Day something or other: plateaus and body shape

Some lovely new friends were asking about reading my blog yesterday so I thought I'd better write something...

Last weeks renewed fasting efforts paid off with 2 pounds gone, so I'm back at the magical 2 stone loss mark and hoping that another one will give up the fight this week to get me back to where I was before my break. I'm finding the fasting easy at the moment, the hunger is no problem to deal with. This is despite the chaos of the house move, the continuing back pain and currently a sick child at home off school. Non-fast days are another matter, with some of those pesky snacking habits proving harder to ignore after indulging myself on the break. One day at a time...

A couple of thoughts which have come up over on my Facebook group.

Plateaus

As I've mentioned before, I've generally held a very literal view of how weight loss works: energy in (from food) less energy out (from exercise) equals weight loss or gain. Unfortunately our bodies are rather sneaky, and they adjust the efficiency with which energy is used depending on lots of different interrelated factors. Pretty much anyone who has tried to lose weight has experienced the plateau effect - where the diet that once worked beautifully suddenly grinds to a halt. It's very discouraging and frustrating, as there seems to be no logical reason for it, in my literal view anyway.

The following article explains some of the reasons for it, and the ways to defeat it. Part of the reason relates to the fact that your new smaller body needs less food. Yes, the reward for losing weight is having to eat less. How unfair is that? Solutions include altering the diet pattern to nudge the body into a different reaction, adding more exercise, and just sticking with it until you body gets with the program again.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/07/29/202655878/how-to-escape-the-diet-plateau

BMI, body shape and weight

We all get rather obsessed with the numbers on the dial, and BMI is still a well used yardstick despite its known flaws. So much is dependent on body frame that comparing numbers with other people often produces surprising results, as this article shows. (The ladies in the picture all weigh exactly the same.)

http://fozmeadows.tumblr.com/post/80930076791/female-bodies-a-weighty-issue

I read a while back about a lady doing 5:2 who was exactly the same height as me, and had gone from a UK size 20-22 (again the same as my starting size) to size 12-14. This was great news and she looked marvelous. The part that did my head in was that her starting weight was a full 2 stone lighter than me. Same height, same size, 2 stone difference in weight. 

I recall being told as a child that I have heavy bones. I'm starting to believe it. It also occurred to me that when I got married over 15 years ago, I wore a size 16 dress and distinctly remember weighing around 12 stone at the time. So I could lose another 3 stones and still only drop one dress size (I'm wearing an 18 now).

Ultimately the focus needs to be on good health. My Facebook team are great at reminding me of this. The numbers are simply a way of measuring progress and keeping me on the right track. At least that's what I keep telling myself :)

Day Sixty-three... I think?

I've lost track a bit of the count of fasting days. The past month has been crazy and challenging and I've been focused on survival. Things on my plate have included...

• The busiest and most stressful fortnight of the year at work
• Completing the purchase of my new house
• Arranging for one of the rooms to be re-plastered after all the walls fell off during a redecorating attempt
• Starting packing and moving boxes from one house to the other
• Spraining my back, resulting in so much pain I ended up in A&E at one point, and meaning I can do very little practical physical house moving activity
• Complete stop on all efforts to fix my hip and ankle
• Attempting to switch from cigarettes to an e-cig, not entirely successfully
• Daughter starting Brownies and all the additional childcare arrangements required to get her there on a day I'm at work in London
• Negotiating with my ex over exchanging bits of furniture from my old house

There's probably more, it's felt pretty full on. Not all negative though - I'm writing this sat at my desk in my wonderful new house, I got a great performance review and bonus at work, the lovely boyfriend has laid beautiful new wood floor in two rooms, and my amazing friends and family have been helping me through my back injury every day. 

The garden at the new place isn't exactly overgrown but is somewhat unkempt. There are a few pretty blooms making an appearance this week, so I'm looking forward to what we can achieve here too.

 The upshot is that I stopped fasting for about 2 weeks. It was just too much to cope with and wasn't helping me. Once I realised I would need a break, I set a time limit on it, and last week got straight back into it. I was apprehensive about how hard it would be to restart, particularly given how much I was struggling with the fasts just before I stopped. However it's actually been really easy. Today is the 4th fast of the re-booted campaign and I haven't had any difficulty so far. In fact, I think that taking the break has been beneficial, in that I now have evidence that I can put down and pick up this lifestyle as and when I need to.

I suspect I gained around half a stone in that 2 weeks break. It wasn't just a fasting break, it was also a break from all my new good habits, and involved a lot of cake and wine. I weighed last week and was 3 pounds up on my lowest weight in February, so I am hopeful that I will get back to that and then start losing more fairly quickly. I intend to weigh again tomorrow and see how I'm getting on.

The official move in day is on Saturday, and I have a great team of helpers coming to shift the heavy stuff and keep the kids entertained while we get things done. I'm hoping things will calm down a bit after that. They won't, of course, but I can live in hope.

Everything is awesome!

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.

Day Fifty-six: visualisation

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.

Not quite there...

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...

Day Fifty-two: nearly six months on

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.

Day Forty-five: the towel test

Anyone who is slightly (a lot) larger than average will recognise the towel problem encountered at hotels, spas, gyms (?!) and the like. Any towels provided are generally the smallest possible they can get away with. If you are a stick insect I'm sure they wrap snugly around your sleek form with no problems, but in my case I'm sometimes hard pressed to get the ends to meet at all. 

It's not an issue in a hotel room, although slightly irritating, but at a spa or pool where you want at least a pretence of modesty, it can be embarrassing. If I'm lucky I can just about tuck the ends in around my chest but am left with a glaring expanse of wobbling thigh causing heart failure in those of a delicate disposition. I have been known to take my own super-size dressing gown to spas with me to spare the need for medical intervention.

At home I have dealt with this by buying the most enormous extra-large towels I can find. I have several that cross over properly at the top and comfortably meet around my thighs with a few inches to spare. I noticed however yesterday, that I'm having to wrap the towel further and further under my arms to get it to stay up. My measurements aren't showing a massive inch reduction but the towel shows a noticeable difference in this particular aspect of my shape. I don't think I'm ready to risk using a standard towel in public but it's these unexpected small alterations to everyday activities that are so great to achieve.

In the meantime I am settling back into my normal routine, fasting in the office today with my flask of coffee. Monday was a bit different for me as my kids were home but we kept busy and I only had a momentary pang when I treated them to their last treat of the holiday - fish and chips for supper. It would have been fine if the younger one hadn't left half her food on her plate for me to clear up. I am grateful at least that she knows how to stop eating when she is full. I did, of course, resist despite the delicious aroma of temptation.

My fasts this year are enhanced by the fact that my lovely boyfriend has started 5:2 as well. Being a lanky fellow, he doesn't really need to lose any weight, but is doing it to gain the excellent health benefits and hopefully stave off incipient dementia ;) With any luck he will write another guest blog post to share how he is getting on. He is, of course, a hoopy frood who always knows where his towel is.