Renewed

Morning!

It feels very Spring-like today, the sun in shining, I have finally been able to abandon my winter coat in favour of last season’s ¾ length sleeve tan leather jacket (which, PTL still fits!!) , and the sky is blue.

I feel very hopeful today. I think this is because it’s the first day of Lent. I love Lent. I love everything about it, what it signifies both personally and actually, what it leads to and what that means for the world and for me, as just one little (fat) person.

I also feel hopeful on account of last night’s WW meeting. A friend of mine, new to the actual meeting part of WW, put it like this “I feel like I’ve just had some sort of Damascus road experience…am converted!” I kinda had that same ‘newbie’ vibe last night as IWWG expertly demonstrated just HOW WELL you can eat on this plan and still have room for treats. I actually listened (not that I don’t usually, but I tried to have the attitude of being new to the plan so that I would appreciate it more)
And I think it worked. I got home all energised, did not buy wine, did not buy a humongous bag of Kettle Chips (OMACTUAL G how goooooooooooooood are they?!) and chuffing well made what I‘d set out to make…Pasticcio. Page 56 of the imaginatively titled, ‘Shop & Cook’. Kinda like Lasagne but with penne pasta…it was really yummy for 7 ½ points (though I think next time I might add on a point and put some more finely grated parmesan into the white sauce to flavour it a bit more). We had it with a spinach salad, with cherry tomatoes, ww balsamic dressing, red peppers and spring onions. The recipe was for 4 people, Mr Husband ate 2 portions (oink!) whereas I had one and the rest went dans la Frigidaire. So I made it through Tuesday on 20 points which was a job well done.

Thing I need to work on next is my lunches. I often wing it through lunchtime so am absolutely starvin’ like Marvin by the time I get home. I need to plan more bulky, filling lunches that keep me satisfactorily full till dinner time.

With that in mind, I am channelling my inner ‘Laura’ ((http://www.thresholdofgreatness.blogspot.com/) and have today brought in a potato to bake in the office kitchen (2 and a half) with two laughing cow cheese triangles (1) and a big spinach salad same as last night (0), plus an apple (1/2) and a small banana (1).

For breakfast I had the divine combo of 50g porridge oats (2 ½) , milk and a 13g tsp scoop of crunchy low fat peanut butter (1 ½) and one tsp Splenda….good GRIEF it’s gorgeous! Seriously. Try it!

So running total for today thus far is 9. Dinner tonight will be a quick one as Husband is working this evening, so I am making whole-wheat penne pasta with a jar of ww sauce (lazy I know but it needs to be quick) and I am going to dry fry a courgette, mushrooms, red onion, garlic and 2 rashers of ww bacon (1) to go into it. I will use 4 servings of pasta and bring the rest to work with me for lunch tomorrow, thus making good on my promise to eat sturdier lunches rather than scoffing 8 crisp breads and wondering why I’m not full…

See how positive I am?!

Also….and I have wrestled with myself a LOT over whether or not to talk about it here BUT I am going to otherwise I won’t stick to it!!

I am giving up wine for Lent* AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I LOVE wine. I absolutely LOVE IT. I don’t like cheap wine, I don’t like being drunk but I actually HEART wine a whole lot. It’s gorgeous. I love everything about it, and there’s nothing I like more than getting together with a beloved gal pal and chin wagging over a glass of wine, or relaxing after a helluva day with a cheeky glass, supping champers on special occasions, toasting success and new ventures, and for me wine is the ultimate social symbol. But it’s also full of sugar and adds inches around the chin (somewhere I quite frankly DO NOT need further bloody inches thank you!) and I DEFINTELY see a link in my psychology between drinking wine and sacking off my healthy eating and diving head first into the crisps and munching myself into oblivion and before I know it, I’ve blown a day’s points on wine and crisps. Nice. This then leads to the ‘well I’ve ruined it now, there’s no way I’ll lose so I may as well sack it off till after the next weigh in, so I do and believe me I can be FULLY dedicated to sacking something off when I set my mind to it, in fact I excel at it. No joke. And then of course there’s a gain or even worse a stay the same at the scale and then my resolve further weakens and so the beat goes on…sound familiar?

Because Lent means a lot to me, and I take it seriously, it seemed as good a time as any to try and break this psychological pattern!

In CBT we call it goal setting. It’s not particularly a hugely clever psychological concept, more like common bloody sense if you ask me BUT it ACTUALLY works! You work with the client to identify the ‘trigger’ that sets them off on their pattern of behaviour which is maybe physical, maybe psychological and you work to change it.

My trigger is the ‘woo hoo the bottle’s open let’s sack off the diet’ attitude, so if I remove the ability to HAVE wine (and because of Lent I know I will respect the embargo) (not to mention coz I’ve bloody put it on here and there’s too many of you who will remind me!) then there goes the thing that causes the trigger and my devil-may-care attitude to alcohol and food.

So. Is it still possible for me to be *ME* without the vino. Well, we shall see!

Let me be clear. I am still allowed alcohol, come on now – I’m not a saint! But the odd G&T or martini and tonic, vodka and diet coke don’t hold the same sacred place in my heart that my beloved wine does, and therefore does not have the same appeal or pull to me which results in my diet going out the window.

It’s about balance. This way I can still have a social drinky when I’m out and about (ie in Manchester this weekend with my best man and my sister) BUT this way I am perhaps better placed to be in control of it and therefore my eating, or at least the resulting days!

I shall OBVIOUSLY keep you posted. 40 days is a loooooooonnnnnnnng time.

*GULP*

PS During the time it has taken me to write this post, the skies have darkened, become overcast and I have had to put my little electric office heater on on account of the fact that I have short sleeves and a stupid 3/4 length sleeved jacket .....it's not Spring at all. GAH!