Struggling

**** UPDATE ****

I'm nervous!! In just under an hour I'm doing my first test towards the paper I'm doing! It's worth 20% of the final mark. I will be glad when it's over! Silly but I do feel churned up inside. Oh I've been going well - day three of tracking, drinking piles of water and extra exercise and feeling great!! Will update over the weekend...

It took me a few years to reach my heaviest weight of around 98 kilos. I hovered around this weight for quite a few years, eating what I wanted and exercise was an unknown word. I kidded myself that as my body had stabilised here, this was the weight I was meant to be! I was ignoring the type of food I was eating and also ignoring the fact that I was very inactive. I ate what ever I wanted and managed to stay around this weight.

Then the light bulb moment when I decided to do something about it and did. But now I'm finding it all a huge struggle. Looking back you would think that if I could eat what ever I liked and not exercise and constantly stay much the same weight, that now by eating healthy and exercising it should be easy. It's not!! I'm gutted after not weighing in for a couple of weeks to find this morning that my weight was 73 kilos!! This is about 4 kilos now from my lightest weight. I've changed my lifestyle, my way of eating, my choices of food, I've increased my exercise, yet I can see how bloody easy it would be for me to just slowly gain back more and more!! It's not going to happen. For months, well ever since Christmas I've found it just so hard to get back the control I used to have. While I'm happy that I haven't given up, I'm also happy that the lifestyle I live now is so different to what I used live, that I have changed - it's not stopping the scales from slowly heading upwards. I manage a couple of days tracking and then just slowly slip back into helping myself to little bits here and there.

Yesterday I found myself for about the third time that day heading back into the pantry and having 'just a couple' of cashews from an open packet. Not the best food to forget about eating. Do you know what I did - I had to throw them out!! I grabbed the packet and shoved them as far as I could into the rubbish! A waste, but yep I knew the whole packet would be gone, maybe all not in one day but over a few. To start with I had the control that I could overlook goodies lying around, but it's gone! I'm not sure what the answer is, but I have to get the control back.

OK - 73 kilos - I will weigh in (at home) this time next week and see if I can make a difference. This week FOR THE WHOLE WEEK:
I'm tracking - EVERYTHING
I'm drinking water - not just a couple of glasses, at least 2 litres daily!!

Exercise - I still exercise daily, I know I have to increase it, but my ankle knows when it's done a bit too much, also (I'm falling to bits) with my other leg I'm sstill having problems with the back of my knee, going down into the calf muscle, so I'm watching what I do here. I think another session at the physio is in the pipeline. All I'm managing is a daily session of aqua, (no gym or walks) somedays I can feel when I've overdone it, just a certain movement will trigger it off.

Also it may be time for me to get back to weighing in at WW again, I haven't for ages. Reasons - well I found the weekly weigh either resulted in a high for losing a little bit of weight or bitter disappointment that even after a good week I wouldn't get the result I expected. So my whole week used to revolve on what the scales showed on the weigh in day. Hard to explain but as I plateaued I found using the weekly result on the scales hard to deal with.

There has been so many times this past year that I've thought - this is it! Then just so many times that after just a couple of days I slip back into being careless. When we had the move the other day for the carpet laying I found an old photo of me, (there aren't many of those about as I used to avoid the camera) I got a shock to see it, as I'm not very tall 98 kilos on me made me look like a barrel. I'm keeping that photo out as a reminder as I'm not going back there!!!

As I said before I'm not sure what the answer is for me to get back the control, I guess I just have to keep working at it, and keep looking at that photo!