Thursday 12 January - does anyone out there like cottage cheese??

I am trying to warm to cottage cheese, but to be honest it’s just not happening.

So far I’ve tried the versions with garlic, with pineapple and with chives and it still looks and tastes like sick.  £3 down the drain this week so far, and that’s likely to increase as I’m also trying to enamour myself to plain yoghurt but don’t hold out much hope.

On the exercise front at work, I have taken to continually lifting and lowering the waste paper bin between my ankles to coincide with every call I take.  If it’s a short call it’s fine. Unfortunately if it’s a longer one then it’s a little trickier and in fact one tenant did sympathise with me today and tell me that she too suffers with emphysema and had I tried raw egg, because it certainly works for her.

Hmmm.  I wonder if raw egg helps with slimming as well as emphysema.  It can’t be any more revolting than cottage cheese or plain yoghurt surely?

Food today:

Toast with a scrape of marmite for breakfast.

2 bananas

1 fruit yoghurt

4 ryvitas with the briefest scraping of various varieties of cottage cheese (the rest was dumped in the bin)

Jacket potato with tuna (no butter) and a big mixed salad.

One bite of pizza (left on himself’s plate – waste not want not).

Bowl of Alpen with dates and bananas on top plus 5 chocolate drops (kid II put these on as she thought I was trying to make a pattern on top of the cereal…)

Half a Bounty Bar – it was kid II’s fault, she gave me the taste for chocolate.

Bed time now.

I am knackered.

I had to run 60 times up and down the flipping stairs in order to eat the chocolate drops, pizza and Bounty.

Himself said: ‘nevermind your figure woman, think of my hall carpet!’.

Honestly. There’s no pleasing some people is there!

Monday 9 January - I mean business now!

After a disastrous start – not a bean lost so far – I am stepping up the action this week.

My plan is this.  Before eating any treat I will force myself to run up and down the stairs 20 times. I’m serious.

No treats eaten today.

Sunday 8 January 2012 - and the weight loss so far is ..... ???

Woke up with a nice empty feeling today.  Loads of energy and am I imagining it or does my tum look flatter?

Put my MP3 on and took the hound for a king-sized walk very early, because rain was forecast for later on.

Don’t know what came over that mutt but one minute I was merrily singing along to Katherine Jenkins, and the next minute, the dog did a kamikaze dive towards the wheels of a double decker bus trundling up the road towards us. 

 Okay, so I admit, I was just attempting a bit of harmonising with Katherine when it happened …  and okay again, maybe I WAS just slightly out of key … but god, what a diva-ish overreaction from the hairy thing on four legs!

Mother came for lunch today.  I told Himself to grab her scales when he picked her up, but in the event he forgot, and I ended up having to weigh myself when I dropped her home again at the end of the day - by which time I’d had a roast lunch and some apple pie and custard for pud, and then a Magnum ice-cream which Mother dearest treated me to at the local garden centre in the afternoon.

As a result of the above, I regret to say that my net weight loss so far is, umm.  Zero.

Saturday 7 January - The weekends are easier ....

The weekends are easier.

In the week, I spend 7 hours a day chained to a desk with a headset clamped to my skull doing customer-servicey type work like advising people what to do about wasps nests, fallen fences, rent arrears or transfers.

I work for a Housing Association in the Customer Services Team… a bunch of real gannets we are – a “pod” of 6 of us with two desks at the end of the pod designed to hold all of our forms and stationery, but which in fact is usually stacked high with nibbles and treats to get us through the day.  It’s not conducive to slimming let me tell you.  A nightmare.

Today though – no work.  I had food shopping to do first thing, but packed 3 rich tea biscuits into a little biscuit holder thingie I got from Lakeland Plastics (99p – what a bargain) and ate these in the check-out queue in Asda when cake cravings threatened to get the better of me).

Came home and made he-who-must-be-obeyed his usual all-day-fry-up. 

Decided to fill myself up at the same time on the basis that if I eat once, now, (now being 11am) then maybe I wont keep running to the fridge all day long and grazing!   

So!  With this (lovely) thought in mind, I had two toasted doorstep sized slices of Asda fresh bread, topped with oodles of baked beans, into which I grated a lot of cheddar cheese … and then zapped in the microwave for 30 seconds so that the cheese was all gooey and stringy.

OMG it was so scrummy.   Heaven knows how many calories were in that little lot, but guess what? It worked!!! I didn’t eat anything else all day long, and didn’t feel remotely peckish until about 8pm, at which point it was easy to ignore the pangs, have a bath, read my library book and go to bed – more peckish but not keeling over – at 10.30pm.

Friday 6 January 2012 - dining out on a diet .. no slip ups for me!

Out for dinner this evening – my friend’s birthday. 

Boy was I saintly.

They had a special offer running – 2 courses for £11, dinner and pudding.

But they didn’t catch me!

No sirreeee.

I had one course for £8.99 and left it at that. 

Fish cakes, jacket potato and salad.

I read a tip somewhere which said that if you constantly jiggle your ankles then you speed up your metabolism.  So I spent the whole meal jiggling my ankles and hope to have saved a few calories in the process!

Pretty impressed with myself tonight.

Other food today:

Bowl of coco-pops before leaving for work (I had a chocolate craving).

One cream cheese sandwich with cucumber and lettuce (no butter) at 10am (I had food cravings in general).

Carrot slices. Tomatoes. One apple. One pear. One banana. (didn’t have fruit or veg. cravings but this was all that was left in my bag).

Half a doughnut in the afternoon - it wasn’t my fault … they were plonked on the end of our pod within sniffing distance – I mean what is a girl to do??.  I resisted eating the whole doughnut, but admit I scooped out all of the jam before binning one half.

Goodish-but not perfect.

Thursday 5 January 2012 - housework to music .. it's cheaper than the gym

Getting up at 6.30am now instead of 7am. How saintly am I?

I don’t even bother to wash, just grab the dog’s lead and get straight out for a brisk walk and to buy the newspaper.

Did some more cleaning in the lounge when I got back.   The traffic jam building up outside must have wondered what the hell I was doing, as I decided to clean the tiny leaded-light window pains in a circular motion in time to Phantom of The Opera which unfortunately did look as though I was waving at everyone …. .I could swear one young whipper-snapper gave me the finger before driving off…!

Very rude.

Two bananas for breakfast today.  And a cup-o-soup – cream of vegetables with croutons (so probably not the low cal version)

4 Ryvitas with butter, cheese and red-onion relish for lunch.

4 plums, 4 satsumas. 6 squares of Galaxy chocolate.

Alpen for tea again with banana on top.

Then a bag of crisps late evening.

Wednesday 4 January 2012 - the first weigh in ....

You know the diet is working when you get a raging headache and a horrible metal taste in the mouth. 

Woke up with both today. Yippee.

Walked extra fast and a bit farther with the dog this morning. 

Polished the lounge whilst dancing vigorously to my new SuBo CD (Christmas present from kid II).  Then left for work.

Ryvitas and cheese at 11am. I know it’s the same as yesterday, but routine seems to keep me on the straight and narrow.

Carrot sticks looking like miniature leaning towers of Piza today. Definitely on the turn. Couldn’t face the humus so had 2 scottish all butter shortcake biscuits from the office goodie tin instead.   Not good but not the end of the world either.   120 calories each.  How many calories in humus by comparison I wonder ….? 

Can’t be bothered to look it up and compare actually, in case it’s bad news.

A bowl of Alpen for tea with 5 dates stuck on top.   Yum. I love dates.  These dates were actually 11 days “out of date” according to the sticky label on the box, but it was covering up the calorie content which I took to be a good omen, so I decided to eat them anyway.

Live dangerously, that’s my motto!

Went to mother’s in the evening and got a shock to find I am a hefty 12 stone 1lb according to her scales. Surely that can’t be right?  They are old Boots ones, circa 1970.  Personally I think they’re a bit ‘out’.  I was going to put them in the wheelie bin, but mother told me that even if they are ‘out’ they will still record what you lose when you’re dieting and this is all  you need to know really …  n’est pas?  

(my mother says n’est pas a lot.  She is French).

 Hmmmm.

These pensioners can be quite bolshy at times can’t they?

Tuesday 3 January 2012 - definitely starting today.....

Right. Action stations.

Back to work. Biked in. Biked home at lunch time. Biked back again. And Biked home in the evening.  (it sounds good but it’s actually only 10 minutes each way and all on the flat!).

Got soaked by some idiot in a 4 x 4 who I swear drove through a whacking great puddle on purpose, just to see me get soaked.

As a result, my bag (and the Ryvitas in it) were slightly soggy by the time I retrieved them (some hours later when I started to get peckish).

Still ate them though .. needs must and all that.

My diddy little carrot sticks were tasteless (not surprising really, they are over a week old – why did I think we’d need 2 kilo’s of carrots for Christmas dinner??!) and the humus to go with them was too hot. I chose it because it was knocked down to 80p a pot in Asda, but I’d omitted to notice that it was humus with chilli – that’s possibly why they knocked it down. Probably no one liked it.

Ate 5 satsumas in the afternoon. Not because I needed them but because they were definitely starting to disintegrate and I do hate wasting food.

Bowl of Weetabix for dinner.

And that was my lot.

Not bad eh?

I am going to mother's tomorrow evening for a natter, so I will take the opportunity to hop onto her scales while I'm there....I don't possess scales here. I did once. But I threw them in the wheelie bin when I didn't like the numbers they would keep displaying.

Monday 2 January 2012 - and so we begin. Or don't.

Okay. My New Year’s Resolution this year is to record what I eat and hopefully shame myself into changing my habits and losing some blubber.

It’s long overdue – I’m in my 50’s now and year on year I seem to get a bit blobbier and a bit wider in girth …

Plus, it gets harder as the years go by to lose it!

Oh I can still see my toes (not sure I can still touch them mind you) and I don’t get out of puff yet when I run up the stairs.

But some of my friends who are slightly heavier than me are starting to get pains in their hips and knees now – I dread the thought of being in pain and losing any mobility – hence this blog and the determination to step up to the mark and do something constructive!

Ahem….. not today mind you ……  today is a bank holiday and we have friends coming round for lunch.

I’ll start tomorrow …

LOOK IT IS NEW YEAR YOU KNOW!!!!