(Belated) Healthy You Challenge check-in, and some thoughts on thoughts

I have spent the last three weeks on a plateau, bobbling around 71kg, never moving more than 400g either side. Fingers crossed I've got going again, as I weighed in at 70kg on Wednesday morning. I was very excited as that means I've reached my first mini goal! Next stop 65kg, I hope. Here are my stats

All time heaviest: 95kg
2002 WeightWatchers start weight: 90kg
Weight on 2nd January 2010: 77.9kg
Lost in 2010: 7.9kg (or 17lb)

I don't have a specific goal in mind. 65kg would be around the lightest I've ever been, but would only be just inside the 'healthy' BMI range for my height. (I am sceptical about BMI, but that's another post). I am also trying to get fit, and am trying to focus more on size than weight. Which brings me onto the other topic in the title: the mental aspects of weightloss. MargieAnne commented on my last post, and exhorted me to ensure that I learn to handle stress, and make the decision not just to lose weight, but to be that weight for the rest of my life.

It's early days yet - it's not been two months - but I do feel that this time I am in a better place mentally than I have been for previous weight-loss attempts. Moving in with the Boy has reduced the living-out-of-a-suitcase aspect of my life massively, removing a substantial cause of stress. I have time and space to think about and plan my food choices, and I have ample space to prepare them (if not always enough time...). But I think the biggest change is that I have tried to address not just the fact that I overeat, but why I do it. There are two major influences for this: the Beck Diet Solution book (as harped on about in a previous post) and the vast range of healthy eating blogs I have taken to reading.  I won't say I have dealt with my stress eating, but I have become aware of it. And I'm getting there: I've had a frankly terrible day at work, and came home craving biscuits and cheese and granola and all the other wondrous things in the cupboard. Instead, I've read some blogs, and written this post.

It's a long road, but I'll get there.

Healthy You Challenge

I'm excited to have signed up for Scale Junkie's Healthy You Challenge. I hope it will increase accountability and encourage me to keep blogging.

I have also signed up for SparkPeople - not sure how much of its functionality I'll use day-to-day, as I'm already using Food Focus to track my food, but I'm enjoying exploring the huge mine of resources. (And scavenging for SparkPoints!)

Foods

Soup. Soup is definitely my friend.

Soup can be stunningly low in calories for its volume - what else could make a decent-size lunch for 87 calories?

Even when it's not super low-cal, it's still surprisingly healthy for its fillingness. A three- or four-hundred-calorie bowl of lentil and bacon keeps me going for a very long time.

So that's why I'm the Shrinking Soup Dragon.

Books

At the beginning of the year I went through an orgy of requesting diet books from the library. I have a bit of a thing about reading different diet books, absorbing tiny bits and pieces from each while discarding the stuff which I deem (rightly or wrongly) to be stupid. One of them, recommended on DietGirl's Amazon page, was The Beck Diet Solution. It has been a revelation to me. It isn't a diet book in the sense that it tells you what to eat (although the author has produced a subsequent book which does have a diet plan). Instead it focuses on how you think, and employs cognitive behavioural therapy techniques to help you manage your thoughts and behaviours to aid weight loss. I've had great results from CBT before, in other areas of my life; I appreciate that it doesn't work for everybody. But for those who are open to it, I thoroughly recommend a read through this book.

None of the other books I've read has made such an impression, although Anne Diamond's A New You was pretty good, I thought.

About my diet

I have little-to-no tolerance for fad diets - the mathematical part of me distrusts anything that claims to subvert the calories-in-vs-calories-out equation.

I initially turned to WeightWatchers as a close friend had had good results from it and it was the only mainstream diet that was compatible with my extreme pickiness, as it doesn't forbid any foods. Unfortunately, since I was following the At Home programme there was no Leader to dissuade me from using 12 of my 20 points a day on a big bar of chocolate, or 16 on caipirinhas, and from time to time that's what I did. There is no denying, though, that the programme taught me a lot about what was the right amount to eat, and crucially it showed me that I could lose weight if I wanted to.

I could not go back to WW now, however. Recently I've tried counting calories, but found I struggled to lose tiny amounts of weight, which I then put back on ridiculously easily.  I tried going to my GP, who tested my thyroid function (normal) and then told me to stop moaning as I wasn't as fat as a lot of people. (Paraphrasing, but barely!)

Currently (for the last 4 weeks) I am following the Johnson UpDayDownDay diet, which is a modified form of alternate day fasting, or ADF. I first came across the concept in an article in the Sunday Times just before Christmas. I know that it's controversial, and that it looks extremely faddy, so let me set out my reasoning:

1. Assuming you still believe in calories-in-calories-out, to lose weight you need to create a calorie deficit. A weight loss of 1lb a week requires a deficit of 3500kcal, or 500kcal per day
2. I burn around 1800kcal a day, so to lose 1lb a week I need to eat 1200-1300kcal per day.
3. I have tried this. Extensively. I can't do it, psychologically speaking. I find the idea of eating very little for months extremely depressing, and I give up.
4. ADF requires you to eat very little (or nothing) on alternate days, and eat ‘what you like’ on the others.
5. I looked at the description, and thought “I could do that!” And it seems that mostly I can. If I think “ARGH, I’m so hungry, I want cake!” I no longer fall into a tragic gloom about not being able to eat cake ever again (or at least for six months which feels like forever). Instead I think “I can have cake tomorrow.”
6. As a result I am far less likely to think “F*** this!”, eat the cake, go massively over my calories for the day, feel miserable, gain weight, feel even more miserable.
7. Result!

And now, the numerical bit. Assuming that I need 1,800 calories a day, eating 500 for 3 days in 7 will create a calorie deficit of 3,900kcal per week, which should equate to just over a pound of weight loss. So even if you don’t believe the stuff about ADF ‘switching on’ genes that somehow magically cause weightloss, you can see that losing a sensible amount of weight per week is theoretically possible.

I have made a couple of modifications, however:

• I don’t eat whatever I want on the up days: I stick to 1,800 calories. I know from experience that I am perfectly capable of eating 3,000kcal in a day, which would undo any good from the frugal days!

• The plan suggested that for the first 2 weeks you only have diet shakes on the down days. I decided that this would be expensive and awkward, and lead to mockery from my colleagues. So I stuck to normal food, primarily soup. (More on soup later...)

It’s been going reasonably well: I lost 1.9kg in the first week (which the Boy kindly pointed out was a mathematical impossibility), and until this week had been losing another 1kg per week. I maintained this week. I’m trying not to let this get to me.

Anyway, this post has got a bit huge. In the next one I’ll talk about psychological factors and the book that’s been helping me massively this time around.

About me

I'm in my twenties, I work in finance, and I live with my lovely boyfriend.

I was a skinny child, but started to expand when I hit puberty, and by the time I went to university I weighed around 15 stone (210lb, or a bit over 95kg) - I don't know exactly, as I avoided scales assiduously. Uniquely among students of my acquaintance I actually lost weight in the first year, mainly because I was a vegetarian and the college's vegetarian options were mostly inedible.

My real "WTF?" moment came in my second year, however, with the discovery that one of my friends, a six-foot plus backrow forward for the college rugby team, whom we affectionately called Fat Boy (Kids can be so cruel. (We can? Thanks mom!)), actually weighed half a stone less than I did. I'm five foot three. Somehow that was the final straw and the kick up the arse I needed to actually do something about my weight. I joined WeightWatchers, and by the time I left university I'd lost about 3 and a half stone (around 50lb) and weighed about 10 and a half stone.

But then I moved back home while I looked for work. None was forthcoming, and because I hadn't really addressed the issues that had made me fat in the first place the weight crept back on. By the time I finally did find a proper job, 18 months later, I weighed nearly 13 stone. I had kept going to WeightWatchers, but like so many I had slipped back into my old ways. My weight fluctuated for the next couple of years, but the classic young-professional-in-London lifestyle (too much takeaway, drinking five or six nights a week) meant that it never dropped below 11 stone, even after I joined a gym.

I left London for a provincial city in the autumn of 2007, and a more settled, stable lifestyle initially helped me to lose weight again. But my new (and still current) job is highly seasonal, and when it's stressful, it's very, very stressful and very time consuming. It also involves a lot of time away from home, staying in hotels and eating in restaurants, and at first I just didn't have the mental skills to deal with that without putting on a pile of weight. Which is what happened. I rejoined a gym in September 2008, determined to take things in hand, and that is what I was doing until very recently. I'd managed, through exercise and reasonably healthy eating, to get my weight to start with a 10 not an 11, something I hadn't seen since a bout of non-eating induced by the most stressful four weeks of my entire life. But between the beginning of October 2009 and the end of the year, three things happened:

• I revised for and sat my accountancy finals, requiring long bouts of sitting still, enormous amounts of stress, and 'question practice and custard creams' actually having to take priority over 'going to the gym'.
• I moved in with my boyfriend - while this is one of the best things I've ever done, it nevertheless involved substantial upheaval.
• Christmas. Well, we all know about Christmas. And my family, bless them, love you with food.

So when I got on the scales after New Year, they said 78kg. (I changed them into kilograms a few months ago on the basis that they were less emotive than stones and pounds. Sometimes this works.) This was not good. For the nth year in a row I was heavier than I'd been a year ago.

So I determined to actually do something about this, once and for all. The next post will tell you what I'm doing, and how I'm getting on so far.

Welcome to my blog

Hello readers! I have decided to start this to help me on my weightloss journey, inspired by the huge variety of fantastic weightloss bloggers out there. In the next couple of posts I'll introduce myself and tell you a bit about my diet and my story.