Breaking Free

plans temporarily on hold...

Even with all my plans set for healthier eating, higher-protein, lower-carbohydrate, and exercise slots written in to my diary......   sometimes plans just don't work out. Having damaged some muscles and joints in an accident 2 weeks ago, exercise has been off the agenda.  For the first time that I can recall, I've actually missed doing exercise and wanted to do some !  Not sure if this is the start of a new attitude in me, or just some of the usual "grass is always greener" perspective.  However I'm encouraged by this - even while at the same time being discouraged that I of course haven't lost any weight during this time (as I've been effectively immobile).

So even if plans have come to a slight halt..  I'm still absolutely determined to lose this weight, and I always knew it was going to be a long, slow process.

eating and celebration

For every celebration on the calendar, food (and often also drink, e.g. alcohol) is linked right in there.  Christmas lunch..... Easter chocolate eggs...... birthday cake......champagne and wedding cake......having a restaurant meal out when you first get it together as a new couple. You get the idea.  Eating is a profound form of celebration, in any culture that I know about.

Therefore some of the difficulty with "diets" is that I'm effectively saying to myself- No ! you don't deserve any celebration, you can't take part in our culture, you have no place in fun and pleasure.

Where we seem to be getting it slightly wrong these days is that every day has elements of food or drink in it which would, once, have been for celebrations only.  Therefore our expectations, and our calorie intake, increase.  The original idea of midwinter / Christmas celebrations, and Easter/ Ostara feasts, was to eat and drink a LOT - to make up for several weeks when people were on a naturally restricted diet due to eating seasonally grown food.  Now we have "celebration" food available to us every day, all year round.

I've been thinking about celebration following a family party last weekend in which (guess what) I ate more than usual, and drank a lot more wine than usual.  Do I regret this ? Hell no.  But what are my ways in which I can celebrate, praise, rejoice, have a good time - which are NON-food related ?  This is part of my quest to break free from other people's or society's expectations of how I should control my food and drink intake.

measuring up..

One of the things I've really struggled with in the past is the concept of having to weigh every item I might eat, or else to measure its volume, or else to look up how many "carb units" it contains, or else to write down its calorie content and deduct that from my total.......   this just seems WRONG to me. 

Now it may well be that part of the reason I got fat in the first place was a breezy indifference to carbs, weights and precise calculations of food's calorific value.  Certainly I am trying to be well informed at present about what I eat - and am trying to make the best choices available to me.

However the obsessional focus on counting, measuring (and maybe also entering the details into a website which calculates your intake) just doesn't do it for me. I have tried these methods, for a few weeks each, and I felt constrained and panicky.  How much did that cheese roll weigh ?  If I had a coffee but someone bumped into me and I spilled half of it, how many ounces of milk were left in the coffee cup?   Surely this is not the point of food.

Therefore I'm breaking free from obsessional measuring, calculating and worrying.  I'm going to eat what I believe is a healthy option, and I'm going to buy food based on good choices for me.

I already have a list of criteria which, for me, are important when choosing food : some of these are -

1. vegetarian
2. good protein source
3. locally grown or low food miles
4. organic
5. sourced from a small shop, local people or a co-operative as opposed to a supermarket
6. free-range if eggs are involved
7. seasonally grown
8. a reasonable variety or change, e.g. if I had apples last week, I'd like pears today.
9. avoiding artificial colouring, flavouring, sweetening, etc etc
10. no doubt there are more but this is enough for now......

day 1 - the manifesto

So this is it.  Day 1 on my first-ever blog.  Inspired somewhat by the fabulous Pasta Queen blog which I've been reading for a while now, I felt it's time to make my own efforts.

So how fat am I ?  See the About page for ongoing details. I'll be hoping to update that fairly regularly.  Let's just say, fat enough that it bothers me. Really bothers me.  Not just "oh she's a little plump" but quite a lot more.

And why do I want to lose weight ? Well for one thing I'm never going to aspire to be particularly fashionable or stick-thin.  A size 14 would be wonderful.  So I'm not doing this for purely cosmetic reasons (though I would have to say, there's a whole load of nicer clothes available for people less than a size 16..  obviously above that size there is an assumption by clothes retailers that you lost your brain cells with the increase in your fat cells, consequently all the clothes are nasty. With a frill down the front if you're lucky).

I'm doing this because there's a whole load of misery and unhappiness to do with compulsive over-eating and eating for the suppression of emotions, which I want to be able to process and then let go of.  If I'm upset, then I'll let myself BE upset - rather than eating a packet of Jaffa Cakes and then feeling even more upset with myself.

I'm doing this because I want to feel happy with my body and the way it looks.

I'm doing this because I don't want to waste any more of my thoughts and energy on negative self-blaming comments in my head.  It's just food - so I want to remove the emotional link that's been there in the past.

So my plan is very simple - to exercise more, and to eat better quality food, ideally higher in protein and lower in carbohydrate.  As I'm a vegetarian, this does mean I have to think fairly hard at present about what I can eat.  However I'll be adding some new options to my cooking as I've just acquired Rose Elliot's book :   The Vegetarian Low-Carb Cookbook.

This is going to take some time - perhaps 24 weeks if I stay on target, in practice perhaps 6 - 8 months as no doubt there'll be times when life gets in the way of healthy eating and exercising.  My challenge to myself (using this blog to spur me on) is to make sure I stick with it.