Slowly, slowly...

-



I had a goal in mind. Lose 9.5lb in 25 days. Can't be that hard right?! I have my holiday at the end of the month, I thought it was a good enough challenge for the timescale.

But this is me we're talking about.

Not only am I slow to lose weight anyway, I also hate restricting my diet too much. A nice, normal achievable goal for me is 1lb a week, then I can still have a few treats, so long as I workout, too.

There was pretty much no way I was going to achieve this - still, I set my mind to it.

How good would I feel on the beach on holiday if I got to my goal?!

Well, turns out it wasn't to be.

Friday weigh in one - maintained.
Friday weigh in two - down 2.5lb. Hallelujah!
Friday weigh in three - down 1lb.
Friday weigh in four - up 1.5lb. WTF?!

As you can see, I didn't make it to 9.5lb.



As I realised I wasn't going to reach my goal, I did the unhealthy thing and decided to beat myself up about it. I thought to myself - "If only I'd tried harder, hadn't eaten that rocky road, swam ten more lengths that workout, not skipped that day I didn't feel up to it..."

The problem is that getting bogged down about not losing weight fast enough is pointless. The time will pass anyway, whether I'm making smart choices about the food I'm putting into my body and making sure I get enough exercise, or I'm sat lazily at home killing time and eating comfort food, the weeks are still going to pass by exactly the same.

I feel like I really need to remember this, because who is going to lose weight while punishing themselves and scolding themselves? I think anyone who is losing weight needs a huge pat on the back - it can be so difficult!

So I've decided to think of this last month and all the positives I can take from it.

More energy.
Inches lost.
Feeling stronger.
Eaten a wide variety of foods.
Taken in lots more fruits and vegetables.
Skin, hair and nails feeling healthier.
Spent my downtime productively.

I'm even packing my suitcase full of size 14 clothes - the last few summers I've been squeezing out of size 16s that are all too big now!



I mean, in the grand scheme of things, what difference does a few pounds make? So I only lost a couple out of the 9.5lb. In a few months time, this will serve me as a lesson learnt - goals take time to achieve. The time will pass anyway. Developing healthy habits and doing it for the right reasons are so much more important than the numbers on the scale.

Time to enjoy my holiday!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The birds still sing at Auschwitz

-
Image
Birds sing high up in the green branches, which sway slightly in the breeze. A blanket of delicate white flowers covers the ground, as the warm spring sun shines down. It’s hard to believe this was the site where over one million jews were put to their deaths in gas chambers, through starvation, from disease or exhaustion. This was what I learnt when I headed on a trip to Auschwitz organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust , for a feature with pupils from the Selby area while I was working as a reporter for the Goole and Selby Times. The start of the experience was a seminar at the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, where around 200 students and teachers gathered to find out more about the roots of the Holocaust and explore difficult issues surrounding it. We were asked to remember one important fact: the Holocaust was 6 million seperate murders of individual people who were Jewish. At the seminar, we heard the testimony of Steven Frank , a Holocaust survivor originally from
Read more

We did the 'Dutch Dash' from Hull to Amsterdam - but was it worth it?!

-
Image
The premise: I have been to the Netherlands before by ferry - but it was for a friend’s 18th birthday and we only got as far as Rotterdam - and it was half-day closing day! Everyone was hungover and it was really rainy and all we really did was go in H&M. It wasn’t really my cup of tea! A few years ago I did the Bruges dash - which I really enjoyed. Apart from getting a really basic cabin and some rough seas, Bruges was a nice compact city, perfect for spending the day there, and my gosh the chocolate is good! Me and Jono had been saying we wanted to visit Amsterdam for a while, and we looked at short breaks flying from Humberside, but they were a bit out of our price range while we’re renovating our house, so we decided to try the ferry. Our trip: Having learnt from my previous trips, we booked a slightly nicer cabin with a double bed! It was only £80 each, and it even had a kettle and a slightly bigger bathroom. It was a good choice - I got lots more sleep than I normally do on
Read more

St Ninians Walk - a short story

-
Image
Those of you who have been stuck in lockdown and traipsing round every corner of the Avenues like me, will no doubt have come across St Ninians Walk. Running between Ella Street and Victoria Avenue, down the side of the railway line, next to the old Jewish cemetery, they are a group of individually designed houses that stick out like a sore thumb in comparison to the Victorian and Edwardian redbricks in the surrounding area. I let my bored lockdown imagination run away with me about the potential occupants of these ultra-modern houses, and wondered whether Hull might have its own community of vampires. Enjoy! St Ninians Walk  It had been a bit of a task trying to get the council to approve the planning permission. They kept asking all kinds of questions, like, ‘Why do you want your houses built next to a cemetery?’ And ‘Why do the metal fences need to be so high and the windows blacked out?’ But this was the perfect location. We didn’t want to live anywhere accessible
Read more