Smelly Elle's fantastic diary: Weight Loss? What Weight Loss?

Hi everyone, welcome to the wonderful diary of me! I'm bored of my blog so thought i'd continue here. But first I will copy and paste my blog so far until I have time to write something new lol.

xxx

Start date 12th June

Posted 4 Days Ago at 02:45 PM by elle2585
OK, so this is day one... Well. Not exactly. I've been trying to lose weight for a while now. Just that today is day one of me actually putting some extra effort in. I've got until the 12th August to look decent, and then however long it takes me to lose the rest of it. (I'm going on my usual holiday to Cyprus - i'm from there so almost every year I go and every time I do I end up getting depressed. It's rare to see local even slightly overweight, and when i'm sat on the beach looking around I just want the ground to swallow me up.)

I don't know how much I weigh but i've decided that tomorrow morning i'm going to swallow my fears and just do it. If I can face up to that I can lose it.

Today i've had cheerios in the morning, a glass of smoothie, a coffee and some water, a healthy chicken sandwich and a packet of quavers (i'm going along the lines that they're 87 cals per pack so not necessarily that bad.) I wanted to go for a walk but it's raining... I'm hoping to go swimming very soon. And I do a few exercises every night. COME ON!!

Last thoughts of the day..

Posted 4 Days Ago at 01:36 AM by elle2585
Just about to go to bed...feeling a tad nervous about my first weigh in tomorrow (in a long time). I just hope I haven't put all my weight back on...

The people on here are all stars by the way, i've been on here for a day and I feel motivated, like i've got a thousand friends helping me along.

See you tomorrow with the results... (eek!)

Weigh in results...

Posted 3 Days Ago at 11:42 AM by elle2585
So this morning I woke up, brushed my teeth, washed my face and weighed myself... and the results were a bit shocking. I thought I would come out at around 15st 5lbs but in fact I am....drum roll please...

14st 9lbs!

I am incredibly pleased with this, especially since I remember very clearly when i was 15st 12lb... It's definitely given me hope.

Another shock of the day:

I calculated my BMI and i'm not obese like I thought (just...), i'm overweight and my ideal weight extends to around 12st 5lb! So in essence I need to lose around 2 and a half stone. I've set the goal on my ticker as 12st 3lbs if i remember correctly but ideally i'd like to end up at around 11 and a half. ONE STEP AT A TIME THOUGH.

I'm planning on going for a walk after work, get a bit of exercise.

Oh and one last thing:

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY

XXX

p.s. i laid off the cheerios this morning... lol

Yes indeedy...

Posted 3 Days Ago at 12:07 AM by elle2585
I went for that walk today, to a lovely place called Himley Hall where i've been before. There's an ace steep hill that I like to walk up...no...struggle up huffing and puffing and sweating like a maniac. Anyway, because it was relatively sunny and a friday evening there were lots of extra cool teenagers messing around. I was BEGGING THEM (within me) to bugger off but unfortunately this didn't work. When I got to it I was this close --> || to not going through with it, dreading some form off piss-taking from them. And then I thought, i'm not coming all the way to Himley Hall and NOT BLOODY WELL CLIMBING MY HILL!! So i turned up my headphones and went for it (looking immediately ahead of me at all times). And that, my friends, is the most exciting thing that's happened to me all day. Apart from the Holland - France match, that was awesome.

Food wise, i'm refusing to clear the dishes because I made some delish pasta and, in a typically greek way, made 50 times too much. I know i'll go in there and keep munching so someone else will have to get off their lazy ass. Basically.

I've done well today I think, i'm quite proud of myself .

Positive thoughts

Posted 23 Hours Ago at 12:06 PM by elle2585
Had an awful weekend but i've already posted about that so lets not go there. Positive for the rest of the week till the friday weigh in! I've had a small serving of special k so far today, although I was shocked to see theyre slightly more calorific than cheerios! Which makes me wonder why cheerios are supposed to be so bad... Anyway, I have my lunch with me - a little bit of rice and chicken, half a pitta bread and some yoghurt. Oh and a nectarine. Walk after work and my late night exercises and i'll be right back on track!! So it's all good. Just got to SMIIIILE now

I ALMOST DIED JUST NOW! In Greggs....!! Well fine, I didnt almost pop off to the place in the sky but the b*&%!@ds were giving out free bits of apple pie and cornish pasty! I was like, AAAAAH, get me out of heeeeeeeere before I cave in. Thankfully, dear friends, I did not. I think that brings my willpower up a few notches after my acheivements yesterday (please see the thread "yay everybody " under general discussion for more details.

In other news, i'm feeling a bit peckish. Might eat my lunch at one. Yum xxx

p.s. I wasn't in Greggs for myself, I was there picking up some lunch for my boss. do you see what these people put me through?!

Good afternoon dearest friends and acquaintances!! hope you all bode well on this fine sunny day!

Last night I was muchas fearful, as I was staying at my nan's house, and her favourite things include: 1)gardening 2)sewing and knitting etc.. 3)stuffing as much food as she can into me. She asked me what to cook and I said no chips please, so she made a traditional greek chick pea stew and we had it with some salad and wholemeal bread. And then I had some lovely watermelon, and declined the plate piled high with chocolates and biscuits as an accompaniment to my cuppa later on. I think I did quite well people, even if I do say so myself, so hurrah to me! Also, I absolutely love my nan's scales, as they make you around 6lbs lighter, lol. I think we should all go by those scales.

Today i had 2 slices of toast in the morning and half a cup of tea, and then a bit of leftover chick pea stew with half a roll of wholemeal bread and a nectarine for lunch. Walk after work and exercises before I go to bed....now it's just my dinner i've got to worry about! Incidentally, I did my exercises downstairs at my nan's house, and narrowly missed smacking my hands into the 'chandelier' (aka posh looking glass light fixture)...

Finally, a thought for tomorrow...my first weigh in after i've started dieting..and during the evening time i'm going to a bbq. REALLY need to be aware of what i'm eating!! Argh. Oh and on saturday i'll probably be going to Nandos!! So i'm thinking a bit of chicken with some rice, no chips or coleslaw. And keep the portion size down - i dont have to eat everything. Does that sound ok peeps?

Much love xxx

So i'm thinking a bit of chicken with some rice, no chips or coleslaw. And keep the portion size down - i dont have to eat everything. Does that sound ok peeps?

Click to expand...

Well done on planning ahead of time as I have found it does help when I have done it.

And you are right "you don't have to eat everything"

Love Mini xxx

Hi chick,

Good luck with ya diet plan, sounds fab. Can't believe ya had to go to greggs. TORTURE.

good luck elle

x x

thanks everybodyyyyyyy! weigh in tomorrow! wooooo. bet you anything now i'll be 5lbs heavier. haha x

Well, how incredibly depressing, i've lost but one measley pound. I find this really hard to accept since two days ago I weighed myself and came out at 14st 6lbs. Although I've been eating less and doing more exercise, and eating no crap at all, I think I blame it on an increase in carbs over the last couple of days. Today i'm drinking more water and have decided that from now on I will restrict myself to no carbs after 6pm. Does anyone agree that this might be the case? xxx

Right, not letting that bad result get to me, i'm starting afresh! The weekend went ok, I didn't eat loads and loads but did have pudding on Sunday. Today i'm limiting portion size as much as possible, going for my walk as usual and doin my exercises tonight. If i keep going i know i can get there...

Well, now then now then. This week I have lost 2lbs, which is twice as many as last week (incase there are those out there who really can't fathom the idea of having to solve mathematical problems). This week has been a week of realisation for me, in terms of the fact that I have realised where I had originally been hoing wrong, kind of... I had been cutting down on calories way too much, eating very little brekkie which was unable to sustain me throughout the morning and erm...well that's it I think.

Also, from this morning i'm eating porridge for brekkie with a little honey in. This morning I left making the porridge till quite late on before I had to leave, thinking "its ok, it only takes 2 1/2 minutes" Yep, 2 1/2 minutes to cook, 10 minutes to cool down, haha. Thus I have a burnt mouth this morning from trying to down hot porridge hahaha.

Ah well...onwards and upwards xxx

haha i think i should maybe post in my diary... all went a bit awry in the last few days. I was at an exhibition and it was a bit less busy as we'd hoped and there was a food section with lovely sausages and things so you all know the rest. yesterday was especially bad, but again it's a dusting off starting again thing....

i still lost weight last week which is a bit of a miracle, only 1 lb though. I'm not surprised at all, I need to boost my will power and be more stringent with what I will and wont eat. I'm not ruling anything out, but the odd treat doesnt mean 3 treats a day hahaha. I'm determined to do this 'diet' in a way that I can keep up forever. i've found that diets don't work for me at all as I end up putting weight. So sod it, i'll have the chips, or the roast potato but I'll balance it and make sure i eat as healthy as I can and not over eat. it's making my brain ache trying to get it round to this way of thinking but I WILL do it. And also either when I get home or tomorrow (depending on whether i'm tired when I get home as sometimes when I listen to it i fall asleep) i'm going to give the paul mckenna cd a listen.

I'm guzzling water as we speak and today is going well... i've had my porridge with honey, and for lunch a tuna sandwich and a nectarine. and around three glasses of water since then. desperate for the loo lol...I've decided not to weigh till friday now. I was weighing every morning in the last 2 weeks to figure out some stuff about why I wasn't losing as much weight as i'd hoped etc... now I've learnt the odd thing im going back to weigh ins once a week. We'll see if this way works and what I feel more comfortable with. On the plus size I seem to have lost an inch off my waist and and inch off my belly, although I doubt that's just from the 4lb loss as I havent measured myself in over a year lol.

Have a good day everyoooone xxxxxx

p.s. I read this article in the Sunday Times yesterday, thought it might be of interest x


Diets? Don't bother

They won't work and can even make you fatter, says author Geoffrey Cannon, the scourge of the slimming industry







Anita Chaudhuri


div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited {color:#06c;}Take a stroll into any bookshop and you won’t suspect a thing: the shelves are heaving with summer-diet tomes, from Crash Diet — Lose 7lbs in 7 Days to Bikini Bootcamp: Two Weeks to Your Ultimate Beach Body and, perhaps most optimistic of all, The Revenge Diet: Make Him Sorry He Dumped You! Lose 15lbs in a Month. Yet, despite appearances, the diet industry is in the throes of a backlash. It started with The Diet Delusion and Rethinking Thin, both of which challenged conventional wisdom about weight loss. Now comes something even more revolutionary, the splendidly titled Dieting Makes You Fat. Its author, Geoffrey Cannon, is unequivocal in his belief that dieting causes the very condition it is meant to cure.
His argument is simple: in evolutionary terms, the human body cannot distinguish between dieting and famine. We are hard-wired to respond to the threat of an insecure food supply by retaining body fat rather than burning it off, just as camels are biologically designed to store fat in humps to survive forays in the desert. “The more we endure cycles of dieting, the more our bodies become trained to seek out food, slow down vital functions and conserve body fat,” he says. Apparently, it’s evolution, not lack of willpower, that causes us to seek out sweet foods. “In the forest, sweetness was nature’s way of telling early humans that fruit was safe to eat.”
For anyone who has ever tried to stick to a diet, some of Cannon’s advice might come as a shock. He says that restricting calories is the worst possible way to achieve the body of your dreams. “If you have more body fat than you want, don’t even think of going on a diet,” he warns. “Be more physically active instead, and be patient. You need to train your body to build up lean tissue, which works more efficiently than body fat.” He isn’t advocating that you go and binge on Krispy Kremes, but suggests that if you are active, then you can enjoy a balance of good food — even cake.
Cannon points out that there are huge misconceptions about the link between physical activity and weight loss. “Many people, including GPs, mistakenly believe that the amount of exercise you need to take is huge, and they’re still thinking in terms of energy balance — for example, playing two hours of squash to work off a cupcake.” Researchers at Stanford University, however, found that people who exercised regularly burnt off 500-700 more calories a day than their sedentary counterparts. Crucially, fit bodies burnt off this energy largely during the time they were resting, not just while they were pounding away on the treadmill.
Somewhat unusually for a writer in this field, Cannon has direct experience of the misery of being overweight. He battled through a childhood fuelled by comfort eating following his parents’ divorce — fish and chips with pickled cucumbers, washed down with Tizer — and he continued to struggle through his years at Oxford, where he discovered the delights of cucumber sandwiches layered with butter and salt. He writes movingly about how his emotional hunger for a true home led him to overeat through marriage break-ups and career changes, including a stint at The Sunday Times, before he became a nutrition writer and campaigner. Eventually, it was running, not dieting, that got him on the path to thin.
Nor is Cannon jumping on the anti-diet bandwagon: Dieting Makes You Fat was originally a bestseller in 1983. He decided to write a 21st-century version of the book to tackle issues such as the global obesity time bomb and phenomena such as Atkins, about which he is dismissive. “It’s quite tricky to know what he was going on about,” he says. “In as much as I understand, if you’re on 1,500 calories a day, and are not encouraged to take any physical activity, then it’s not going to work. I don’t care how many people say it does.” Fortuitously, research published by UCLA last year, while Cannon was working on the new edition, concluded that — guess what? — diets don’t work.
The lead author of the study, Traci Mann, noted: “You can initially lose 5%-10% of your weight on any number of diets, but then the weight comes back. We found that the majority of people regained all the weight, plus more.” The success rate for maintaining weight loss five years after a diet ends is estimated at only 5%.
“People make the mistake of judging the success of a diet at the point that it is stopped,” says Cannon, who points out that this is like assessing the state of your finances based on the one day in the month when your account is in the black. “It’s madness. Dieting triggers the body to go into reversal. When people come off a regime, it’s a form of the bulimic syndrome. They find they can’t stop eating. I’ve had that when coming off a diet, and it’s scary.”
Is this really true of every diet, even a teensy crash diet in the week before you hit the beach? Apparently, these are the worst: restricting calorie intake by anything more than 200 calories a day will trigger a rebound effect, and the more drastic and long-lasting the diet, the worse the rebound once it ends. In some studies, people coming off a diet were forced to eat up to 10,000 calories a day — and still reported feeling hungry.
“People often ask me, ‘If this is all true, why haven’t I heard it before?’ Well, my response is, ‘In whose interests is it to tell you?’ The diet industry sells its wares on the basis of repeat custom — if a diet doesn’t work, it’s your fault. It’s time for a paradigm shift. Much of what our bodies do is beyond the control of our minds.”
Cannon accepts that, to most people, the idea that we don’t have control over our appetites is not an attractive one. “That’s why there was such an outcry about Fern Britton’s gastric-band surgery. She knew all along that dieting wasn’t the reason she lost the weight. People don’t want to admit that. I’m sure she is by no means the only high-profile figure to have had one fitted secretly,” he observes, before speculating wildly on other — unprintable — likely candidates.
“Claims made by the diet industry appeal to our base desires, like the e-mail spam messages saying you have won £5m or can enjoy multiple orgasms for ever,” Cannon says. “The dieting business is fabulous. It sells dreams. But dreams rarely come true.”
Dieting Makes You Fat by Geoffrey Cannon (Virgin Books £16.99)

See I knew the first time you posted on this site you had no diary...and I never checked since...until today.

But now I have found it...and it shall be getting read!

So keep it updated

haha my first frequent reader. thanks muchas hope you enjoyed satc. i shall be on a bit later with an update