Wednesday

Breakfast 7:00 1 slice wholemeal toast with plum and cinnamon jam. 1 boiled egg. 2 weetbix, 1/3 C diced peaches , 1C low fat soy milk. Coffee with 40 ml Hilo milk.

Snack 10:30 coffee with milk.

Lunch 12:30 I loved my lunch today!

I took a small slice of wholemeal bread (~ 70 cals), put it under the griller till one side was toasted, then turned it over, and sprinkled the soft side with 15 gm grated parmesan (47 cal) and put it back under the griller till that was melted. Then I topped it with shaved double smoked ham (~ 10 gm 97 % fat free - 10 cal)and thin slices of tomato(~ 8 cal) and put it back under the griller. Then I topped it with thin sliced zucchini (3 cal) and thin sliced mushroom (4 cal) and it wouldn't fit back under the griller any more!! So I took out a bit of the griller to make space and then put my creation back underneath, then I added some grated low fat cheddar (15 gm 42 cal) and sliced black olives (1 tbspn 10 cal) and put it back under the griller. And it tasted divine and massive and was hard to hold onto while I ate it, and dripped over my fingers, and reminded me somehow of fast food except for tasting divine and having less than 200 calories. Also I toasted another slice of bread and scraped it minimally with plum and cinnamon jam. And I had coffee. Oooomama!! I love to eat lunch at home!!

Snack 3:30 4 dates. Coffee with milk.

Dinner 8:00 Ricotta and spinach cannelloni (4 tubes) with tomato, garlic and basil sauce and grilled cheese. Microwaved broccoli and carrots. 1 diet apricot yoghurt. Coffee with milk.

Exercise: 9:00am Walked at Warwick. For one hour, which felt like half an hour, but surely couldn't have hurt me because I mostly walked so slowly. The bush is full of flowers. Lots of orchids. Today I arduously (for my husband, because he was the one I kept calling for directions), followed my husband's directions to find some pink fairies blooming. These are not especially spectacular compared to other things there but they are harder to find. However, when I was a child they were the common orchid near my home, and somehow when I see them again the sight makes me feel deeply calm. The ground near where they were growing took me back too, and instantly made me think of the possibilities for play and cubbies. The day started coolish but it was sunny, so everything was bright and glowing and the sun was heating my back as I walked to the car.

And then my day went back to being a normal mix of the crappy (“we can't process your pay because the computer says you don't have a licence to teach” !!), mind boggling, (which travel insurance? - “please read our terms and conditions for full details of exclusions), disappointing (“so actually what you're saying is that you don't have a specific release date, there are none in the warehouse and you don't know when there will be any of that model in Australia”), scary (when the house insurance and the car insurance renewals arrive on the same day! ), frantic (as in the to do list is growing and everything I get done leads to another addition) clockwatching (not including while I made my lunch of course!) And despite that, still also included the odd very pleasant moment of chat, invitations, kisses, and jokes!! I am still pretty nervous about this trip though!!

5:45 pm. Another walk, in a different part of the bush, at Warwick. A quickie which I forgot to time but I think was 20 minutes.

Feli, your avatar is so pretty!! You have one of the best smiles! And you do look youthful, so I'm not sure what you see when your looking in the mirror. hehehe very pretty!

By the way, what time is it there?? You mentioned your lunch was good today. It's currently 9:58 am here, I'm still drinking my morning coffee. LOL LOL

Your post reads 10:58 pm to me here.

The lines are here, believe me!! I'm still trying to come to grips with my ever changing appearance. It's been so quick! I know my loss is slow now and always was fairly slow compared with some people on here, but to me, I still seem different to ... to I don't know what? I rather feel that I don't know what I look like any more. I really need to get over thinking about it I reckon!!! Thanks anyway!

Thursday

Breakfast 7:00 1 slice wholemeal toast with plum and cinnamon jam. 1 boiled egg. 2 weetbix, 1/3 C diced peaches , 1C low fat soy milk. Coffee with 40 ml Hilo milk.

Lunch 2:00 Toasted sandwich: cheese ham veges much as usual. Carrot. Diet passionfruit yoghurt. Coffee with milk.

Snack 4:00 - 5:30 Pack of Vive crispbread with soy and linseed. (= slice bread). 6 almonds.

7:30 glass white wine.
Dinner 8:30 ~120 gm saddleback snapper fried in EVO oil. Chopped salad veges, french onion dip. 4 dates. Coffee with milk.

Exercise: No.

Now my knee hurts. Walking was not an option. I had physio on it and will do again tomorrow. I'm starting to get fed up about all this. Probably I am just getting too tense and that is making my body get a bit wacky? I'm going to see if I can hunt down the stretching video tape I was using earlier in the year, because I definitely noticed that I was more flexible at about the same time as I started doing it. I was changing other things then too, though, so I'm not sure. But the other things I have either continued, or can't do right now, so I'll just try that. I am a bit bothered about not getting any walk at all. I thought I was getting the hang of making it feel right to always walk. In fact I guess I do have that, because now I feel bad that I couldn't. I can still walk around the house and so on though, even though it felt rather unpleasant occasionally, so maybe I should just keep the walk, but cut the amount right back. It might not help my physical health, but it probably wouldn't hurt it, and it would make me feel better about it.

Oh Feli, I hope your knee gets to feeling better soon. It does seem like you've been doing therapy on it for quite some time and not much relief, maybe you should seek a 2nd therapist and see if that helps. It should be getting better by now. Are you on any anti inflamatory meds?? Does it seem swollen at all?? Just wondering why it could be taking so long to heal, seems a little longer than I would think. My hubby had the same thing, but it healed rather quickly. Hope you feel better soon.
Kim

I hope your knee gets better! what stretch video did you watch?

Hey, I hope that knee gets better soon. I'm still not officially posting, but I wanted to thank you for keeping the light on in my diary.

Hey you girl - your av is great and you look great!!!Im not really doing anything these days - I decided I needed to take a forum break...Im slowly working on posting again and more and gettin my exercise up - sorry abt your knee and that soup for cannon in his diary was so sweet thoughtful and cute!!!Better yet calorie free - lol

Well at first it was my ankle, which is pretty much settled, but now it's the knee! I'm afraid my joints are not in great nick. Looking back, I realize now that they were so bad when I started walking last December that I was incredibly careful, and perhaps that is why I had no setbacks at that time and as I built up to the maximum exercise I was doing which was about April. These days I find I have lost some of the caution and yet there is still some permanent damage to my knee and maybe to other joints, so perhaps that is why I seem to so easily overdo the stress on my joints when I try to extend things a bit right now, despite not doing very much! I am just trying to get myself in sufficient good shape to enjoy the holiday we finally start in 2 weeks, so perhaps putting more effort into getting better quickly than I might have at another time. I take ibuprofen but not consistently because my tummy's a bit sensitive to anti-inflammatories.

Thanks. The knee is better than it was. The physio strapped it today, which seems to be helping too. I was using an old Jane Fonda tape - something about low impact aerobics and stretching.

Thanks and no worries. I hope you're better soonest.

Yes! Calorie free!! I am speed foruming a bit myself these days, though always having some sort of quick look. I hope that job's still going well. It sounds like a great change - but so many hours in a short time!!


Friday

Breakfast 7:00 1 slice wholemeal toast with plum and cinnamon jam. 1 boiled egg. 2 weetbix, 1/3 C diced peaches , 1C low fat soy milk. Coffee with 40 ml Hilo milk.

Lunch 2:00 3 tubes of canneloni leftover from Wednesday. Microwaved carrots and broccoli.. Coffee with milk.
Possibly I also ate some snow peas and a raw carrot, as I haven't brought these back home again with me, though I don't remember eating them and do remember them still being in the classroom at the end of lunchtime. Which I cannot call a “break”, but which did involve lunch.

Snack 3:30 Slice of toast (prob. ~ = ¾ normal slice) with jam. Coffee with milk.

I am drinking quite a few coffees lately. I know some people worry about drinking it. I'm not bothered. I just find it helpful at the moment, and have been making sure it's stuff I really enjoy, and which helps me know when I've finished eating. Also, for some reason this better tasting, stronger coffee I've been having seems to taste better with a lot less milk than I used to use in the other stuff, so I probably haven't increased the calories, despite drinking more. Hot drinks seem to be a cold weather thing for me though. I expect I'll easily change back to water later on. (I hope so!)


Dinner 8:30 A restaurant meal with friends. 1 glass white wine (Evans and Tate 2006 Classic White). Some little things from a share starter antipasto platter (a little marinated feta, cracker size piece of fancy toast, black olives, ½ inch bite fish, artichoke. 2 of something that looked like an olive on a stem, with little white seeds inside and tasted like a caper – juniper berries?edit: turns out it was caper berries) Seafood rissotto. Yummy seafood. I ate all of it – probably 100 – 150 gm. I just ate whatever rice stuck to the seafood and left the rest. A little salad. I looked at the dessert menu and would have ordered something if there was anything that especially appealed to me, but figured nothing there was really worth the calories. Cappucino.

Exercise: Warwick. 15 minutes. It rained a bit. When I got inside my family was all there laughing and asking me how we'd liked the hail! Which they evidently had. Lucky for me, even though I was close to home, I didn't get hailed on!!

I didn't post before that I changed my ticker a smidge. Just down a pound or so. For quite a while it didn't seem to be changing. However, I've been taking a bit more care and I can see it going down again and expect that will continue for the next couple of weeks. I can't believe the trip will be so soon now, after having been booked ages ago and always seeming a long way off! I have got a few more of the preparations out of the way this week so I'm feeling a bit less apprehensive and starting to look forward to it a bit.

Saturday

Breakfast 7:00 1 slice wholemeal toast with plum and cinnamon jam. 2 weetbix, 1/3 C diced peaches , 1C low fat soy milk. Coffee with 40 ml Hilo milk.

Oops, I forgot to buy eggs.

Lunch 1:00 4 Vive crackers with 30 gm low fat hard cheese. 10 almonds. On the hop racing out the door food - but tasted good.

3:00 1 giant strawberry. (At the markets)

4:20 2 tubes of cannelloni leftover from Wednesday. 1 mushroom. A little zucchini. Another giant strawberry. (By then I was a fair way down on my normal food for the day and quite hungry. I think this would have just brought me back to around normal. )

7:00 Coffee with milk.
Dinner 7:30 My husband cooked. 2 pieces grilled lean lamb (~ 140 gm?) with ~ 1 tbspn of a cream and mint sauce, ~ ½ C mashed potato, carrots, broccoli. 1 banana. 1 tub diet apricot yoghurt. Pretend cappuccino made from a packet (low cal ~ 40 - but not worth bothering with again.)

Exercise: No. I walked a loooong way in the shopping centres and markets today and though I don't count it as exercise I'm not sure my dodgy joints can tell the difference.

I lost another half a kilo. I'm at 71.5 kg So for this week now that's a total of a kilo, or 2.2 lb. After so long with not much loss, I'm happy about this. I do think the difference is due to eating more carefully, though I'm not sure if I could show that in calories, even if I was inclined to try. I noticed usually feeling full and occasionally feeling overful when I wasn't losing, and often feeling a bit hungry this last week. That fits my past pattern for losing, or not.

This week the younger slimmer, more weight conscious of my friends said they thought I didn't need to lose any more weight, which I was a bit surprised about. From my point of view, I do, because for the sake of my health, I want less fat on my body. Maybe the scales I've been using as my standard all this year weigh a bit heavy, maybe I look fairly normal now, but I can still grab handfuls of fat on my tummy, and I still need to suck it in to get a smooth look in tight clothes. I think those comments say more about what is acceptable in our society than about what is healthy for me personally. Oh well, I appreciate their constant pleasure in what I've lost so far anyway.

I had fun at the shops. I found an actual pretty dress I thought looked nice on me and wanted to buy. It has been years and years since that happened. Also I wanted a new warm cap, and all the hats I tried on looked cute on me, which is what I recall from long ago, too. It was rather puzzling to me somewhere along the line to find that I was never happy with how my hats looked any more. This is better. Finding suitable bathers was a bit trickier - I bought another skin tight top - but no swimsuit. It wasn't as demoralizing as the last time I tried to buy one back in January though.

I also made yet more progress with my preparations for the trip, and beat back the exponentially growing to-do-list a bit. One way and another I'm a lot more relaxed and comfortable than I've been for a while now, and finally starting to look forward, a bit, to this trip, which so far has just felt like an enormous project with both a deadline and budget that I wasn't sure I would manage!!

Yes it's interesting how when you get to a certain point of weight loss, people want you to stop. I keep having people call me "skinny" which is a complete joke. I'm not that much into clothes, but I can appreciate the feeling that comes with being able to fit into stuff you thought was out of your league for good.

Oye !! you lost a 'key' !! Nicely done Kerry A Getting that final drive for Kiwiland, eh ??

hehe, Tom dislodged a story (IE: losing too much and the like) that happened at the Truck Show yesterday about my 'cancer'. I'll tell ya about it later.

That's awesome news on the loss. I hope it continues for a good long stretch

This is what happens. I don't exactly know why. Maybe they are just trying to say that our current look is acceptable? Or that we have enough wrinkles now!! That is very much what I meant. My interest in clothes is spasmodic. However, I am still blown away by the thought that I am ABLE to buy things again!!


I hope so! I know that in my normal life, being able to control what I eat starts with being able to control how I buy food, and knowing how to get what I want. I can't that amount of control while I'm travelling!! But I don't want my holiday dominated by thoughts of how to make it like my non-holiday time! And I definitely want it to include some indulgence. At one stage I figured anything extra I ate would be balanced by extra exercise, but I'm feeling more cautious about that after my last few weeks of joint issues.

So I'm accepting that the holiday might make a blip in my weight loss graph. Maybe that will be a good thing if I'm able to do well enough in the time before and after that. I need to feel like things are still moving for me now anyway, because I just do feel better that way. I don't weigh the right amount to be healthy yet. However, when I am losing, I feel more healthy than I have recently while I was stable at this obese weight.

Just looking back at what I've said here is interesting to me partly in that it is so different to my time 12 months ago. I went on holiday with my family then too. Just for a week and not that far away. However, there were quite a few weight differences. At that time, I had been trying to change my eating yet again. I was trying to eat plenty of protein and vegetables and avoiding most but not all carbs. I had been losing for a couple of weeks and weighed about 92 kg. My plan before the holiday was to just keep that going, and avoid all indulgence - because my experience was that any time I broke away from eating very strictly I totally crashed and lost control. I didn't even last out the first day. By the second day I had decided I had no hope of eating as I'd planned so I totally went back to eating badly with maximum indulgence. I regained weight during the week away and once I got home I didn't know how to start again because the evil twin was in control.

I want to be aware that this time, these things are different: I have been eating well for nearly 10 months, I eat balanced meals, I don't expect to be able to eat as well as normal while I'm on holiday, and I do have back up food plans for the times when I can't get what I'd normally have and don't want to eat crappy traveler's food. I am planning some indulgence and I have some practice in eating off plan then reverting to it. I am not going to let the evil twin take over either. Most importantly, I think that I have a heap of entrenched good habits associated with my life here and I expect they will clip back on fairly automatically once I get back.

Well they're my advance thoughts anyway!! I think it's worth my while to be aware of what I have going for me. Whatever happens I will be back here and back to losing weight afterwards.

Hi Cannon! Well I hope it continues for the next 2 weeks at least!!