Last day of eating food for a while

Today is the last day I will be eating actual food for a while. More than a year after I actually signed up, and after Corona-related postponement after postponement, last Wednesday the 52-week Optifast weightloss programme at my local hospital finally started. This evening is the second meeting, which means this evening I get to collect my first order of meal replacements and starting tomorrow, for a period of 12 weeks, I will be be eating five of those every day. We did a taste-test last week and I have to admit I was underwhelmed by the soups on offer. I had had such high hopes for the leek and potato. And I had a cup-a-soup just a few weeks ago, so it's not like I have an incredibly high bar for comparison. Still, I will be glad to have something warm on occasion, I'm sure. 

Today, I told everyone in work about it to ask for their support, warn them/apologise in advance in case the next few weeks bring a very moody or easily distracted Moonwaves, and to let them know that there will be no more sweets/cakes/treats to be found in my office. It's somewhat traditional for the secretary to have a bowl of treat out, for example in the run-up to Christmas. And I asked them specifically to just not let me know if someone bakes a cake and brings it in to share. While ultimately my success will be up to me, I am fully embracing the attitude of make everybody else help, too.

Forgot to take a photo this morning,
this is after the pile has been raided.

 In return, anyone who wants has the opportunity today to take any of the remaining storecupboard stuff I had. Despite my efforts to eat the cupboards down, I still managed to fill two large shopping bags. And I have to admit I also threw out more than one packet of sooooo far past its best before date, I'd better not risk giving it to someone else, items. My boss is going to take a small basket of things into care (olive oil, the good balsamic vinegar and that kind of thing), hide it somewhere and give it back to me when I start to incorporate proper food again. That will start happening at the end of October. 

After the 12 weeks of just meal replacements are over, we begin a transition phase, in which we slowly start to replace the meal replacements with actual food again. And that will bring us up to Christmas. Possibly not the best timing for the first two weeks of the stabilisation phase to be over Christmas and New Year but I'm sure it'll be fine. 

Obviously food is not the only component to play a role when it comes to dealing with serious obesity and eating disorders and this programme also involves a 3-hour appointment every week. There's a talk on some aspect of nutrition and group therapy. I think at the beginning these two sort of blend into one another and the psychologist and the nutrition advisor are both there at the same time. We get weighed and have a check-up with the doctor. And at the end, there is an hour to an hour and a half of sport. Gentle stuff like walking at the start, moving on to pilates, yoga, nordic walking and so on in the later months. The idea being to try out a good few different things and hopefully find things you like to do. About five times throughout the year there are longer appointments where a full blood workup and body fat analysis and so on are done. 

From a financial point of view, at €3,400 for the year, it's not exactly cheap. You are supposed to pay in instalments but I asked to be allowed to pay the whole thing up front and have done that. I just don't want to have to remake the decision every month to keep going. That feels more like pressure to me than an opportunity to choose the commitment again and I am fully leaning into doing whatever it is that will make this work. I have now been very overweight for most of the past thirty years. I think for a few months in 1996/1997 I managed to maintain around 85kg (about 188lbs for any foreigners here, or a bit less than 13.5 stone) for a while and that is the lightest I have been since I was a child. Honestly, I would be thrilled if I were able to reach that again, but at this stage, I'll take any sustainable weightloss I can manage. 

So, it has been a strange couple of weeks as I haven't much felt up to cooking but kept buying things to make x one last time, and y just once more. I've ended up having some strange combinations and because I normally try to be aware of portion size, it has been really weird to be erring more on the side of "well, I'll have more since I need to use it up". I'm glad it has felt so weird though, as it kind of proves to me that I have learnt a lot over the years, especially during the time I spent seeing a nutritionist on a weekly basis a few years ago. For posterity's sake, here's what's on the menu for today: 

Breakfast was:
Scrambled eggs and tomato with toast (3 eggs, 1 tomato, 2 slices of toast, some butter)
Oh, I also finished the crisps (about one very large handful), had three chocolate digestive biscuits, and a large mug of milk 

Snacks on my desk for throughout the day:
The last of the mixed nuts and sultanas
1.5 bars of ritter sport with cornflakes
1 banana
1 apple 

Lunch will be:
The last of the fresh veg, which I chopped and sautéed in olive oil this morning, then mixed with the last of the cream cheese.
2 small courgettes, 4 scallions, 2 small leeks, 1 tiny carrot, cherry tomatoes. I'll have that with some leftover chicken.
Oh, and I have the last few pieces of kimchi from a tin I opened at the weekend. 

With all of that, and considering our meeting will go from five to eight o'clock, I don't think I'll have or need dinner. Although I am going to try and make an appearance at a colleague's retirement dinner after the meeting, so I may be tempted to have some falafel there. We'll see.

This weekend for sure...

I am definitely going to actually write a proper blog post this weekend. Have planned to do so for at least the last five weekends and enough is enough. This week's Team TOMM Friday focus is Garden/Outside Space but I changed that a while ago to "Table of Doom". Yes, the table of doom is back, although now spread among my writing desk (haven't actually been able to use it for at least two years) and multiple boxes. But apart from the fact that there is a serious amount of filing to be done, the other reason I chose to name this Friday Focus Table of Doom was to remind me of this blog and encourage me to actually get back to it. So here we are. I am currently in work but wanted to look something up and found some horrendous typos in a post from long ago (here instead of hear, and it's instead of its. I mean really!!! At least I can pretend my instead of me was a typo!) and couldn't leave them and since I'm logged in anyway... I will come back tomorrow and do a longer post and also add a photo to this one. I took some quick photos as before photos the last time I was sure I was going to start blogging soon. Looking at the date of the pictures on my phone, that was 6th March. Ah, sure, that's only barely a month ago. Feels like progress. Or something.

Hmmmm...

...does thinking about posting, and half-writing posts in your head count as blogging? Asking for a friend.

3 Posts in 2020

Ooops. That wasn't a lot. I do plan to get back to regular blogging but eight days into the new year it hasn't happened yet. So here's a first very short post and I'll plan to do at least one every week from now on. One thing I have managed to do is actually keep up with the housework. There's still a lot of basic decluttering and tidying that needs to be done. I did the Organised Mum Method on and off over most of last year and after getting more and more done through December (helped by the two four-day weekends, it has to be said), I got up early this morning and caught up on a few things so that I am now on a 6-day streak of completing both level 1 and level 2 jobs. Woohoo. Just need to finish my level 2s this evening after work and I'll have a full week. For tomorrow, I have arranged to have a video call* with a friend where we are going to keep each other company while peeling and chopping veg. I have a big butternut squash I want to use for a couple of different things, two leeks, there will of course be onions, I want to grate a carrot for kidney bean and carrot burgers and, I am possibly going to pick up a small hokkaido pumpkin after work, too. Have a bit of a longing for pumpkin soup. That's it for now. I'm in work and shouldn't be posting from here at all but I had to log in to this account for some reason or other and since I was logged in, I thought I'd take my chance. * Just before Christmas I decided to join the modern world and bought myself a tripod thingy for holding my phone so that I can spare my poor hand/arm getting sore. Looks like video calls are going to remain a big part of our reality for the forseeably future.

It's hot out there!

We're having a heatwave which means we're on day three of about 35° weather, with at least another week of it on the horizon. Not my ideal operating temp by any means. 

I prepared by going to the supermarket on Thursday afterwork and buying a mountain of crisps, crackers, cheese, quark and yoghurt. And actually cooking the lentils I had put to soak on Tuesday and then forgotten about. That's enough for at least three lots of lentil salad. Yesterday after work, I stopped at the farmer's shop and bought a huge oakleaf lettuce and some eggs, and couldn't resist adding a courgette and a couple of carrots, too. 

Apart from boiling some eggs, there should be no need to switch on the cooker at all. If I get up very early tomorrow, I might put on the oven to make some soda bread and a quick cake. We'll see. 

Was trying to insert a screenshot of the weather forecast but apparently chose this picture of my aloe vera from the other day instead. Apps, new phones, fat thumbs, what can I say. Anyway, enjoy this picture of loads of new pups on the aloe that I thought I had really actually killed (it didn't seem to enjoy it's last repotting at all).

 

For now, well, about an hour ago it reached that time of day that still feels surreal for me, having grown up in Ireland. The sun had moved round to the side of the building so it was time to open up the shutters and blinds in the bedroom. But the temperature had passed 30° so it was also time to close all the windows. Even 12 years of living here has not made this any less weird to me. In another hour or two, it'll be time to close down the shutters in the living room and they'll stay that way until almost sunset. At least I did actually go out and water the flowers and the tomatoes on the balcony properly this morning. Don't think any new fruit are coming but have already harvested loads and there is still quite a lot ripening. 

Hope everyone is having a lovely weekend.

Getting back to the simple life

I am having lots of thoughts and feelings at the moment around depression, accepting how severe my depression has actually been over the years and trying to come to terms with how much of my life it has absorbed and the feeling that I have wasted years and years while trying to be kind to myself and accept that it wasn't all my fault, dealing with depression absorbed most of my energy, etc., etc. I have been taking anti-depressants for about a year and a half now and am slowly getting to a point where it feels like I have some energy to spare for just life in general. Very much an ongoing journey and it's going to be a long one. As always, accepting something logically is easier than accepting it emotionally.

In terms of energy, I wouldn't describe myself as full of beans but I am making an effort and managing to get something done every day. Mind you, being on holidays from work helps.

All of this led to me yesterday doing something that I have thought about doing every summer for the last few years but never quite getting around to. I bought two large punnets of strawberries. From a local shop that grows a lot of their own stuff on a small farm on the outskirts of town. And this morning, I washed, hulled and sliced them, and put them into the dehydrator.

Dehydrator trays on scales, 1 punnet worth of strawberries, preserving notebook

I dragged out my preserving notebook to add it in and see, somewhat to my amazement, that the last entry was 2014. Wow. Looking at it logically though, I knew I hadn't done anything since I moved here, and that was 2016. And in the summer and autumn of 2015, I was working my notice at my corporate job, then starting my translating on the side business and trying to recover from years and years of overwork and stress. I'm pretty sure when I moved here I told myself it was ok to not do anything the first summer - I was only working part-time and money was tight, I was trying to settle in and all that. The next summer, I feel like I was determined to do at least some dehydrating but it never happened. I'll have to read back and see if I posted anything in 2018, because I am really not sure why I didn't do anything then, although thinking about it, I was pretty miserable in work and depressed. And then at the start of last summer, I had just switched to my new job, was loving it and starting to really enjoy life when my boss killed himself. It seems hard to believe that that was almost a year ago. I still miss him and think about him, well, not quite every day but on many of them.  Strawberries were his favourite fruit, and remembering the conversation we had when he told me that is probably something that will always come to mind when strawberry season arrives.

When I look back and view it logically, there were almost always reasons why I wasn't getting around to doing some of the things that are important to me in terms of the simple life that I was searching for when I started this blog. It is very hard to accept that it wasn't all just me being lazy or worthless. I'm working on it. Today, at least, it felt good to switch on the dehydrator, and now the smell of strawberries is filling the room. Getting started is always the hardest part and that's done now. So here's to living the simple life I want.

The Organised Mum Method

This will be short, since my phone ate my last return-to-blogging post a couple of weeks ago.

In December a friend mentioned the Organised Mum Method to me. She was very enthusiastic about it and the app you can also get. Note: you don't have to buy the app or the book, everything you need to follow the method is available for free on her website. I was not specially impressed by what my friend told me but a week or so later I checked out the website (mostly so that I could tell her I hadn't just dismissed it out of hand) and actually found it interesting.

I got the app (and the book. And I've pre-ordered the second book.) and am a total convert. But after a bout of depression through most of March and April, it mostly fell by the wayside again. I've been picking it back up over the last few weeks and although I'm not at the stage where I'm doing everything every day, I'm doing something every day. But even if I don't even do all the level 1 jobs every day, every time I do something else it feels good. I may take a while to get to a place where most of it gets done most of the time, but it is true that the cumulative effect has an impact. Would love to get lots of 'you're done for the day' messages but for now I'm just happy every time I tick something off.