Find the positives

I really should start filling out my little things list again. I don't do it half as often in my head as I'd like to think I do. And today has started as a dull and dreary one, so a bit of positivity is sorely needed.

To start off with, I think it needs its own post. So, it is currently 8:10, I am at work and I already have two things to list. 

1. My belt is now reliably closing on the second hole every time. Extreme bloating over the last couple of months meant I had been using the very first one. Now, I can even close it on the third, although it's not quite very comfortable yet.
2. I have a busy day ahead of me, with several appointments and things to do (apart from work) so I ended up carrying three different bags this morning. When I switched to the bus that is normally very crowded, one of the weird too-big-for-one-person, too-small-for-two-people seats was free, so I got to sit with my bags comfortably beside me instead of trying to balance it all on my knee.
3. let's see how the day progressess ...
   

The fasting begins

Day one of our 12-week fasting phase started with a bang with me completely forgetting to bring one of the shaker things with me to work. I'll just had to do it the old-fashioned way yesterday and use a fork. Not optimal but it worked well enough. I think I'll buy a couple of small whisks for the office kitchen. And today I brought one of the shakers with me and it was much easier.

Food for the week

Yesterday went pretty well. I was only a little bit hungry a few times throughout the day but that is what is supposed to happen. When you sit down to eat lunch or dinner, it is normal for you to feel hungry. I've worked on that one and off over the last few years. Learning to hold back and not immediately reach for something the very second I feel hungry. There is, of course, the old Weight Watchers trick "if you feel hungry, drink a glass of water, do something to occupy yourself and wait twenty minutes". The idea being that many people don't recognise thirst anymore and think they're hungry when really they are started to need some hydration. 

The amount of liquid we are supposed to consume in addition to our five meal replacements is definitely a challenge. At least 3 litres every day. I have a 750ml bottle in work and normal fill that with water once in the morning and once after lunch. To drink three litres in a day, I'll need to fill it at least three times. That's 2.25l and then if I have a cup of tea or two at home in the evening, I'm just about there. I managed to get to 2.85l yesterday but I did end up having to get up a couple of times to go to the toilet during the night so my sleep was a bit disturbed. This morning I drank a mug of water before leaving the house. But I had therapy before work and since I started later, I'm still drinking my first bottle of water. I'm not going to kill myself with trying to do it every single day and if I don't manage it, I'm sure I'll still survive. I'm glad that water is what I normally drink anyway. I'll miss being able to drink milk but very glad that fizzy drinks are more of a once or twice a year thing for me. And of course having to quit drinking caffeine years ago because of migraines is undoubtedly a big advantage now. 

In really positive news, I managed to kill two mosquitos in my apartment last night, and don't appear to have any new bites today. The ones I collected over the past three or four days are mostly all looking red and swollen. That happens every few years and I've never managed to actually look up if it more related to the mosquitos being particularly horrible that year, or my skin/body is just reacting more that year.

In terms of appetite, the other thing I noticed yesterday was that once or twice during the day I really, really wanted to eat something. Not that I was hungry. But that I really wanted to be engaging in the physical act of eating. Interesting. We are allowed to chew a small amount of chewing gum (some gums, not all) but were also advised to try and keep it to a minimum, since chewing activates all sorts of signals relating to hunger and that's what we don't need at the moment. I'm going to try and make it to the recommended six-week mark before starting to do fancy things like adding (certain) herbs or spices to the soups, or lemon juice or ginger to my water, and I think I'll do the same with chewing gum. That one remains to be seen. 

In the plans for this weekend is tackling all of the washing up that has somehow built up again over the past week or so. Then I want to give the kitchen a bit of a scrub and enjoy the feeling of a clear and clean space for the next while. I'm excited to restart my store cupboard slowly and make sure in future to really only get the stuff I know I will use.

Happy Friday everyone!

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.