Well……DUH!

Good morrow friends….I have had something of an epiphany, a ‘eureka!’ moment, if you will….

Allow me to elaborate…..

At weigh in on Saturday I was back UP by .5lb (as I had sneakily discovered on Tuesday by checking on the official ww scales at the meeting I weigh at but do not weigh IN at……yeah, yeah I know I shouldn’t do it but quite honestly I LIKE a mid-week indicator of how I am doing.) and was most annoyed. Obviously. What the flip is happening here?!

Then again, I did eat paella late on Friday night (had the Barcelona chicas round) all home made - I tries to be as weightwatchery as possible but making authentic paella demands authentic olive oil and rice is heavy and sits in my stomach for an eternity or so it would seem, so I think I probably stayed the same in all reality but nonetheless I am recording my weight as it was on Saturday (hello 169 lbs AGAIN!).

So I have been sitting here today in between work tasks, mulling over the whole situation and thinking ‘what am I NOT doing?’. It’s so easy to kid yourself that you are doing everything possible to remain on plan and thus lose weight.

Because I am anal and also borderline OCD, I have kept all of my food diaries from the initial (and successful) ww period of 2006/7. This means I know precisely what I ate on 10th October 2006, for example. Pretty useless, you might think, but think again comrades, for this is what has brought about aforementioned ephiphany!

In a mind-wandering-y way, I began looking back through these lists and it occurred to me to look closely at what I ate on weekends back then……and all of a sudden it hit me. There they were, all my weekend’s eatings gloriously tracked and pointed. The reason I was losing so successfully could possibly have something to do with the fact that I stayed on plan for 7 out of 7 days rather than 4.5 days out of 7 which, if I’m honest, I’m doing now. It hits Friday and I’m like ‘woo hoo’!

I know, I know, this is nothing new, so maybe calling it ‘epiphany’ is a tad OTT, but nonetheless something has clicked in my brain. I CANNOT expect to lose at a consistent rate if I do not track the weekends. It’s all very easy to be super-disciplined during office hours but the weekends are an unfettered danger zone if ever there was one!

Good grief Elizabeth! *rolls eyes at self*

Take this weekend for example, I was very careful all day to minimise pointage and maximise filling foods as I knew I was having a dinner party on Friday evening. The paella was pointed, as was the pan amb tomaquet, as was the salad, I even made fresh non alcoholic 1 point strawberry bellinis for sobbing out loud!

Karen modelling the paella

Yummy paella being cooked - chicken and chorizo plus red and green peppers and tomatoes, plus apella rice and saffron, turmeric and garlic and onion.

Fresh strawberry, non-alcoholic bellini anyone?!

And then the girls brought dessert – Belgian chocolate Hagen Dazs ice cream and freaking chocolate fudge cake. And I had 2 glasses of wine. I had a teeny pieceof cake, one scoop of ice cream – BUT I DIDN’T COUNT IT! It does not feature on my tracker at all……alas the other half of said cake DID feature pretty heavily in my fridge the following day

Chocolate Fudge Cake in situ!

(Seconds later it was in the bin!)

….luckily as I got the urge to scoff the lot I quickly took a picture and sent it to Rachel just before tossing the cake into the bin (garbage, trash) as proof to myself I wouldn’t eat it. I didn’t even want it! I was just in a bad mood and bored so was having an acute attack of the munchies, so instead I made ham and coleslaw sandwiches with ww bread which was much fillinger (!?) and didn’t make me feel like I wanted to hurl!

So Saturdays section for tracking was pretty empty, as was Sundays. And as I look back through my weekly trackers, therein lies the common theme old beans.

LIZZIE MUST TRACK ON WEEKEND AND NOT HAVE A HIATUS AS A REWARD FOR DOING IT ALL WEEK!


Not bloomin’ rocket science but there you have it!

To this end, I have changed my tracker layout to begin on Saturday (when I weigh in) and end on Friday(before I get weighed), in the hope that I will actually begin to fill these columns in. Clever stuff innit!

I have also for the past few weeks fallen out of the habit of doing my hardcore Saturday exercise-a-thon. This is largely due to my social life, a fact about which I am certainly not complaining BUT I am defo noticing that I miss the workouts. For me there’s something really decadent about spending a Saturday afternoon, toute seule, at the gym. Odd. But I like to take my time and really enjoy my workouts without the pressure of time or deadlines or cooking dinner or whatever on the weekends. I miss it. So I’m going to get back into it. In a week. (Because next weekend I am in London to see BRITNEY! Wahooooooop!)

I have also been missing workouts on a Saturday because of seeing my trainer on Fridays - often I am too incapacitated after those sessions even to think of going to the gym – last Friday would certainly have been an example of this! I imagine that’s what it would feel like to have been run over. Great workout though, and I was fine by Sunday!

So that's my aim for this week. Again. Here's hoping.

xoxo BFP