My experiences with the Lighter Life programme

Well, here's how things are breaking down (shit basically):

Week 1    18st 11lb (start weight)
Week 2    5lb (18st 6lb)
Week 3    3lb (18st 3lb)
Week 4    3lb (18st)
Week 5    3lb (17st 11lb)
Week 6    5lb (17st 6lb)
Week 7    4lb (17st 2lb)
Week 8    5lb (16st 11lb)
Week 9    3lb (16st 8lb)
Week 10  4lb (16st 4lb)
Week 11  3lb (16st 1lb)
Week 12  5lb (15st 10lb)
Week 13  4lb (15st 6lb)
Week 14  2lb (15st 4lb)
Week 15  5lb (14st 13lb)
Week 16  2lb (14st 11lb)
Week 17  2lb (14st 9lb)

And you girls know I freaking haven't eaten a single thing.  It's bollocks, complete and utter bollocks.  It's not what I signed up for.  I signed up for a stone a month and at this rate I'll be doing half of that and that means I won't be eating for another EIGHT MONTHS.  Four I can deal with but EIGHT?!  That'd be eleven in total, that's absurd.  Constant deprivation and £66 a week for 2lb?!?!  It's ridiculous.  A stone a month is motivation.  3lb a week is fine, I'd be happy with that.  That keeps me on track.  2lb a week is bollocks.  Fuck 2lb a week.  If this keeps up for longer than a month I think I will give up (well, I'd think about it at least).  I know it's still 2lb and 2lb is better than nothing and I've done so well and I need to keep going but seriously - if it were you, would you pay £66 for 2lb?  And give up every food you love and even those you don't?

This next bit is not weight loss related at all, so you can stop reading now if you wish!

So I finally got round to watching Legally Blonde 1 and 2 after Alicia3000 left me a comment with the (then) mysterious-sounding "snaps for you" quote.  Firstly, phew, it's a good thing and secondly Lighterlife has something very similar - no doubt stolen from Elle - called strokes.  Perhaps they should think about re-naming them to snaps to cut down on the snickers (not the food variety but oh my days, wouldn't it be nice?) when the DVD starts talking about giving yourself strokes.

So anyway, it turns out me and Elle have a bit in common - our burgeoning legal careers being one (okay, maybe hers more than mine but they did condense her years of studying in to a couple of hours), our admiration for Jackie O (how much do I covet Elle's first day outfit?!) and most importantly our love of French manicures!  I am currently being very careful as I type because I have just put a clear coat of polish over the the lovely pinky-whiteness of last night's self-given French manicure.  I just love the way they look - nice, crisp, clean. 

I was actually watching Legally Blonde 1 the day before my birthday and halfway though got a sudden and gripping urge to call my local beauty salon and book a French manicure on the morning of my birthday.  They were all booked up and so I went to a newly opened salon further down the street.  All was going good, I got there, they took one look at my nails and declared them the 'most stained nails' they'd ever seen and told me there was no way I could have a French manicure.  Now I wear nail varnish constantly, you will never seen me without a polish on and yes, my natural nails are fairly orange but I have no problem getting them to that gorgeous pinky hue myself.  So I was pretty bummed, not really what you want to hear on your birthday.  Instead I chose a zingy matt mauvey-pink colour that really popped.  It looked alright at the time although I was a bit dubious about the application but it was chipped to buggery within two days - so I won't be going back there.  On the Sunday evening (day two - supremely chipped) I resolved myself to the fact that I wouldn't be walking in to the office the next morning and say "Hey girls, don't you just love this colour of polish?", I took off the £20 crumby-ass polish and thought 'fuck it, I'll do it myself'.

Lol, so anyway...Elle is gorgeous and I love her hair.  I wonder about her outfits sometimes but in general she is perfection.  This could, of course, be the list of ways in which we differ!

So something I've wanted to talk about: my tattoo.

I have a tattoo of a key with wings on my...left hip/bum/back area...it's hard to describe.  It's covered by my pants but it's higher than my bum.  Basically it's on that nice, big, fleshy, womanly bit us lovely women have that give us our hourglass shape.  When I got it I thought 'fuck it, I don't care.  It's hardly like I'm gonna lose this weight, is it?', which at the time seemed like a reasonable thing to say because, as a lot of you will know, you can diet and 'be good' and 'cut back' and all that shit and you still stay fat.  I'd been fat my whole life.  It seemed logical.

So anyway, I got it in early June and I started lighterlife in early July - I hadn't had it very long at all. 

It.  Is.  Shrinking.  Oh my days, how it is shrinking!  It used to be a fair size, its width was (and not being near a ruler I will have to be imaginative) roughly the length of the tip of my index finger to just before the big knuckle.  So what, like, three and a bit inches?  Just measuring it against my index finger in the mirror now, it now goes to the second knuckle on the finger...so that's about two inches? 

That's a lot!  It used to fit the space quite nicely and wasn't massive but similarly wasn't dwarfed.  Now, on the other other hand, it's a little scrunched up key floating on the expanse of my hip.  The key used to have a visible white VW in the middle (yes, it was a Volkswagen tattoo.  Yes, I am a GEEK!) but now it's just a black key.  Stretched out wings now seem clipped.  I have two thoughts about this: 

(1)  My counsellor says you should give the skin a year to 'snap back'.  How can I expect to lose - how many was it?  Seven inches? - off my hips and it not be affected?

(2) I could always get it covered.  Although it does contain alot of black.  To be fair though, at this rate it's going to be tiny and so easily covered - I hope?

Well, it's a small price to pay, eh?  It can be remedied.  It feels like a big deal but I guess I should think about the bigger picture.

I've asked people on various Lighterlife forums if they've noticed anything similar but their tattoos seem to be unaffected.  I guess mine was on a particularly fleshy part (which at the time I thought was super clever because being on my back it wouldn't be affected by pregnancy) and quite new too.

I have big plans for when I lose all of my weight - well, pipe dreams shall we say.  In my ideal world, this is how it'd go down: I want to get a tummy tuck, breast lift, bingo wing removal (now that one I haven't researched but I assume it exists.  The tops of my arms are extremo saggy.), so hopefully I will have the body my 22 year old self deserves and not this saggy, stretch-mark ridden sack.  When that's all healed I want two old skool symmetrical swallows on my front near my hips (fuck pregnancy, I don't want to ruin my new body.  I've always felt physically sick when it comes to child birth anyway.  It's all about the adoption imo) and a back piece of a Japanese phoenix going from my shoulders down to mid-thigh.  Now that sucker should cover my squiffy key!  So yeah, how much'll that cost?  Ball park figures - Tummy tuck £5,000, boobs £3,500, bingo wings no idea...let's say £3,000, swallows £250, phoenix £1,000 (let's hope it's less, eh?).  Sod it, I'm worth it!

Sorry if this has been rambling rubbish.  I've listening to the High School Musical 3 soundtrack very loudly in anticipation of seeing the film on Wednesday while writing.  I cannot wait.  So much for me being a grown up, eh?  I tried, I really did.  I just love Hello Kitty too much.  I can't do it.  I'm immature, I'm not independent.  I tried, I just don't know what to do.  I can't force it.  Urgh, the whole situation just irritates me.  I don't like to think about it.

Anyway, I'm getting very tired now.  Group tomorrow!  I will report back. =)

Wow, isn't it nice to be on holiday and to sit around writing exceptionally long blog posts?

Well, since then I've had my birthday and decided that I'm a grown-up now and should 'knuckle down' (which is such a grown-up thing to do, of course). This means studying every hour God sends and I tell you what, it's bloody knackering. (Did I mention I am doing a distance learning course funded by my work that I've so far shockingly neglected?)

Rather conveniently, I was also sent to another department as soon as I came back off holiday (doing a job that's a step up although not pay-wise) and so have a sandbox in which to exercise my new grown-up-ness. This involves studying before work and during lunch and not being seen dossing around on the internet.

Needless to say, I have fallen behind on many important internet duties. Ebay, paypal and blog.co.uk have all suffered. Not to mention I haven't even glimpsed Perez in days.

To be completely honest with you, I am dog tired at the moment. I can't believe it but my new work and trying to learn has left me run-ragged. I'm finding it really hard to find time to do things. Now for instance, I am blogging rather than doing the annoying virtual legal research skills practice I have scheduled myself...and I'm only blogging because I have left it for some long.

Anyway, time is slipping away from me these days and I can't keep up. That's what I wanted to say. You guys don't come here to hear about that so I'll leave it there.

After reading that, I hope you'll forgive me for being brief:

I lost 2lb at group last night. I was fairly disappointed (because that was after firstly being weighed with my shoes on) but decided my small loss was because I lost 5lb last week.

The group wasn't quite as heinously large this week. There were no people sitting on the floor!! My Foundation Crew, the cool kids, entertained the old-timers and I think we're starting to get along. I did actually LOL (and I mean the kind where laughter involuntarily and unexpectedly erupts out of you rather than a quiet 'oh haha, that's funny') a couple of times in group.

I have started to like Thai Chilli soup again, rather strangely. I have discovered that when it says 'Thai Chilli' what it really means is 'devoid of any chilli flavouring, add copious amounts of Tabasco if you want to stand any chance of tasting something remotely spicy'. I think the thing that really gets me excited about Thai Chilli soups is that they have those weird little chewy bits like in Pot Noodles. Dios Mio! Chewing something?!

Anyway, I really best be getting on. It's such a pain in the ass. My eyes are tired, my back aches, I can't concentrate. By the way, I doubt it's anything to do with Lighterlife in case you're putting two and two together. It hasn't been a problem so far. It's just a mixture of having really bad sleep lately (it didn't help, for instance, at 1.10am this morning when my mum woke me up to ask if I wanted to play with her sewing machine), trying really hard to study, getting up early and working hard. Oh yes, I'm a grown up alright.

Hopefully soon I will get the balance right. I mean well at least.

BRILLIANT news!!!  I weighed myself this morning and what did I weigh....14st 11lb!  I have lost 4st - I am half way through! Of course, that was this morning and not last night at weigh-in but who cares!  Four freaking stone, that's a hell of a lot.  I want to jump up and down outside shouting "FOUR STONE!!!" but I'm in bed with just my nightie on at the mo and I don't think my boobs could withstand the abuse without a sports bra on.

I am also very pleased about something else.  Something I should have really put on my goal list but never realised was a goal of mine.  I have two pairs of scales because I am anal and became fanatical about the seemingly bizarre readings my scales would give (denial much?): one is a jazzy digital set that gives you your weight, the percentage of your body that is fat and some other figure I can't remember (since doing LL it's been going up so I assume it's good?  Or it's what percentage of me is water perhaps.  Maybe it's years left until I die?  It is current 31, which could be possible.  Clever scales.) and the other set are proper old-school bog standard scales.  Both are kept on a little piece of wood on my carpetted floor (I did say I was anal). 

So anyway, when I bought the digital scales I could not get the bloody body fat percentage function to work.  I put in my gender and height and made sure my feet touched the metal but it kept coming up with an error message.  My (fat but less fat than me at the time) boyfriend tried it and it worked.  I was stumped but came up with some rubbish excuse about how my massive thighs pushing together all the way down to the knee when I stood with my feet so close together must have confused the little magic waves that measure your body fat.

I got used to seeing the error message instead of a percentage.  I began to accept the fact that my 'fat thighs' theory was probably wrong and it was probably because the percentage was so high it overwhelmed the scales.  I started Lighterlife.  Time passed.  Around the Week 6 mark when I was comfortably mid-17st one day a number appeared - 61%.  Sixty-freaking-one percent! What the hell would it have been when I first bought them?  Second thoughts, don't wanna know.

I was really keen to get below 50% because somehow that made things seem okay, that seemed to be the magic number.  And guess what?  Today I am 49%!!!  Less than 50% of my body weight is fat!!  I can't believe I used to weigh so much that the poor bloody scales couldn't even measure how much of me was fat.  It seems verging on obscene that over two thirds of my body was lard.  No wonder I have so many stretch marks.  Why couldn't I see it then?  Why did I think it was okay?  Or did I think it was okay?  I have the shortest memory ever, I can't really remember.

I'm going to add that to the list of goals I made a little while ago.  I'm also going to try and add a few more because I'm sure, like that one, there are others that I'm trying to do that I haven't realise are goals.

So, group last night.  It was the first week of Developers.  After your first 14 weeks in Foundation, which is a closed group with the same people every week, if you still have weight to lose you remain in abstinence and move on to Developers.  Developers is not a closed group but it is still same sex.  You stay in Developers as long as it takes you to lose your additional weight.  Last night I swear to God there were at least 30 people in the group.  It was like someone had ferried half the women in Waterloo Station into class.  There were people sitting on the floor for fuck's sake.

This was a massive shock to my system.  It wasn't until then that I realised how much I liked my group.  Now I see that the small numbers, the same faces every week, people who were friends had really helped me.  It felt like we were a team.  Last night though was horrible.  Somehow I got separated from my mum and Team Foundation while I was being weighed and I got sandwiched between two lots of clicky, gossiping, hostile 'old timers' with their backs to me.  I'm shit at these situations at the best of times (despite writing intimately to strangers) and there I just crumbled.  I sat looking at my trainers and fiddling with a pen while the rest of the room buzzed with chatter.  I freaking hated it.  It was shit on a stick.  I don't know how I'm going to get through 4st 7lb more of that.

Our counsellor kept flitting round weighing people and giving out foodpacks in her perpetually positive way and beamed as she told us she was so glad to see us all and that the group wouldn't always be this busy.  I can't really see how that's true because people aren't all going to hit their target weights at the same time.  People will leave in dribs and drabs, not in massive chunks.  I don't think I'd feel a whole lot better if I turned up on Tuesday and there were 29 cackling old timers instead of 30.

So here's what I lost anyway.  It was a good week.  I think I lost so much because I only lost 2lb the week before.  Carry on 5lb losses, let me get out of stinky Developers:

Week 1    18st 11lb (start weight)
Week 2    5lb (18st 6lb)
Week 3    3lb (18st 3lb)
Week 4    3lb (18st)
Week 5    3lb (17st 11lb)
Week 6    5lb (17st 6lb)
Week 7    4lb (17st 2lb)
Week 8    5lb (16st 11lb)
Week 9    3lb (16st 8lb)
Week 10  4lb (16st 4lb)
Week 11  3lb (16st 1lb)
Week 12  5lb (15st 10lb)
Week 13  4lb (15st 6lb)
Week 14  2lb (15st 4lb)
Week 15  5lb (14st 13lb)

I found a picture of myself from this time last year on Facebook and I so, so, so want to show it to you but I'm worried about blowing my cover.  After dissing Developers and my mum (occasionally), I'd hate to get found out and I know my blog comes quite high up on the results if you search for lighterlife on Yahoo, so it could happen.  I'm so huge though, I hardly recognise myself.  Maybe once this is all done and dusted and I don't have to see my counsellor anymore and my mum is so amazed at my weight loss she won't mind reading that I wanted to denounce her as a liar and a cheat.

I have written a lot more than this because I had some other things I wanted to tell you about but I think you and I will get bored if I write it all as one long post, so for now I'll leave it at this.  All I'll say is birthdays and kaftans, lol.  Perhaps I spent too long telling you about my digital scales, eh?

Anyway, until next time!

I am sooooo lucky!  A kind and generous lady at my group last night have me the loveliest black dress.  It's amazing that (a) someone gave me such a handsome dress for free and (b) it fits wonderfully!  I am wearing it now with a white shirt underneath and my houndstooth courts (hardest working shoes I ever bought, seriously).  It's sleeveless with a high-ish neck and comes just below the knee.  LOVES IT!  And y'know what?  It's a size 20.  Check me out, I haven't been so happy with how I looked in a long time.

I only lost 2lb at group last night.  My lowest loss yet.  Still, can't complain.  Rather lose it than put it on.  So that takes my losses to:

Week 1    18st 11lb (start weight)
Week 2    5lb (18st 6lb)
Week 3    3lb (18st 3lb)
Week 4    3lb (18st)
Week 5    3lb (17st 11lb)
Week 6    5lb (17st 6lb)
Week 7    4lb (17st 2lb)
Week 8    5lb (16st 11lb)
Week 9    3lb (16st 8lb)
Week 10  4lb (16st 4lb)
Week 11  3lb (16st 1lb)
Week 12  5lb (15st 10lb)
Week 13  4lb (15st 6lb)
Week 14  2lb (15st 4lb)

So three and a half stone in foundation.  Pretty good!

It turns out that only three people in my group (which started at thirteen) have stayed abstinent the whole time.  That's the truth you don't find out until the end!  I was under the impression all these weeks that everyone had not eaten.  I must say, there is a little part of me that feels disappointed and cheated because I have had times where I've struggled and I've told them and they nodded along but it turns out they weren't sticking to it?  Whatever works for them I suppose.  There is no way I could cheat because if I ate one thing, I'd eat everything.  There's no balance for me, I couldn't regain control.  If I ate anything I'd be off the wagon for good. 

You guys know that I told myself at the beginning of this that I was going to do the whole 14 weeks without eating and I've gotta stick to it. 

I got my before and after pictures back today but I will have to tell you about them another time because I have to go now.

Seriously, if you are thinking of doing Lighterlife, I urge you to do it!  Do it!  Do it!  Do it!  It is the best thing you will ever do for yourself.