Stress And Losing It

OK, I've never had a lot of time for this theory but now I'm living it! And even though I feel like I'm making excuses, I think I can confidently say that stress makes losing very very hard and makes gaining way too easy!

We got the news at the end of December that my dad was unwell and facing major surgery and since then I've gained 7 kilos effortlessly - yes, I know, that's more than a kilo a week! How can that be? Its not as if I'm bingeing on junk food or anything.

Despite the incentive of wanting to look great when I go back to Scotland to act as family chauffeur while he recovers, despite wanting to impress my mother with my efforts, despite the fact that Christmas is over and all, well OK most, temptation is gone. Some of it is comfort eating, some is total inertia where exercise is concerned. I have good intentions that evaporate like the dew by mid afternoon. I'm not eating anything particularly bad but it seems like everything I do eat is sticking like glue.

So I guess the first step is awareness. Knowing that stress is not helping is a good start, not beating myself up about it is also good. What's the point? That will only create more stress. I know my danger period for food is about 4pm, its too long till tea time and too long since lunch and that packet of oatcakes is looking too tempting! Yes, I admit it, I binge on oatcakes! OK I'm weird! So my plan for the next week before I go back to Scotland is to be as far away from anything tempting at 4pm as possible - probably walking the dog would be a good thing! Oh, and to do lots of swimming, because I sure as anything won't be doing a lot of that in the frozen wastes of Glasgow!

Post festive Panic!

OK I'm back after far too long away from being good! The festive season was far too good and as most of my friends and family are great cooks there were one or two too many calories consumed and not nearly enough spent. Wrestling with the Christmas tree was about the only exercise I've had in weeks so from tomorrow I'm getting back into the swing of 50 lengths of the pool every day, walking the legs off the dog (who also had far too much turkey at Christmas and could do with losing a couple of pounds!), and maybe even taking the bike round the block.

With all that bad behaviour its quite remarkable that I only put on 4 kilos but they have to go! NOW!!

There's a reason for my panic - I'm headed back to Scotland in a couple of weeks and that means two things - One - being nagged by my eagle eyed mother if I haven't lost anything - actually the poor old dear is as blind as a bat but she seems to have a sixth sense when it comes to me losing weight, and she remembers every single pound I've told her that I've lost (of course I don't tell her about the ones that came back!) so she's expecting a waiflike anorexic to turn up!! The other is that healthy eating there is well nigh impossible, on the one hand my mother worries if I haven't lost weight, and on the other, her maternal instinct to feed me up kicks in before I even arrive so I have to arrive with the expectation that I will add at least 3 kilos... a week!!!