Temptation

14st 4lbs (v.g.), calories 450 (slightly repetitive there), Cravings denied 1,000 (v.g.), Cravings given into 0 (excellent!), Books read Moved on to Bridget Jones 2 now

Don't worry people, you can stop crying hysterically, I'm not dead! Nor have I fallen off the dieting bandwagon! I just went out and got me a life for a couple of days and I'm afraid to say blogging took a bit of a backseat for a while.

But don't worry, that madness has passed and I shall probably not do anything vaguely interesting for the next few weeks and will be able to write every day about the sheer mundaneness of life. Guess that's one of the problems with blogging - if I led a more interesting life worth talking about in great detail then I wouldn't have time to write about it. Bet Edmund Hillary doesn't keep a blog.

The last few days, I've had friends round, and I've been out with friends just like most crazy, 'mad fer it' 24 year olds. What struck me the most is how much of life revolves around food.

Most social activities include some sort of accompanying food. We went to see Bond (bloody awful) it was popcorn and ice cream. We went bowling, it was hotdogs. We went shopping, and 'popped in for a coffee and maybe just a little slice of cake.' We had a girls night in with a dvd, and of course, pizza was ordered. We played poker, and it was crisps and nibbles.

Now I wasn't hungry for most of this, and, like Howard's Way promised, by now I'm really not craving food in the same way as before. But it's very hard to break the habit of eating food that's in front of you - it's almost an unconscious thing.

These were great friends I was hanging out with, and not people who were deliberately putting temptation before me, but I couldn't help noticing just how much I must've eaten before!! When I used to 'record' the food I ate each day, I never would've thought to include the obscene amounts of 'nibbles' I ate, or little snacks used to 'keep me going' when shopping, or the bars of chocolate used to 'pick me up' when I was a bit down. Guess I'm finally learning what I actually need to survive, and what is excess!

These past few days would've been really hard for me, what with all the food under my nose the whole time. Of course my amazing friends offered to not get all of the junk food in, and of course I said that they should and it wouldn't be a problem, but it sure wasn't easy to keep having to stop myself as I leant forwards to grab some popcorn. Think I looked like I'd developed a twitch actually.

But I got through it, I live to diet another day! And at 14stone 4, I've seen enough results to keep me well and truly on the straight and narrow!

Me and the mastiff

Read a great post today from another guy on a liquid diet. He'd just passed the 250lbs mark, and was feeling justifiably proud of himself, and he chose to put this photo on his blog:

Why? Because the average black bear weighs 250kg apparently! So it got me thinking that I could rate my weekly success by which animal I weighed the same as (to be honest, much as I'm LOVING doing my little Excel graph which documents my weightloss (this is of course slightly unreliable now after the 'wrongly callibrated scales' debacle, which has RUINED my beautiful downwards curve!), and I thought that a beautiful chart which had a photo of a different animal each week would be something else that I could waste time on. (I lie, beautifully colour coded graphs are never a waste of time, just so long as the line goes downwards!)

Anyway, turns out it's harder than I expected to find out the average weight of animals. I google-d it, I wikipedia-ed it, I even encycolpedia-ed it, and all I got was a bunch of nutters worried that their poodle might be pregnant. But during my highly unsuccessful attempt to visualise my journey from hippo to ...hamster (alliteration won out over making sense there I'm afraid) I did find out some fascinating facts to share with you.

• An average African elephant will eat AT LEAST my weight everyday in food, and drink 113litres of water (I'm struggling to get through my required 4!)
• A mastiff (biiiiiig type of dog) averages 170-220 lbs. (That's the closest I could get to an animal that weighs the same as me.)
• Americans stop eating when they're full, whereas Europeans stop eating when they're no longer hungry. Big difference if you ask me, and it's the main thing I'm going to put in to practise when I'm back on regular food.

I went to the gym yesterday. Normally, when I was on diets before, I went first thing in the morning before anyone got there so that I could exercise without anyone worrying about the structural damage to the building. And although I've not lost a really noticeable amount yet, although I'm still obese, I didn't feel the need to hide today. I felt like people were staring at me, but somehow those glances and little smirks didn't seem the same today, they seemed positive, encouraging almost. I don't know if that's a difference in perception, or a difference in confidence, but I really noticed it today and I did the longest workout I've ever done because of it.

Maybe people just suddenly woke up nicer! Guess we'll wait to see the girls at work on Monday to find out how long it lasts!!!

yet another constipation based posting

Now I'm not normally the sort of person who rates their days based on the number of times they've managed to poo, but if I were, then today would have been a good day.

Three whole poos! I thought the constipation had gone a couple of days ago, but I was still having a few problems in that department, so my locum lady suggested a stronger laxative. And it worked wonders! Feeling more sprightly as a result - which is funny, because it wasn't like there was a lot there, but I feel much lighter now it's come out.

Bad news today. Turns out my scales are calibrated slightly wrongly, and have been giving me readings that were about 2lbs under what I actually am. I go to the gym or Tescos to get officially weighed once a week, so I've been thinking that on those days I just happen to be randomly putting on weight and the day after I'm doing well (yes, it did take me a whole 2 weeks to notice, please don't laugh!)

Anyway, I thought I was 14'8 when I woke up this morning, turns out I'm really 14'10. It's still good, it's still a stone lost, but there's still a long way to go before I'm going to be prancing around in a bikini.

Sketch show humour

Weight: 14stone 10lbs, alcohol units: 0, calories: 450 (v good), encounters with mean girls: 450 (conservative estimate), styles of writing copied from Bridget Jones: 1

Funniest thing ever happened today. I almost had to look around me to make sure I wasn't in a sketch show because it was so damned ridiculous!

I was talking to some girls at work, and they're both maybe a tad overweight but nothing to write home about. One of them offered me tea, and it's always a bit embarassing turning down tea because no one understands why I'm not allowed things like that (technically I am allowed tea, but no milk in it - yuck!). So I reminded her about the diet, and she apologised and said she was being inconsiderate. Then the other one, straight off, said "I'm getting a McDonalds later, bet you wish you could have one!" At which they both chuckled hysterically.

So I (after counting slowly to 10) said "I know this diet may seem a little extreme to you, but it's really working for me and hopefully in a few months time I"ll be thin."

Then they (and this is the funny part) said "OH. SO YOU'RE SAYING WE'RE FAT ARE YOU!?"

Self absorbed much?

It was only afterwards when I thought how WITTY it would have been to say "oh shove it up your bottoms you big stinky piles of horse manure" or something of that tone, but alas, I was still spluttering away to myself when they linked arms and marched away, noses in the air.

Putting it back on

Since well before I started this diet, I've known that losing the weight is the easy part. The hard part is keeping it off for the rest of your life.

The way I feel at the moment, it's almost impossible to imagine that after 12 weeks of this diet, I'll EVER put myself in a position where I'm overweight, even less dangerously obese, again.
I'm feeling so strong right now, like nothing can stop me achieving this. And I know I've only been on the diet for a 10 days or so, and I know that it's easy in the beginning because the weight comes off so fast, but having been obese for so long, and feeling so wonderful now, I feel like every time I look at that second slice of chocolate cake in the future I'll remember and I'll have that incentive to stop myself.

Because it's all about incentive. I got fat when I was depressed, and I didn't think anyone cared about how I looked. Then, once I was fat, I had no incentive to stop eating, because what did it matter - I was already fat. And that's how I became obese.

I nowhere near where I want to be yet in terms of size or appearance, but the difference in how I feel when I walk in a room now, compared with just a fortnight ago is just breathtaking, and if that carries on, then nothing is ever going to bring me down again.

...except possibly the weather. That's a bit shite.