Week 4: De ja vu all over again...

Disclaimer: Not my feet

It's under 3 weeks until the baby turns one. Under three weeks! I'm not sure how I feel about this yet so we'll park that thought and focus on the problem at hand. Baby weight.

I didn't think I had put on that much weight while pregnant. I don't think anyone really thinks they've put on weight though - it's easy to convince yourself that 'it's all baby' until the day you walk out of the hospital with the baby in a car seat and you still squeezed into your maternity jeans, your gorgeous firm belly now a deflated, squishy mess somehow almost the same size as the day you waddled into hospital. This was a surprise to me. In the back of my mind I was prepared not to immediately spring back into pre-baby shape and size 14 jeans but to still look pregnant was a shock.

Never mind, nine months up, nine months down I told myself. Well, it's over nine months now and although I don't look pregnant any longer I'm a size up from where I'd like to be and still have a squishy belly.

We're having a little birthday party for him on the weekend after his birthday with friends and family and although I'm looking forward to it I am all too aware this momentous occasion will mean photographs. Candid shots, posed shots, shots of my butt as I bend over to pick him up. Shudder. Now I understand that at best I will be able to lose 4 or 5lbs between now and then but if that 4 or 5 lbs is no longer tightly adhered to my chin(s) I will be happy.

So the resolution this week (and until the party) is no sugar (yes, again!), only one serving of wheat a day and to drink 3 litres of water a day. If I can't look slim I will at least look glowing! And if I don't look slim or glowing no-one will notice as I will spend most of the day in the loo.

Watering plants and other minor things: Update

This week has been a resounding success. I have chucked something out every night this week, have watered all my outdoor plants (indoor plants are looking bit dry but they will have to wait for another week!) and am clenching as I type.

Throwing stuff out has been strangely cathartic. I'm able to look at the masses of stuff we have - this is no exaggeration; we have a barn full of boxes which haven't been unpacked from our house move, ahem, 2 years ago - with fresh eyes. I've only really gone through stuff in the house and even then, it's just been my and the baby's things which have been cleared out but this small start has made me keen to get going through the rest of the junk. I almost feel like just taking every unopened box to the charity shop, clearly we haven't missed any of it! But this is a bit drastic and I think eventually we would wonder where the Tibetan nose flute or Native American dream catchers are. Only joking, the majority of the boxes are full of Haynes manuals to cars we no longer own, ridiculously large serving platters and obscene amounts of Christmas decorations.... All of which I will probably end up keeping... Even if I keep it all though the very act of reminding myself what we actually have will be useful in curbing spending and drawing some of the more useful stuff back into the house.

Watering my plants every night has had twofold benefits; it's got me out of the house when I've been sitting at a desk all day and it gave me the opportunity to critically examine the health and well-being of my plants: not great if I'm honest...  I discovered my honeysuckle has powdery mildew and my courgette plants are being eaten by mice.

Cutting the honeysuckle back hard and spraying with some lethal chemical is apparently the way to go. I've done the cutting back but once I'd hacked off all the affected bits there was only a single stalk left. It looks slightly ridiculous but I'm hoping I've saved it without having to resort to spraying. The worst of the courgette plants I covered with half a milk carton in the hope that this would provide a barrier to mice giving the plant a chance to re-establish itself. Hey, it might work.

I might extend my nightly waterings to the house plants as well. They are just as badly neglected; I do not have particularly green fingers....

For those hoping for a super exciting blog, I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place... pelvic floor exercises, watering plants and de-junking are basically as thrilling as it's going to get...

Rock on!

Week (ahem) Three: Water my Plants and Other Minor Things

Verdant greenery

I buy plants.  I plant plants.  I sit back and admire my handiwork for a few days, then I forget about them or I'm a bit busy and I plan to do it later and the next time I go to the garden I am confronted by a plant graveyard of dry, dead twigs.  So this week, I will water my plants every night!

Because watering plants isn't too taxing I thought I might manage to commit to more than one challenge this week (gasp!).  I know!  I'm really living life on the edge here. 

After my no sugar failure I'm a bit loath to blithely promise something and then fail again - this would be a very dull blog if that were the case -  I'm going to do this!!  Oh, I didnt manage to do it... I'm going to try that!  Oh, it didn't quite work out....  Not very inspiring. And I'm afraid my second challenge isn't a big glittery ball of awesomeness which will have you waiting with baited breath to see if I succeeded or failed but it is something that we women really should do more of: pelvic floor exercises.  Exciting huh?

Without going into too much detail, after having the baby my pelvic floor muscle had taken a bit of a battering and could really do with a bit of toning (as could the rest of me...).  When the baby was born my muscles were utterly knackered, they've improved massively since then but I think with muscles there's always room for improvement!  I'm guessing they were stretched out of shape by the weight of the baby and all the fluid during the last few months of pregnancy and surprise surprise these muscles didn't ping back into shape either. 

Apparently for the best results you need to do this three times a day - the midwife suggested doing it while brushing my teeth but this was too much like patting your head while rubbing your belly and I just don't have the coordination.  Basically, you exercise your pelvic floor by imagining you're stopping a wee mid flow.  Don't grit your teeth, screw up your face or otherwise tense up - this should be a quiet, secret exercise you can do while waiting for the bus or doing the dishes - nobody needs to know what you're up to!  There's more info on the NHS website here.

Now I'm going to push the boat out this week and do one more thing.  I know.  How will she manage it I hear you cry! She must be superhuman! 

Now the final task is a biggie; I'm going to throw out one thing each night this week.  Again, not so exciting but necessary unless I want to wake up one day and have to burrow through a wall of magazines to reach the front door.

So that's it for the week.  Water pants, pelvic floor exercises and chuck out some junk.  Totally doable.  Clench well ladies!

No Sugar: Update

So.  The week of no sugar was a bit of a disaster.  In fact, I would go so far as to say I ate more sugar this week than I have eaten in the last month!  A bit disappointing really as I have given up sugar in the past and had no trouble sticking to it for weeks.

So day one, I was all fired up and hyper vigilant checking and double checking packaging until dinner when I ate quorn sausages but didn't check the packet (I didn't think I needed to!  Big mistake).  Added sugar.  For some reason this little blip knocked me for six and the next day I had a slice of cake in a cafe, the day after I ate a bar of chocolate and the day after that (and I am ashamed to admit this...) I ate an entire packet of biscuits.

I'm even eating a bowl of ice cream as I type this.

Sigh.

This sugar frenzy is coming off the back of not eating any sugar for almost a month prior to the experiment and then slowly falling off the wagon the fortnight or so before. Not eating sugar for the month really emphasised how artificially sweet so much of what we eat is.  I was mechanically munching through chocolates, cake and so on not really enjoying it but unable to stop. Afterwards, sitting in a fug of self loathing, my mouth coated in a film of sugar I'd mentally berate myself for having zero willpower and vow to be better the next time. 

It's frustrating as I know I can do it.  When I was pregnant I read an article that caffeine was bad for the baby so I went cold turkey on caffeine - no tea, no coffee and no chocolate.  Overnight I went from about 8 (massive) mugs of tea in a day and (at least) a bar of chocolate to decaf tea and no sweets at all and beyond the first week of horrendous caffeine withdrawals I found I didn't miss it at all.  In fact I still drink decaf now. 

In short, what I'm saying is I don't think this is down to straight will power alone.  It will take more than this single blog page to explore the ins and outs of my psyche, food dependencies and fat girl habits but I think it's something I need to look deeper into myself.  Off the top of my head I think the following three things have scuppered my no sugar plans:

No-one knows what I'm doing:
I work at home 4 days a week so am alone for a large part of the day.  At the basic level this means there's no-one to challenge me as I wander to the kitchen and come back with my 4th cup of tea before 10am or ask where I'm going as I nip over to the shop.  Offices can wreck havoc on the most determined dieter with endless cakes, chocolates and Friday bacon butties but at least you are accountable as everyone can see what you're doing.  I can hide the wrappers long before my husband comes home from work and no one is any the wiser.

We've both been ill:
The baby has started nursery (or The House of Germs as we have taken to calling it) and we have all had endless colds, viruses and assorted other mystery illnesses none of which are serious enough to warrant time off work and days in bed but slowly wear us down.  Coupled with the broken nights associated with teething I personally feel like I'm in need of a little pick me up once or twice a day.  We're not quite into a decent routine which allows for the preparation of healthy and wholesome snacks and lunches so when the mid morning or mid afternoon slump happens it's easier to reach for junk.

I'm trying to do a hundred other things:
Apparently we have a finite amount of will power and the more you draw upon it, the less there is for the next thing requiring an iron resolve.  There's a lot on my plate at the moment; I've just gone back to work after 9 months of maternity leave and a lot has changed, re-establishing my role in the office is hard especially when I'm only there one day a week.  We're trying to sort out the house and garden ahead of a first birthday barbeque we plan to throw which is taking a lot of time and it's a lot harder to keep on top of housework, washing and meals when we're both technically coming in the door after 5.  There's just not enough will power left in the tank to swear off sugar as well.

This sounds like a massive blog post of excuses (and, well, it is....) but the long and short of it is; giving up sugar is hard!  Planning is key; a well thought out meal and snack plan for the week would have helped as would not having spare change in the house so I couldn't go to the shop.....

I'll chalk this down to poor planning and try again another time.....

Week Two: No Sugar

 (Not so) sweet and innocent...

The evils of sugar seem to be in the press a lot at the moment and I’ve jumped aboard this bandwagon by reading Sweet Poison by David Gillespie.  I’m only half way through (it’s not a quick read although he does try his best to make it accessible), but so far am quite convinced that my being overweight is (at least) partially to do with the amount of sugar I eat.   

There are three main sugars; glucose, fructose and galactose.  In a nutshell it seems that the human body doesn’t ‘recognise’ the calories in fructose.  Fructose is turned into fatty acids which in turn latch tightly to your hips but fructose somehow bypasses the internal consumption control mechanisms which render the calories in fructose largely invisible. This means that if we eat anything with fructose in, such as fruit juice, a significant percentage of calories will be undetected (but not unused) by the body.  

We consume those calories without noticing and then carry on to consume the same again and over the course of a day, depending on how much fructose we eat, can end up eating way more calories than we realise.  An example given in the book talks about a glass of apple juice containing around 34g of fructose, to consume 34g of fructose you would have to eat four large apples.  Now this is possible but you are unlikely to sit down and have a meal after eating four apples but you will if you have drunk the juice.

There is other evidence in the book that fructose contributes to more than just obesity; for example strokes, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and potentially some cancers.  Scary stuff.  For me though it’s my weight which is bothering me.  Since our wedding it has slowly but surely crept on and depressingly I’m now a good three stones heavier than I was when we got married.  Diet and exercise regimes do work for me but I have to be ultra strict and follow them to the letter which works until I get fed up, go crazy and eat a weeks worth of calories in one sitting.   If I do stick it out, as soon as I eat ‘normally’ again the weight piles back on.  Perhaps I’m deluding myself but I don’t actually think I overeat.  I’m prepared to (read - would like to) believe that it’s less down to the volume of food I eat and more due to the type of food I eat.  

Now I didn’t think I actually ate that much sugar.  I don’t take it in tea, I don’t really eat biscuits or cakes (not daily at least) and we don’t buy ready meals or drink fizzy juice but when we started to look at ingredient lists we were astounded at how many products have added sugar with no noticeable difference in taste.  Full fat mayo has added sugar for example, isn’t that unexpected?  Weetabix and bran flakes, cereals I thought were healthy options, are full of sugar.  Bread and flavoured yoghurts are full of sugar as are jars of sauces.  Going no sugar was going to have the unexpected side effect of making up cook meals pretty much from scratch every night.

Reading other short kindle books on the subject it seems that people have physical withdrawal symptoms: headaches, irritability, widely oscillating blood sugar and so on as the body gets used to a more stable energy intake.  I’m bracing myself for a grumpy few days ahead.....

Seven Days of Contact Lenses: The Verdict

Ouch.  Ouch, ouch, ouch.  Actually, only half ouch as my right eye has taken (figuratively speaking) to lenses like a duck to water, the left eye not so much.  After a week of not wearing glasses though I now find I hate them more than ever so am persevering with lenses. 

Back to the optician for a different type of lens, this time it’s the left eye which is fine and the right which is weird, blurry and nippy.  I think we might have cracked it; one super expensive lens for my high maintenance left eye and a bog standard one for the right.  I think.  Another week’s trial and we’ll have the answer!  

Because this is a no will power needed weekly task, I’m going to set myself the challenge of wearing contact lenses while also following another week’s regime.  I know!  We’re going crazy here!

Seven Days of Contact Lenses: Mid-week Update

 Ouch!

So far so painful.  I’ve persevered though and the crazy stinging does die down after five minutes or so and I can open my eyes and feel my way back upstairs.  Part of the problem is that I’ve got a mild astigmatism in one eye which is not bad enough to be corrected but bad enough to make wearing normal contact lenses a complete pain in the backside.  My right eye is perfect.  After the initial irritation I can barely tell I have it in.  The left eye is a completely different story; slightly blurred vision, a constant feeling like there is something in my eye and I touch and rub and poke at my eye a million times a day which is not helping.  I feel like I can’t see properly particularly when I’m working at a computer which unfortunately for me is practically 10 hours of the day.  “Persevere! You’ll get used to it” says my husband.  I am not convinced but am going to keep going at least until my appointment at the optician.  Aren’t I brave?

Seven Days of Contact Lenses

I don’t see myself as a glasses wearer, even though I’ve almost worn glasses longer than I haven’t worn glasses.  At uni I would stumble about half blind, walking past people in the street, most memorably my own gran, because I was too vain to wear specs but too poor to afford contacts.  Even now I hate wearing my glasses and whip them of at the barest sniff of a photograph and stand, blinking myopically in the sunshine trying to pretend I have 20:20 vision.  Stupid really because the only people who are likely to see a picture of me are people who already know I wear glasses....  

I’ve signed up for (another) contact lens trial with Specsavers and this week I am going to wear them every. single. bloody. day.  I don’t care if my eyes shrivel up and drop out of my head!  However, I’ve had the lenses for almost a week already and have only worn them twice one of which was on the way home from the optician so I don’t even know if that really counts.

Helping this week is the fact that I’ve broken my glasses.  I was too cheap to pay for a new decent pair while the optician tried to repair my old ones so I pushed the financial boat out and bought a pair of cheapo glasses for £30.  They weigh a ton, hurt my nose, hurt my ears and need to be pushed up my nose about 200 times a minute.  They are also desperately uncool. They’re not even cool in a hipster, deliberately uncool and retro type of way.  They are just terrible.  

What better reason do I need to try out the lenses?

The start of it all

And roll week one!

I start things, and I don’t finish.  Or I decide to do something, and I don’t start.  Over the years I’ve spent a small fortune on books, materials, courses, equipment, special tables/boxes/clothes for a new, all consuming hobby which lasts, in some cases, only days.  I start diets and fall off the wagon before I’ve reached my goal weight, I start new exercise regimes and might manage to keep it going for a week or two at most before manufacturing a reason to give up (sore knees, a bit of a cold, I don’t have the right shoes....).

It’s not new to me, or probably to anyone, this state of erratic hobbying.  Of flitting from one thing to the next, barely stopping to appreciate what I’m doing never mind actually dedicate time to become proficient at it.   Maybe it’s the internet.  Certainly having so much variety and inspiration available at a click of a mouse doesn’t help but I really don’t think it’s Pinterest or Facebook which are the problems here, the problem is me.  A combination of a short attention span and a misplaced confidence that the basics of whatever hobby I’ve turned to are too simple and I zoom ahead to intermediate level and beyond and then wonder why whatever I produce (if anything) looks crap, seriously I can’t even give my efforts to my own mum!  Which of course disheartens and depresses me so I pack it in and pick up something else.  

Not to make excuses but I’ve also got a ten month old baby and believe me I’m not the sort of super achiever who is up and out of bed at sparrow fart and has run 5k, baked a cake, prepared dinner for the evening, written a chapter of a novel and is sitting calmly drinking a cup of herbal tea and nibbling on a piece of toast made from bread baked that very morning as the rest of the family stumble downstairs.

I want to improve, I want to be slim, I want to have a tidy clean house, great relationships with my family and friends.  I want the whole nine yards.  I just sort of want it to happen immediately and effortlessly without me really having to do much. 

My answer is to take everything I want to change and change it for one week.  One week isn’t hard, I can manage to stick at it for a week and if after the week is up I feel like I could continue and incorporate the small change into my life then so much the better but no pressure on myself to stay rigidly on track for ever.  Short term goals with no long term commitment suit me down to the ground; I don’t have the iron discipline needed to create and maintain good habits in the long term but surely I can keep something going for a week.

All good things start with a list.  I wrote everything I could think of down, not paying any attention of how it was going down, onto paper.  I ended up with a massively long list.  On the list was everything I think I need to change, improve on, do or not do.  I added fun things and not so fun things, easy things and more difficult ones.  Writing everything down helped me take stock, a mini life audit to steal a pretentious turn of phrase.  I’m not going to do them in any particular order and I don’t think I’m going to post the list on here – who really wants to read what is essentially a massive New Year Resolutions list.  Boring! 

What I am going to do though, as a mini motivator, is post my weeks goal at the start of the week and update at some point in the middle of the week and a final summary post at the end of the 7 days.  Accountability is one of the stronger motivators, as soon as you say it out load, write it down or tell a friend you are more motivated to achieve whatever you set out to do.  So here goes.  Week one.....