1st Small Step...

[Tabytha]

Hello, {waves}

I've never been a thin person but I've been carrying this "baby fat" now for over 8 years! Lol! Enough is enough My Mum tells me that once you hit 40yrs old it's twice as hard to shift the weight ... I'm 42 now and she's right so I realise that my efforts must be doubled

Friends around me are loosing weight on various fad diets or with weight watchers or slimmers world but I've been there & done that. A friend gave me the Paul McKenna book "I can make you thin" and it's making lots of sense. Eat sensibly & exercise to burn off excess "unwanted" calories. Paul talks about actually noticing and tasting when we eat instead of mindlessly shovelling in our food (sounds familiar) and about starting with the 10,000 steps a day.

I've downloaded the NHS Choices pdf and will use that too.

I'm looking to shed 28lbs so that my body is back to my pre-baby weight. I hope my blog wont bore you but it's for me rather than for anyone else. I can't make excuses or back out if I make it a "public" journey....

Here we go .....

[Hidden]

Hi Tabytha,

There's lots of free and very good advice on the NHSChoices live well lose weight pages, including stuff about nutrition, diets (including fad ones!), dealing with comfort eating, etc., etc.

There's also lots of experiences on these blogs from people who are actually doing it. Both are worth a good read.

For sure, actually Paul McKenna is right to some degree. For some people their main problem is that they have learnt - taught themselves? - to eat the wrong things, too much of them, and eat them too fast.

Slowing down the rate you eat, so that a meal takes 20 minutes or so, will give your hormones a chance to react and tell your body that it's full. There are various tricks, like eating with a smaller spoon, chewing your food more, breaking up the meal into stages, and/or ensuring in some way that you keep being distracted from just shovelling it in can all help to counter that tendency.

And some people learnt that from being chivvied along - "Eat that before it gets cold", "Get a move on with your breakfast, or we'll miss the bus", etc., etc.

But, therein lies the nub of this weight-loss game. It's about changing bad eating and activity/exercise habits into helpful and healthy ones. It's about leaving behind and letting go of ways of doing things that may well feel rather familiar and comfortable but are actually harming you.

It's about taking control and managing the eating / activity / body fat thing.

And, if you don't change the behaviours that are causing you to be overweight, then you're very likely to just carry on gaining weight.

So you want to lose 28 lbs, that's nearly 13 Kgs, so setting yourself a time-frame of say 14 / 15 weeks should allow you to get there fairly comfortably. You'll probably lose weight a bit faster at first, but averaging about 1 kg a week's loss is about the most you want to do. There will, for all sorts of reasons, be blips and spurts - it isn't all perfectly mathematical.

It's not really just about calories in and calories out - that's a bit of an over-simplification. It's about doing things, like cutting down your calorie input and upping your activity / exercise level to persuade your body to go into fat burning mode, rather than fat storage mode.

Don't try to lose weight too fast. It's much more likely to be gained again later when people do that.

And see this as a life change journey. Work at losing your extra weight. Do it once. Do it for good.

Make a commitment to your body, your health and your wellbeing.... and get on the weight-loss bus.

Good luck with your journey.

[Tabytha in reply to Hidden]

Thank you Doikosp, for your reply and you positive advice.

I will continue to read the information on the NHS Choices pages and I do see this as the opportunity to re-train my habits, both eating and activity and make some healthy ones instead

[Hidden]

Hi Tabytha,

And also, we do live in a society which has a culture of FAST food, having a QUICK snack and GRABBING a bite to eat. Look how often you see commuters finishing off their breakfasts on trains or station platforms or at bus stops because they're rushing around so much!

I often think of us as modern people in cave-dwellers bodies in many respects, and our ancestors just didn't eat like that. Most of the time, they would have been eating and foraging for food at the same time.

But the speed of eating is only one of the problems, the type of food /drink, the portion sizes and the sedentary lifestyles are also big factors.

[suzybenj]

Well done Tabytha for taking a good look at this. I had forgotten about paul mckenna and how powerful his visulisations are. The DVD's are good - but if you really follow it through it can make you not like food you love. I don't eat a lot of chocolate - but i would not want to never want it.

As to your mum's comments - believe it it's true. I am a few years older than you - In the last two plus years i have gained two and half stone And yo yoed with a few pounds on and off - but steadily going upwards.

So I am dieting pretty seriously and it is coming off in slow minute amounts. My GP tells me this is normal for my age.....Blah....I don't want to be normal for my age.....

Anyway - good for you for starting now - i too have 2 stone to lose - if i could do this in 12 weeks actually i would be estatic - something to think about for me!