 5 house bricks. I struggled to lift them all together. Given that I am not carrying that around with me every day anymore, it's not surprising that I feel better. I also feel more confident about how I look. I caught sight of myself in the ladies room mirror at work the other week. I was wearing a dress I bought a back in September (http://darklingplainfast.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/day-nine-when-does-it-become-habit.html) which I was delighted to slip in to as its a size 18. I'm generally an expert at being in rooms with full length mirrors and not looking at them at all. However this time, rather than quickly glancing away, I stopped and had a good look. I'm not going to say that I was delighted with the image in the mirror, but at least I wasn't horrified. The dress hangs very differently to when I bought it, and I suspect I won't be able to wear it for much longer. Thankfully Dream is shrinking out of her dresses too so I am slowly stealing them from her. I have a long way to go. Sitting here typing this, I occasionally glance down at my belly, bulging out over the top of my jeans, a constant reminder of the work still to be done. But for once in my life, I'm confident I can do it.
