Month: October 2008

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lesamy

Lesamy Week 5 – Weekend Away

Firstly apologies because I know I’m a day late with this post. All I can say is I was busy.

Secondly apologies because I know I need to post some reviews or some other non-Lesamy stuff for those of you who just-don’t-care-about-the-diet. I’ll get to that, I really will.

The Land of Temptation

So I spent the weekend at M.’s place. Something I do about once every six weeks, two months, or so. But this was the first time since I started the diet. On the one hand I was determined not to let my diet affect her so I wanted to eat normally (or close to it) whilst I was there. By which I meant I would not count calories just keep an eye on portion size. On the other I knew this would still be more than my usual amount and set my expectations low as a result. Back on the first hand again, when I started this adventure I decided I could have a 2300 calorie pig-out day once a week and so far I’ve had none. So this could be five weeks of treats in one weekend.

How Did I Do?

Well the good news is that I pretty much stuck to the eat normally part. The keep an eye on portion size part went out the window and I was back to the old me portion wise. But I did avoid eating between meals. Mostly.

Friday we had a takeaway, Saturday a home-cooked meal and Sunday a meal out (I had starter and main). In between I had toast and sandwiches and water. We did a fair amount of walking around.

A Gift that Counts

Whilst I was there M. bought me a pedometer which was cool. It’s my new favourite toy. Now my spreadsheet has all sorts of extra info on it. I’ve discovered my normal walk in the park is 3 miles and that I expend ~500 calories doing it (fewer than I thought). I’m using it to make sure my weekend walks, which are non-park and can be a bit random, are roughly equivalent.

I Can Eat What I Want?

Anyway, once I got back from a great, if indulgent, weekend I weighed myself and here’s the shock: not only had I lost weight (I’d’ve been happy breaking even) I lost exactly the same as last week. I lost the average amount I’ve been losing these past 5 weeks. Weird huh?

So that means I lost 2.4kg, 5.3lbs and in total have lost 12kg, 26.5lbs or almost 2st. It means I’m a few pounds away from my 10% reduction milestone. I’d originally planned on hitting that by Christmas.

Time to Slow Down?

This raises the big question of whether I should slow down. I’m still averaging over 5lbs a week, more than twice the recommended amount. And what’s interesting is that my extra exercise probably only accounts for about a pound of that per week. So am I going to slow down, do less, eat more? Probably not. I am starting from a high base and I’m sure the rate will slow. I haven’t done the maths but I suspect that my old diet was something like 3,500 calories a day, or higher and so dropping to 1800 is a bigger change than it might have been. I’m inclined to take advantage of this rate of loss whilst I can. I’m in this for the long haul anyway and it’ll still be next year before I’m at my ideal weight and I’ll be consciously maintaining it for the next year or two. (hopefully after that I’ll have learnt enough good habits to not put it all back on).

Categories
lesamy

Lesamy Week 4 – Exercise

So week 4 was a week when I was back at work. This presented an interesting challenge – when to fit in my daily exercise walk. At first I tried in the morning before work. This was a 40min walk rather than the 2x30mins I did when I was off work. I did it for a couple of days but it was hard going. Then I tried after work, but walking around the park as the sun is going down is not ideal. In a couple of weeks when DST ends I’d be walking in the dark, don’t fancy that. Thursday I did a special expeditionary walk. Work is moving to a new build a mile or two down the road sometime before the end of the year and so I thought I’d go take a look at it. That made 2x16mins. Friday I decided what the heck and did a walk into town and back (2x22mins).

So perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a shock but after only a week of less (not no) exercise when I went back to my 2x30mins park walk on Saturday I found it tough going. I found it even tougher yesterday. It was foggy when I got up and so I went out wearing my coat. Ten minutes into my walk and the sun came out. I think it was that as much as anything that caused it to be tough. Oh and I painted my bathroom yesterday, which turned out to be more exercise than I thought.

Too Fat to get Fit

In the midst of all this I thought about buying some kind of walking machine, a treadmill or cross-trainer. You can get a cheap one for under £100. I could do as long or as little as I liked and watch TV whilst I was doing so. I saw one they had in Tesco and despite my normal on-a-whim purchasing habits I decided to see what else was available online. I’m glad I did.

It turns out that these machines go from £70-80 to £3000+. It also turns out that the cheaper ones have a weight limit that I’m over. In fact I’d still be over it when I hit my 10% reduction target. I guess it makes sense, cheaper materials means less sturdy means weight limit. As you go up the price scale you get machines that can take more weight but I had to go to £800 to find one that I could be confident of not breaking.

A bit of a depressing irony to find I’m to fat (and poor) to get fit. Actually after checking out ebay I found I could probably get a treadmill for £250ish that would do, but by now I’d completely gone off the idea. Walking into town as exercise may be a bit odd but it’s free.

A Nice Surprise

So after all that lesser exercise I was fully braced for a smaller loss this week. Instead I found I’ve lost 2.4kg (5.3lbs) a total loss so far of 9.6kg (21lbs). I’m down a half a belt notch – by which I mean I can fasten it one notch down but it’s more comfortable at the original one.

Categories
lesamy

Lesamy Week 3

Another good week. Points of interest:

  • I’ve added home-cooked pasta to my list of meals. This means that I’m progressing slightly more to my eventual goal of not only eating less but eating better. Again this was something I did because it allowed me to make a filling meal with less calories than I’d’ve managed otherwise. (Thus freeing up enough in my daily allowance for some chocolate!)
  • I’ve gone down an extra couple of belt notches – making three in all. I was thinking to myself how this was a great way to follow my progress when I realised that a lot of people use a similar method – it’s called a tape measure! D’oh!
  • I’ve noticed a difference in how much and how well I can cope with exercise. I’m now up to an hour’s brisk walking per day (actually 2 x 30mins) as my main exercise regime. This is gratifying although whilst it still must be burning calories it’s no longer significantly raising my heart rate, so in terms of overall fitness it’s less effective. However the main goal is weight loss. When I’m a little lighter on my feet (literally) I’ll consider some more aggressive forms of exercise.
  • I can now do sit-ups! All my agonizing about “Am I losing it too fast?” is really about “Will I end up with lots of loose skin?” So one of the things I’ve been wanting to do is exercise that will build muscle where I’ll be losing flab – in my case my stomach. However a couple of weeks ago I tried to do a sit-up. First, due to my present centre of gravity, there was the the rather comical sight of my legs going up until I could rock myself forward and then bring my upper body down in something approaching the correct fashion. So then I tried with my feet under the bed. That held my legs down and I did a couple of sit-ups but I soon felt a tightness as if I was in danger of rupturing something. I left it, but then tried again the other day and found that I can now do sit-ups without feeling like I might literally split in half. So a few (very few at this stage) sit-ups have been added to my daily round.

All this has led to this week’s result of another 1.9 kg (4.2lbs) lost. So my new running total is 7.2kg, 15.9lbs or (in English money) 1st 2lbs. I’ve lost more than a stone!

So I’m now halfway to where I’d thought I’d be by Christmas. And my awful confession is that after three weeks of worrying if it’s coming off too fast I looked at the scales this morning and was a teeny tiny bit disappointed that the rate has actually started to slow. I know, I know, you can’t win with me. I whinge when it’s too much and whinge when it’s too little.

Categories
writing

Hold That Thought

I’m a bit backed up with blog posts, which is odd considering I’m off work right now and (theoretically) have oodles of free time. I should be reviewing either Merlin ep 2 (more of the same as ep 1 really), the Chuck season 2 opener (spent too long re-establishing the premise) or The Man in the High Castle (what the hell was that about?). Also I watched The Island on TV the other night and felt like blogging (i.e. whinging) about how if they hadn’t tried to make a big dumb action movie they’d have made an only slightly dumb, if derivative, Sci Fi flick. Oh and there’s always Buffy Re-watch to get back to.

But instead of all that I’m going to talk about writing and my on-going love/hate relationship with it.

I’ve just signed up for two big writing commitments. The first is Slingink’s “Eurofiction” competition, which is a short story is due every two weeks for twenty weeks. Points are awarded and whoever has the highest total score at the end wins a prize (and much glory and bragging rights obviously). I actually entered a similar competition that’s just finishing – The Write Idea’s “Whitaker Prize” – however after I failed to enter in round 3 and 4 I just bailed on that.

Second commitment is NaNoWriMo. As you may have noticed I’ve changed my blog theme again, apologies for that I’ll try to stick with this one for a while. This is partly because I wanted one where I could add tabs across the top and have NaNoWriMo with links to my profile and progress etc.

So I am officially getting back on the writing horse and shouting “giddyup” in a nervous and slightly excited way.

Which brings me to my main topic. A new twist on the perennial “do I really hate writing and does that mean I’m destined not to be a writer?” question. As I sat at the keyboard last night, not typing, remembering how much I truly hate this part, the beginning part, the part where you think that every shred of imagination or trickle of inspiration has fled far far away – as I thought on this I was reminded of something I wrote in a forum at the beginning of this year:

What actually happened was that I started 10 minutes late, stared at the
challenge requirement for 10 minutes before coming up with the germ of
an idea. I then wrote for about an hour, producing 850 words of pure
drivel. That idea, that cute little, perfectly formed concept of my
imagination had become this crap on the page because I lack the skill to
put it into words, apparently.

I received some comforting words about turning a deaf ear to my inner critic, who to be fair is pretty fierce, but I think I’m developing a theory about the way I write. When I look at the most successful, and by that I mean the most well-received, pieces that I’ve written, they are either flashes or stories where I took the time to re-work them significantly after the initial draft. I recall I had to write a story-within-a-story piece for a challenge and I went through 3 versions of the inner story before I finally committed. I found it painful and difficult. Real work in fact.

Secondly almost always the first draft is complete crap. Not only that but my inner critic will scream at me that it’s not even worth finishing and I should just ditch it and start on something new. Sometimes I listen to this. I have a limited amount of time to give to writing and I’m not a fast writer. I wish I could sit down with an idea, toss off 1,000 words quickly and treat it as an experiment. I can do that but the 1,000 words may take a couple of days.

You see there are ways to overcome that initial block, that blankness of mind and page. I find simply writing what I’m thinking (complete with negative commentary) works for me. Each time I start anew I have the fresh fear that this time nothing really will come but it usually does. An idea, a bright shining little spark, lighting the way to the story as a whole. And for a brief moment I’m excited and engaged, if it’s a good idea, or at least charmed with the possibility enough to want to give it a try.

But I find that spark is usually a single flash. A moment’s illumination during which I need to memorize as much details as possible because once it’s gone I’ll be groping along in the dark relying solely on my recall of the features around me. And it’s at this point that the fear and doubt kick in. I wish I could simply get that first draft down on the computer whilst the light is still fading and the after images burned clearly on my retinas. If I could only do that then I would have something, a draft, something I can tweak, edit, re-write, even rip the guts out of and re-work structurally – but a place to start. But often I can’t get that far because the light of inspiration has long since died and I’ve allowed all the criticisms of the idea to come in. “It’s not that original/plausible/interesting/clever.”

So I think, for me, a major skill I need to learn is to holding on to the initial thought, that idea that got me started, for the duration of the task of writing, at least the first draft. Since my attention span seems to have a radioactive half-life that’s not particularly easy but it’s something I want to develop. Half the battle is turning off, drowning out, the inner critic but that is only half the battle. The other half is holding on to the idea. I think that’s why I’ve had more success with 250-word flashes where I can write the thing in an evening. I’ve also had some success with longer stories but where I was prepared to really work at maintaining the vision. I had to keep reminding myself what the story was about, even if I secretly doubted that that “what” was worth doing. I haven’t written a novel (yet) but I imagine that holding the thought for weeks and months will be one of the biggest challenges involved.

So anyway that’s what I’ve been thinking about. And it’s why I think NaNoWriMo will be very very good for me.