My way of life these days

Breakfast: 1/2 cup rolled oats with 80ml lite soy milk and 20 gm protein pdr

Mid Morning: An apple and 12 unsalted almonds

Lunch: Cucumber, tomato, John West smoked salmon (drained), Beetroot, and any salady type stuff with 150gm of home baked bread

Mid arvo: 250g berries, 220 plain yoghurt and 40g protein pdr (I usually just whizz it into a smoothie and have half now and half post dinner)

Dinner: 220gm fish or kangaroo with veggies

I exercise monday to friday and clock up about 10 hours of exercise and a cpl more hours of walking.

I have decided that this is the way I want to eat for the rest of my life and do not like calling it a diet. I avergae upto 1500 calories a day and of these I ensure that fat % is about 15% and no more. The calorieking website is great for this as it works it all out for me. I know that there are days when I will eat rubbish but I am hoping that these days will be no more than once a week. I am also trying not to focus on weight as it does my head in. I know in my head that I feel a lot better than before by doing these things. I will weigh and measure myself once a month and then forget all about it. These days I like myself a little bit more which is a huge thing for me. It is still summer here in Melbourne, Australia and so I hope to get some bike rides in with my husband. Thats the plan for the summer so lets see what happens.

In terms of recipes, hubby and I are experimenting a lot more with food. One salad I absolutely love is the one where we use rocket or arugula leaves, some lettuce and spinach, crumble in some low fat feta cheese, chop finely cucumber, red and green capsicum and thinly slice some radish. In this we finely slice some red chilli which has been soaked in vinegar....this is available from our supermarket and then we also hand crush some capers and mash em into the chilli paste which we run into the chopped salad. Lastly we sprinkle some lemon juice on this salad and sprinkle some cracked pepper. This, we eat with a side of some form of protein such as fish or kangaroo and it is so yummy.

Back again

My weight and my measurements are...
It is the 1st of January 2010 and I am back. This is not going to be one of the new year resolutions where I promise to be healthy for ever and ever. I am here simply because i have had the epiphany that I must be back here for my health and must get back on the horse again!

My stats:
Boobs 125.5 cm
Waist 132.5 cm
Abdomen 131 cm
Thigh 81 cm
Calf 49 cm
Arm 45 cm
Weight 113 or 114 kg by my weighing scales which are usually not trustworthy so I will wait and get to my gym and go with those as those are the digital ones I usually follow.

The Plan: I have taken the rest of the month off from work to focus on getting a good start, eating well, exercising well and being healthy and active. It is becoming more and more important to me to become healthy and seeing that I am approaching the big 40 in the end of March, I want to give myself the chance to becoming as close to healthy as I have ever been. I have had a reasonably unhealthy Xmas where it isnt the typical story of 'its Xmas and of course everyone indulges in excess'. However, I have identified that the moment I smell a whiff of success I immediately indulge in self sabotage. What is annoying is that after finally identifying it, I continued to do it yet again and this time I am determined not to do so again. Hence, like a meditation course, I am devoting a month to myself where I am the focus. I have never done this before in my life and I dont know if i will ever have the opportunity to do so again - after all, I am not a millionaire that can afford to not go to work!! Further details of this one month time off decision will be take the form of another blog.

My Team: consists of my trainer and his wife who is into nutrition and most of all my husband. I have been banned from taking on the role of housewife meanwhile as my gorgeous husband reckons that as this month is all about getting a really good start, the focus must continue to be activity and nutrition as I will be challenged in every way and getting bogged down in becoming the housewife will firstly end up with me spending more time in household chores after gym and also having to deal with more temptations and secondly it will take me away from experimenting with other activities I may not have tried before.Our gameplan is for me to be busy and active to the point where I will sleep well because my body will have earned it, I will have tired it to satisfying levels and hence instead of cooking and ironing whilst Dr Phil and Oprah will wax eloquent, I will be either jogging my brain in a library in between gym and swimming or explore Melbourne cycling along the Yarra trail.

FEARS:I'd be lying if I said there were no fears. I am afraid to fail as I have taken this time out for me and feel a bit selfish. However, having faced my fears with my husband my best friend that he is, I am just trying to toss such thoughts out of my head to give myself the best possible chance ever! So lets declare the challenge open..... :)

Hungerpangs
Temptations
Pressure

GOAL for the month: To be true to myself and to be the best that I can be

I think I stuffed up !@#$%^&*( - BIGTIME

I have stuffed up today...Bigtime.....I had not one but almost 2 whole family bars of cadbury creme brulee chocolates.

I am still reeling from the whys of why I did it? What made me reach for it? Am I really serious about this weightloss journey? and also it makes me think of fri and sat which is when I am meeting friends for dinner at a restaurant and at our place. Life afterall stops for noone and I am not about to close myself in my house and cease any form of social life to lose weight. I will have to lose this weight and this means giving more thought to how I live my life and how I plan to incorporate food around my new life.

The decisions I have made after today are - No more chocolate until I can manage it or for a minimum of one month at the very least. I find that chocolate manages me instead of the other way around and so I will need to cease socialising with creme brulee in a romantic date for 2!!

The bottom line is that I want to lose weight and this means that I will need to have habits of healthy people and although there is a very slight margin of error it certainly does not mean that I can make these errors willy nilly.

I am still trying to understand why I had it? I know it was not hunger or even a craving. I think I can put it down to feeling like the goal was too far away, feeling some amount of work related stress owing to work I need to get done for the promotion and the boss giving me something absolutely unrealistic!! Mainly I think it is also indiscipline of the last many many years taking over to something it knew best. I feel like I need to believe in myself a bit more than I do. I need to believe I can do this and I will do this.

I take away from today that I will work on my self belief and discipline for the rest of the week. After all I have blown all form of calories today and I will have to make sure I exercise really really well and also eat superbly. I can do this and I will. Weight day is Tuesday and I will come good. I bloody well have to! I have spent too many years feeling fat and frumpy and I want to change it this year - once and for all.

The last time I was <100 kilos.....last century sometime!!!

Tonight, at 8pm I have decided to commence my weightloss journey. I currently weight 112 kilos and my aim is to weigh 60 kilos. I suppose that makes it a weightloss of 52 kilos. A very challenging goal this. I start completely determined to give it my best shot yet and save my life to be able to live it to the best I can.I have never been someone that has been skinny but when I think of when my weight began to creep up, I can associate it to going to Scotland on a scholarship. This is the first time I saw the world of frozen food and its uniqueness to me. After all I came from a country where the only things frozen were ice creams and all else I ever ate had been fresh and boring. Boring chicken curry, aubergine 'bharta' (grilled aubergine, then mashed and spices added), plain and simply boring indian food. Frozen food was cool. I had read about it in books and always wondered what it tasted like and so I indulged in the made land of endless food isles and ready made frozen foods. I also indulged in all the various ice creams and chocolate that I could lay into. By the end of the 12 month period, my mother wept when she saw me. I had ballooned to over a 100 kilos!!!Since then I can only remember constant abuse of food - when I moved to Australia, the battle of the bulge continued and although my fascination with frozen food had ended post Scotland, the weight had continued to creep up. Australia in my first 7.5 years had been very very stressful. From being an international student to finding a job, a place to live during Grand Prix time when at one point I may have had to live in a phone box!!, endless visa stuff ups and bad immigration lawyers followed by worse choice of boyfriends and then a merry go round of another bad boyfriend, and another - all of my 7.5 years in Australia aged me and tired me an additional 10 years and I have grey hair (at least 200 strands!) to prove it - each time I lost a bit more self love and to combat all this - food was the answer. I ate and ate and it became my best friend. I wanted to be alone and I was happy with it and the way I saw it - I was waiting to die one day buried in a mound of food!!............But then one day I met the love of my life and to cut a long story short, 18 months later we are married and happy. Correction......madly and insanely and obscenely happy. He was ironically Australian and made all the tough years in Australia worth it. Maybe Australia decided to give me one of its own to heal me. A breast cancer scare also happened along the way somewhere. Luckily thats all it was...a scare... and so I want to be healthy, strong and make the most of my life. I also believe health is everything and I just dont know where to start. This is my millionth attempt and this time I hope I will succeed... So here goes....