General ponderings and observations of my time spent on the lighterlife diet, upon which one abstains from all conventional food and drink for 14 weeks. I however, have abstained for over 7 months and lost over 8st. Read the whole story here. Hear talk of sagging skin, bizarre therapy sessions and a perpetually ship-jumping mother. How did I make it? Will I falter? Will I regain it all in a month? Find out everything you want to know about lighterlife and maybe a few things you wish you hadn't.
I nearly forgot my foodpacks this morning. I was driving down the big old road that connects my village to the town before the town I work in and I thought 'I feel a bit hungry, which bar did I put in my bag for breakfast?' and then it hit me, 'shit, I forgot to pack anything' so I had to turn around and go back. Luckily it only made me about 10 minutes late (I drove back home very fast). To be fair though this is the first time I've forgotten, so once in nearly 9 weeks isn't bad in my book. I have a cranberry bar for breakfast, if ya wanna know.
There was a nice surprise in the kitchen at work this morning (don't get too excited). Someone had left some bottles of water and leaflets advertising a gym nearby. Normally people put cakes, gingerbread, biscuits, chocolates, crisps, doughnuts - you name it - in there and it feels like a big display of what I can't have. Today though, I thought 'Yay!! A treat for me!!' and happily yoinked me a bottle.
My friend is leaving town for a new job tomorrow and this evening we are going out as a farewell thing. There'll be no food involved, just a few drinks after work. She is meeting me and some co-workers straight after work and then going on to a bigger party at 8 o' clock. I think I will be fine as long as I don't end up staying around for the bigger party (I'm not depriving myself of going, I wouldn't know anyone else there and I think that's why my friend organised to meet me and my co-workers separately). Bigger party equals getting carried away, pressure to drink, being sloppy. I don't think I would drink any booze but I'd rather not risk it. I don't even know why I'm entertaining the thought because the simple fact of the matter is I'm not going to the big party.
Do you remember that top I bought in March that I was itching to get in to? And how happy I was when I was finally about to wear it? Well, it's become a wardrobe (doesn't that look like a funny word?) staple of mine these days because it's one of the only things I own that isn't a big baggy mess. I'm wearing it today and there is definite bagginess but it's bearable. I'd say I can probably wear it for another month before it begins to look silly.
I'm quite lucky though because after LL on Wednesday my mum decided to have a wardrobe clear out and was handing me bagfuls of clothes in the size I've just reached. She has a big wardrobe and some of the stuff she was handing me was totally Atomic Kitten circa 1999, which obviously was not happening but I got some nice trousers (with non-elasticated waistbands WAHEY!) , a few tops for slopping about in and a couple of nicer tops. That was brilliant because if I had gone to town and bought it all, it'd have probably set me back £200.
I think I might try and scout out some charity shops at the weekend. This clothes business is a right kaffufle. Some how I thought I could just live in my current clothes for the year?
Group tonight! I have (obviously) not eaten conventional food this week but feel like my weight loss might not be very good this evening. I was Xst 6lb this morning, which means I'll probably be Xst 8lb tonight. That means a loss of 3lb. I don't think I've been drinking enough this week. Even though the new improved LL says you 'drink to your thirst' or whatever.
The week has just sorta run away with itself. I blame the bank holiday. Still, I can't expect to be amazing every week and hey, if this is my version of a bad week - not eating and still losing - I can hardly grumble.
Tabasco has grown on me. I don't remember if I told what I thought of it when I first tried it (burning mouth in a bottle) or what I did with it the first time I tried it (shook it directly on my tongue) but now I can't eat soup without it and I seriously glug it into my cup. I hope I'm not killing my tastebuds like Lister off of Red Dwarf.
I had a dream last night that I went to a chinese restaurant where they made whatever you asked them and I asked for mixed vegetables and tofu in black bean sauce with boiled rice. I don't remember eating it in my dream but I remember seeing them make it. I also dreamt about my ex-boyfriend, which was a downer but I think that's irrelevant.
I would like to see him and go 'ha! I'm thin and you're not. Gutted!' but obviously as I'm not thin that will have to wait. I doubt he would even notice that I had lost two stone. Having not seen me in two months I guess he would assume I have always been this size. To orchestrate my self-stroking plan I would need to wait until I was thin, which will be spring next year. Although I doubt he'd even (a) care who I was then or (b) recognise me. Maybe if I waited until then I wouldn't want to do it anymore. Besides, if I'm too good for him now then by next year I'll be out of stratosphere.
...and why oh why oh why oh why does no one ever comment on my blog??
Well, it's been a while since I posted and I'm not afraid to say that right now I'm reaching the end of my tether. Well, maybe that's the wrong way to put it. Let's just put it this way, things don't get easier on lighterlife. I thought I'd get into my stride and stick there but all you do is get more and more bored. I just want normal food. I just want a cooked dinner. Something hot and filling and chewable. Just one chinese take away and I'll hop back on the wagon.
It's silly because I say all this and I spend hours at work listing the foods I would like to eat but I know in my heart of hearts that when it comes down to it, I wouldn't eat it. It's like I have a cut off switch, yesterday my daddy was eating a jacket potato and it smelt good, looked good, I wanted to eat it (sort of, there was a desire to eat it there) but that's where it ended. Kinda like an ingrained 'look but don't touch' thing in my head.
I've become fed up with those crisps I used to make. I've become fed up with most of the milkshake flavours. My days now consist of bar, strawberry milkshake, vanilla milkshake, veggie soup plus lots of tabasco and pepper.
Good news though, on Wednesday at group I got my second kitten sticker! Hooray, two stone off.
Yesterday me and my dad went to a motor museum as part of a classic car display. We got free entry and a voucher for the cafe while my car was put in an arena for people to look at. When daddy got hungry we went in to the cafe to see what he could get with both of our £3 vouchers. He decided to get two jacket potatos with cheese, so that it looked like we were both eating something and so they would accept both vouchers. I added a bottle of water to the tray and daddy got a bottle of Fanta. I went to find a seat by the window that looked out on to the arena partly to feel smug at people looking at my car and partly to monitor whether any small children were vandalising him. When daddy came over with the tray he said that he had to put...wait for it...FIVE POUNDS towards his lunch!! FIVE POUNDS?!?! How can two jacket potatoes and two drinks cost £11? Dios mio!
I know it's not food related but seriously, I am never entering my car into another display. I spent six hours cleaning his sorry ass (and my car wasn't dirty in the first place) - that's from when I got home on Friday night until it was too dark to see and from 7am on Saturday morning until we had to leave to take him to the museum. It's a lot of effort for not very much return. We had to stay there until 4pm but we had already finished looking round the museum and had several lengthy chats with members of the public about my car by midday. The thing is about putting him on display was that I didn't know who was going to be looking at him. VW aficionados, for example, would know every possible weakness, flaw or blemish my car is likely to have and seek them out. They would scrutinise and critise everything they see because they are used to seeing absolute perfection at VW shows. My car gets driven every day and I have no qualms in telling you that I've scraped past a few railings and drainpipes in my time. He's not a show car (any more), he gets used, he doesn't live in a garage, he's not a plaything. This weighed heavy on my mind when I was preparing him for the display and so I cleaned and scrubbed and polished like a woman possessed. I thought I was going to get blown out of the water by hoards of VW know-it-alls but silly me, I was the only Beetle there surrounded by gleaming pristine middle aged mens' toys. People cooed and beamed and gasped in admiration at the near mint interior. Small children asked me what the buttons did and little boy informed me that my car had two gear sticks and ten gears. I am glad I put the effort in though, I felt like I had earnt the nice things that people said about my car. Never again though, oh my, never again. And certainly never ever at a VW show.
Oh a brilliant thing has happened! (If you managed tor drag yourself through the car related moaning.) My feet aren't so fat anymore!!! I can wearing high heels all day at work. Some of my old shoes that used to cripple me are now wearable and my old shoes that fitted sorta don't but hey, I can buy new ones! Shoe shopping used to make me cry (honestly). I love shoes and believe that a pretty shoe really finishes your outfit and makes your look complete - shoes, however, do not love me. Everyone where I work is an eagle eyed shoe obsessive. They all wear different glossy, brightly coloured sky-scrapping shoes everyday and quietly monitor your footwear. Whenever I emerge from my desk wearing anything with a slight heel (in the past, not very often) I am pounched on with 'Are they new?', 'Let me see', 'Where are they from?', 'Oh there nice, you should wear more high heels', 'Good for you, you are wearing heels!' extremo patronising etc.
Whenever I used to go shoe shopping the thought of the shoe vultures from work and my own impossibly high shoe aspirations (I'm not into tacky, tarty shoes that scream high-street...like some of the shoe vultures, I say quietly. The shoes I love are very prim, proper, high, austere...y'know brogues etc. The shoes I imagine Maggie G to wear in Secretary or that you see in those bizarre Vogue work photoshoots. Prim and proper with a twist.) used to hang over me like a dark cloud. I have grown up with wide feet and obviously being morbidly obese did not help the situation. My feet aren't long, they're not big but they are wide and so I would find a shoe I liked, jam my foot in it, it wouldn't fit...I would repeat this exercise for as long as my battered self esteem could take it and then either leave the shop in tears or buy the shoes anyway and never wear them. I longed to wear nice shoes, wearing shit ones does nothing for your confidence but quite simply they did not fit. When I did manage to force my fat feet into a pair of 'nice' shoes I would feel ridiculous and reflections of myself in mirrors looked like a huge lumbering pig upright on tiny little trotters. That's honestly what they looked like - trotters. The overall roundness of my obesity did not sit well with teeny, tiny tottering shoes. When the shoe vultures loomed I felt awful. I wanted to wear the shoes but didn't want to be noticed because I felt ridiculous. I was convinced I walked like a man in drag and would repeat to myself 'heel, toe, heel, toe, heel, toe' as I walked down the corridor.
I feel a lot better now. There's less weigh pressing down on the balls of my feet and my feet are a little less fatty boom boom. When I see my reflection now there is definitely less of a trotter element. I feel like I fit now. I can wear the lovely houndstooth wonders and not feel like a laughing stock. And I've seen the reflection of myself walking down a corridor now, I do not look like a man. My posture is good, my shoulders are still and level, I look fine - good even. Certainly better than sloping down in a pair of worn-out flip flops.
Good things are happening. I am feeling better. Even if LL is beginning to wear thin.
My mum bought some stickers the other day. One lot have puppies on and the other has kittens on. She told me that every time we lose a stone, we'll get a sticker. She was having puppies and I was to have kittens. I have one kitten on the back of my LL record book so far but I want another one!! I am 5lb off my next stone and a couple of weeks ago I did lose 5lb in a week. I have been Xst 13lb in the morning now for about 5 days. It's not looking good. I was contemplating doing some exercise in the hope of burning up a few more pounds. I don't want to wait two weeks for a kitten.
I even considered buying an exercise bike from Argos (it's payday today, wa-hey) but I always have bad feelings about it because I bought one when I very first got a job, used it for however long and then it sat there for years accommodating scarfs and necklaces.
We have a rowing machine at home that I could use. That really kills me. I suppose now that I've lost a bit of weight it might be easier. I've gotta ask myself, how much do I want 2st Kitten?
I dunno, it seems a bit silly buying something that will ultimately just collect dust (and junk) when I have something else I can use at home already?
I went Thursday Night Late Shop last night to buy some new work clothes because of bagginess. Nothing in New Look inspired me (who would wear a shirt with a corset over the top to work?) and so I decided to browse the shoe section. I am notoriously awful at being able to buy shoes. I have a perpetual problem that may just me or may affect a lot of fat people, I don't know. Basically, I have to buy a size 8 for my foot to actually fit in the shoe but I AM SO NOT A SIZE 8!! Back in the day I used to be a 6 1/2, then it went up to 7 and now it is 8. It's because my foot is so fat. I'm sure of it. I tried on some flip flops once and to get the widest part of my foot in to the flip flop I had to try an 8 but I had sole overhang on the front and back or about 3/4 of an inch. It looked stoooopid.
So for a while I slopped about in size 8 shoes (not the aforementioned flip flops though) and they were pretty uncomfortable.
When I tried shoes on last night I was still a size 8 but the shoes weren't as uncomfortable now and they feel a little bit bigger. I still bought a size 8 in the end but I can waggle my toes and I'm not crippled a soon as I stand up. I wondered if the shoes I have at home might fit better as well but when I went to try them on they were all too big. My favourite type of shoes are peep-toe slingbacks but when I tried a pair on the slingback was all saggy and wouldn't stay up. Oh well, hopefully I won't stay at an 8 and by next April I will be back to a 6 1/2!
4lb off for me! Woop woop. Go team me. AND my ketone stick (the stick you have to pee on to tell if you are hydrated or not) was light for the first time ever!!! Not that I don't drink enough, I think it's just where I drink a little bit less anticipating the drive to LL and sitting in group for two hours. It's hard not to pee for two hours.
I pushed the boat out last night and put two things I haven't tried on my order form: fruit bar and mushroom soup. I don't like mushrooms but I thought I would give it a try because most soups don't taste like what they're supposed to anyway and I will put tabasco, pepper and maybe a savoury drink in mine, which will alter the taste. I've got the fruit bar here with me, so I'll give you an exclusive first taste...
Appearance
First thought: oh great it's covered in that faux white chocolate stuff that hurts my teeth.
Taste
I don't understand why it's called a fruit bar?! It has the same texture and taste as the toffee bar - by which I mean really hard and chewy. There are no little 'fruit' pieces like in the cranberry bar. There is nothing even vaguely fruity about it? No apple, berry, pear, pineapple, mango, orange, banana, melon taste AT ALL!! It's as if they've accidentally put a toffee bar in the fruit wrapper. It can't be right. I don't know why this surprises me, I did just say about five minutes ago that foodpacks never taste like what they're supposed to anyway. If this is supposed to be fruit with any luck my mushroom soup will taste like tomato and basil (I really miss tomato-ish flavours).
Anyway, I better go now! Time to crack on. Sorry, I got distracted by my co-workers talking about anorexia. Fun times at my work!
The 'only drinking one savoury drink' thing seems to be working because for the past couple of mornings I have been Xst 13lb, down from Xst 6lb on Wednesday night which is pretty good. Usually getting about Xst 2lb in the evening but there are still two evenings between now and weigh in time. So I reckon I'll lose 4-5lb...or 3lb if I'm unlucky. So by next Wednesday I should be nearing the 2st mark. The only downside to this being that my boobs now resemble deflated balloons and my clothes are shapeless sacks. My whole body is beginning to resemble a deflated balloon in fact. I am a deflated balloon. Oh well, that's what I get for a decade of decadence.
Okay, so I'm not as bad as those sketchy pictures strewn across the internet of yards of skin dripping from someone's belly. But let's put it this way, my tattoo used to be about 3 inches across and it's not anymore!
I have read online that saggy skin shrinks back if you're young. I am skeptical that your boobs shrink back but hey.
I bought some Tabasco on Saturday because you are allowed it on LL. I expected it to be a tangy, tomato-ish, more-ish sauce. Er, wrong. It totally doesn't have a taste. All it tastes of is burning. And not the smokey good kind. It's just pain in a bottle. No wonder we're allowed it on LL. I have been putting it in to soups and crisps so these days my dinners usually consist of mouth pain. Well, a change is as good as a rest they say.
It's my Daddy's birthday today. It seems a bit weird that we're not going out for a meal or anything. I wanted to buy him a cake as if to say 'you can still enjoy it' but I wasn't sure if it was appropriate to buy him a cake for himself because then he'd eat it all and get fatter while we were getting thinner. Perhaps I could buy him one of those little cakes you can get. Usually on someone's birthday we would go to a all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant and Mummy and Daddy would stuff themselves with crispy duck and spare ribs while I would eat veggie soup, fried bean curd, spring rolls and bowl upon bowl of egg fried rice. God I miss egg fried rice!
I was just about to type 'what I wouldn't give for some egg fried rice...' but then I realised I could have it anytime I wanted.
I have decided this morning that I really need a new pair of jeans. I'm having to do the ones I'm wearing at the moment quite tightly to keep them up and they're all baggy around my legs. I need to fold the belt under to stop it flapping about and it's making a bump under my top.
I was talking to my boss about LL last night. We were talking about it for five minutes and I was complaining that my mum was 'cheating' and how I missed food and he said 'what's your diet then?' and I said 'Nothing, I stick to the rules. I just have my four foodpacks' and he was like 'NOTHING? Four foodpacks?!?' and I was like 'uhh...yeah?'. I have soooo told him about it before, he has such a bad memory. God knows what he was thinking when I said I missed food if he thought I was still eating. The funny thing is he was saying how tough dieting is before I told him (again) that all I was eating was foodpacks. I think foodpacks make things way easier though.
Anyway, he said he could tell I had lost weight, which was nice. One positive stroke in the bank for me. Then as I was walking to the photocopier and someone I worked with grabbed at my shirt and said 'look at that, it's so baggy!', which was said in a surprised rather than critical tone - another stroke in my strokey bank. This morning someone else I work with said my new top was a nice colour and that it looked good. Stroke-a-rama city. And what have I said stroke-wise? Well, I didn't think my top sat particularly well because my belt is making a bump, so that's a negative stroke for myself. I did notice my arms are looking a bit less fat, so I guess that's a positive stroke. I put some wedges on and then took them off again because I thought my jeans looked a bit baggy around the knee, which didn't look nice. Negative stroke again. So in the positive/negative stroke balance it looks like I get them but then piss 'em out by giving myself negative strokes.
To be fair though, I was proper self-stroking last night. For some reason I felt really good. It's stupid really for me to go 'ahhhh, look how much weight I've lost' because at the end of the day, I'm still fat! So if I felt really good and I was walking down the road thinking 'I've lost 3 1/2 inches off my hips!', someone walking in the other direction would say 'hahahaha, look at that fat munter' not 'wow, she really looks like he has lost 3 1/2 inches off her hips'.
EDIT: Someone just said my top was a nice colour - stroke!
Okay, time for a peanut bar I think. I've just drunk about a litre in an hour...blurrrgghh.
I lost 5lb last night! Woop woop! Maybe my theory about salt and savoury drinks was right? If that is true, 2lb of my weight loss is water but who gives a monkey's? We all need a little lift sometimes, right?
So our counsellor measured us last night for the first time since week 1. Here's how I did:
Bust: 2 1/2 inches off
Waist: 3 inches off
Hips: 3 1/2 inches off
A quick search of google reliably informs me that there is two inches between each dress size. So I have definitely lost one dress size (although I am still wearing the baggious clothes) and I am on my way to losing my second one. Hooray.
Let me give myself a stroke: I am cool! I did good! Go team me for being extra cool. I am the queen of abstinence.
So my mum has fucked LL big time. She's eating fruit and Ben and Jerry's and drinking whatever she fancies. It's amazing she's being so blithe about it. She said to me last night whilst two LL peanut crunch bars lay on the side 'well, it's better that I eat fruit than a pie or a burger' and I said 'why are you even eating fruit? There are two bars right there'. To me it just seems ridiculous. It's such a waste of money. There's no point doing this half arsed. I wouldn't bother carrying on if I were her. It's not that difficult to just eat foodpacks - I've done it! After going five weeks without food I would not be tempted to eat by anything because five weeks is such an achievement. I wouldn't want to blow it.
The past week has totally flown by. I haven't even thought to do my LL homework and already it's Wednesday again! I think I will have to write any old crap down and make a hash of it - reminds me of school again. To be fair though, I usually do it straight away on a Thursday morning. LL Counsellor says we don't have to do it but I'm sure she'll pull one of those 'I'm not cross, just disappointed' routines on us.
One of my favourite things to do at the moment is make crisps out of soups. You do it by mixing the foodpack with a little bit of water to get a thick mixture (one that will drip off a spoon but not too runny) and then spreading it quite thinly on a dinner plate (but not so thin that you can see the plate beneath). I then put it in the microwave for 3 minutes and when it comes out I peel/scrape the result in to a bowl and put some pepper on it. I think it's nice to have something to chew and crunch. Sometimes the flavour is quite strong but I even it out with more pepper.
Last night I foolishly tried to make a sort of chocolate pudding dessert. I do laugh at myself sometimes for thinking that I can put this powder in a microwave and somehow expect it to come out as something magically more appetising. First of all I made a chocolate muffin by mixing a chocolate foodpack with a small amount of - not boiling but - hot water in a ramikin dish and microwaving it for about 1 1/2 minutes. Then I tried to make a chocolate sauce using another foodpack but it ended up being a bit too runny. I tipped out my muffin and smothered it with the sauce. It was alright, nothing spectacular. I think if I put less water in my sauce it would have been a whole lot nicer.
I read somewhere on the internet (oh what a reliable source) that if you eat less salt it helps with fluid retention and aids weight loss. Now obviously I hardly eat any salt as it is but I somehow got it in to my head that drinking two savoury drinks a day was too much salt and that's why I'm not losing as much weight as everyone else. I backed this theory up with the fact that I always seem to lose more weight at the weekend and then put it on again on Monday. I reasoned that this is because I don't drink any savoury drinks at the weekend but I drink two on a weekday. So now I am attempting to just drink one savoury drink a day and see how it goes. I'm probably being stupid but when my mum was being good the only real difference in our diets was that (a) I drunk savoury drinks and she hated them and (b) she sometimes missed out foodpacks all together. So maybe that's why she lost more?
So I have finally made it through my first 'month' of lighterlife. I lost 3lb on Wednesday (I got my scientific calculations completely wrong, I will admit that!), which means I have lost 1st. Hooray. One month down, about eight more to go.
On Wednesday we learnt about 'strokes'. Bearing in mind we had no idea what strokes were, when the DVD came on and people started talking about asking for strokes and stroking themselves, we were all in fits of giggles. Basically a stroke is a unit of acknowledgement. So when someone says 'That top looks lovely' or 'your hair really suits you', that's a postive stroke. Someone saying 'you did a really shit job' is a negative stroke. According to the shrink on the DVD, strokes are the most important thing in the world and if you don't get strokes you die or something. At this point, I was thinking this was all abit silly and far fetched. I thought that in this day and age, you'd be lucky to get even one nice thing said about you a day because people are too busy or too self consumed.
I asked the LL locum (yep, our regular guru wasn't there) what happened when someone said something that was a positive stroke but you knew they didn't mean it. The group started rallying round saying that it wasn't that the compliment was false but it was the way I was taking it. They said perhaps I didn't think I deserved the compliment. To be honest, the person that I was thinking about originally does have a habit of spitting up random compliments to anyone just as a way of hearing her own voice (which she loves) but when the group asked what they would prefer the false compliment giver to say and I said 'I would prefer if she just didn't notice me at all', it dawned on me that maybe I wasn't accepting the compliments I was receiving.
So when someone told me my face looked thinner the next day, I just said 'thank you'. Later when I looked in the mirror in a changing room, I thought 'yes, actually it does look thinner'.
The locum asked if we felt more confident since we have lost weight and I said 'no, I don't feel any different. I don't feel like I've got smaller'.
I tried on a lot of clothes yesterday and it is fair to say I have lost a dress size. Some blouses still pucker around my boobs but I think that says more about their cut than my body. I don't have huge boobs compared to my body, so they must just be rubbish.
A lot of my current tops are starting to get abit baggy and where the majority of them are empire line etc anyway, I'm ending up being draped in swathes of fabric. I'm just a bit fed up with it, so I tried on the top I bought in March that I mention before. It is the same size as the tops I was trying on last night but for some reason it seems smaller. I think it's because, as I've mentioned, it's not an empire line. Well, anyway, it fit! So I'm wearing it right now! =D Finally, finally, finally I am able to wear it.
So there we have it. Proof that I am getting smaller to dispell my feeling of 'nothing has changed' that I was expressing at LL on Wednesday. I can't deny obvious proof. So there, self, you are great. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
