Is it really possible to be a new me, this new year?

We’ve all been there, every new year we are bombarded with propaganda telling us that if we buy this, eat that and wear these trainers, we can uncover a new, improved version of ourselves.

And a lot of us fall for it. We believe that there is something wrong with the person we were the previous year and we try our damnedest to fix ourselves. We throw money at the situation left, right and centre and yet somehow we usually fail. Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t aim to improve ourselves, because I am one of these many people trying to do this every year, but I wonder to what extent it’s really possible with the approach we tend to take.

Here’s what I mean…

Say you want to lose weight, it’s likely that you wanted to lose weight prior to January 1st and it’s also likely that during the preceding year, you had several attempts at doing so. “Diet starts Monday.” “After Easter, I’ll stay off the chocolate and I WILL lose weight.” “The summer is a great time to eat salads, so I’m sure I’ll lose weight then.”

You don’t do it, or you do it for a very short time, otherwise you wouldn’t need to make a resolution to do so the following January. So what is different about January?

Well, I’m not sure anything is except that there’s an increased focus on improving yourself in the media.

In my opinion, we can’t change things just by saying we will change them and subscribing to a few products and services to help us, we have to make a conscious decision to change our mindsets. And that is where I have a question mark. Have I really changed my mindset? There’s nothing about January itself that dictates my mindset has changed, so how do I know I’m not wasting my time?

How do I test my mindset? Am I really dedicated to the change I have publicly stated I will make?

The only answer I have is to give it time and if I fail, I guess my head’s not in the right place. If I succeed, even if only partially, then perhaps I’ve started consciously making better choices that lead me to my goal. If my head’s not in the right place for success, then I’m not quite sure how I get it there and that’s where I’ve fallen down time and again before.

And there begins the conversation again – to what extent is it really possible to uncover a new me and how would I do that if it is possible?

I’d love to hear success (or otherwise) stories from people who’ve managed to make a change for good. Let me know if you have any winning tips! x

A Tale of Two Wardrobes

There’s something been bugging me recently and it’s taken me a while to figure it out. I’ve noticed that I’m pretty much out of wardrobe space, yet I have nothing to wear and I don’t mean the usual nothing to wear, I mean literally nothing. First of all, I thought it was the change in seasons, “I’ll be too hot in that”, “That’s too summery for today”, etc. but now that it’s fully summer and I’ve re-opened my summer stock of clothes, I’m still stuck.

So what is it?

Well, this evening I went to put some laundry away and noticed that once again there’s no space for it, despite the fact that I only do laundry when I’m out of things to wear. So I started mooching through my clothes, figuring I must have loads of old tat hanging around that needs to be gone. I don’t.

What I have is a tale of two wardrobes. Fat Sam vs. Thin Sam.

This is the first time in my adult life that I’ve encountered this problem and that’s why it’s taken me so long to figure out. For a good 15 or so years, I was a size 10, occasionally dipping into an 8. Suddenly I’m a size 12 and my old clothes don’t fit. Like actually can’t get them on or do them up don’t fit. My metabolism is failing me and my willpower is like an under-used muscle, (which all of mine are) and it hurts every time I try and use it!

I’ve bloody well gone up a clothes size and I’m not even 30 yet. Shit the bloody bed.

Never even mind the weight, my main concern is the clothing. What does one do in this situation, admit defeat and donate the smaller sized clothes to charity or kid oneself that weight loss is imminent and those clothes will be essential at that time? I’ve never had to lose weight before and I genuinely don’t know whether I can do it. I’ve done it by accident before but that was 6 years ago and not a pound has been shed since. In fact, I’ve been slowly gaining many pounds over that entire time.

This is a genuine dilemma; I need fewer clothes in my life as there’s no chance of increasing wardrobe capacity right now, but do I vote fat or thin? Delicious food or hideous exercise? Most likely, I’ll bury my head in the sand, hope for a weight loss miracle (raspberry ketones already on order) and keep adding to my collection of clothing until I can no longer fit in my dressing room. (Because of the vast array of clothing, not because I got that fat…though I won’t rule that out either.)

What would a sane person do? Help a girl out, peeps! x

What’s the Right Diet for You?

Hello, hello!

So, who’s been watching the BBC Horizon special, What’s the Right Diet for You? It’s a programme looking at why different people over-eat and therefore what might work for them as a diet. They’ve taken a sample set of people and run them through a series of tests to calculate what sort of eater they are.

They’ve broken down the group into 3 subsets, which are:

• Emotional Eater
• Feaster
• Constant Craver

They’re fairly self explanatory by name and the BBC have also created an online test you can take to approximate which of these categories you are likely to fall into. You can find the test here.

I have taken the test and found myself to be 39% Feaster and 61% Constant Craver. Essentially, this means that I’m likely to have a genetic disposition which drives me to continually graze, with less interest in / ability to sit down and eat big meals.

Genetic or not, it certainly rings true that I do constantly graze. Where it’s gone wrong is that most people I know tend to eat square meals. What this means is that I end up doing both!!! The recommended diet for Constant Cravers is the 5:2 diet where you fast for 2 days a week and eat normally (with a healthy spin) for the other 5 days. Given that my bf has just started doing this anyway, I may as well give it a bash.

The idea is that it’s much easier to control your cravings for 2 days a week than it is to try and do it, yet fail every day. Knowing you can have that treat, but you just need to wait 2 days is far easier than eliminating it altogether. It should have clicked sooner but it didn’t. Every way I think about it, this option suits me much better than constantly telling myself “no” as I reach for a snack every 10 minutes!!!

So here I go again in my quest to find a more balanced lifestyle that allows me to shed a few lbs. And no, they didn’t say exercise was the key to weight-loss, they said reducing your calorie intake is the way forward. So you exercise nuts can jog on (geddit!?!) x

Juicing for Wellness, Days 4 & 5

Homemade Vegetable Curry

I may as well have just walked into a confession box because what I’m about to say isn’t good. I fell off the wagon big time yesterday. I was hungry, it was the weekend, I wanted to eat something familiar. I’m sorry!

In the interest of being open and honest, I may as well confess that yesterday morning I ate a couple of chocolate biscuits. Then at around 3pm I ate a burrito. It had pork, rice, guacamole, sour cream, pinto beans, peppers, cheese and a heck of a lot of flavour in it. It completely flouted the diet rules but it tasted sooooooooo good! It also gave me the motivation to buck up my ideas and get back on track. Well, that plus my bf watching me and telling me that I want to be healthy, not full of sugar.

So for dinner last night I had a corn on the cob and another bowl of my tomato and garlic soup. I’m back on course. Go me!

Today has been somewhat challenging as it’s been my first day back in the office and things are a bit slow after the Christmas break so I’ve had lots of time to think about food and stare at the chocolate bars and biscuits in the kitchen. On the plus side though, I’m feeling better than I’ve felt in months now that my cold is clearing and I’ve had some rest and good food for a few days.

Today’s menu has been much better:

Breakfast – strawberry, raspberry and blueberry smoothie made with just fruit and water

Lunch – tomato and garlic soup

Dinner – vegetable curry

Snacks – an apple, a clementine and some lemon & ginger tea

It’s not very juicy, I admit but it is bloody healthy!

I’ve posted the recipe for my homemade vegetable curry over on another of my blogs. You can find it here. It’s pretty quick and easy to knock up even on a school night and it’s bloody lovely. Not only that but there’s enough left for tomorrow night too. You’ll notice if you read it that I even experimented with the cauliflower rice that everyone’s talking about at the moment. It was pretty darned scrummy, if I do say so myself!

Happy eating, everyone. Just remember that falling off the wagon doesn’t matter, it’s about making a gradual change to improve the quality of what you consume. It’s not a race! x

Juicing for Wellness, Day 3

I did it, I went home and I weighed myself. I was expecting to weight about 11st 7lbs as I feel like I’ve been putting on even more weight recently so it was a pleasant surprise to weight in at 11st 1lb. That’s basically half a stone less for me to lose 🙂

So, the update on the juicing and the life with it. Here’s what happened on Day 2 following my blog post that day.

Breakfast was the carrot, apple and ginger juice which was pretty delicious.

Lunch was a change up. Instead of juice for lunch, I made a tomato and garlic soup, the recipe for which I found in a different version of the juice plan I was following. It was a smidge on the bland side but it was decent enough that the bf joined me in having some. You can find the recipe here.

Tomato and Garlic Soup for 2

We took the dog on a couple of walks yesterday and my energy was a bit low so I snacked on an apple and some grapes throughout the day and drank a fair bit of fruit tea.

By the time dinner came around, my cold had got the better of me so I had a chicken breast salad. My chicken was flavoured with paprika and cooked in a tiny bit of olive oil, my salad was without dressing. The leaves and avocado tasted better than ever because I was so deprived of food!

You’ll notice that my juice diet has strayed a little way off the juice track so I tried to bring it a bit more under control today, (day 3) but I was out and about so it’s been another compromise.

Breakfast – blueberry, raspberry and strawberry smoothie made with just fruit and water

Lunch – juice from Fuel juice bar, made with carrot, celery, apple and ginger

Dinner – chicken, mash and low-mayo coleslaw with a side salad, (we went out for dinner)

I’m not sure if it’s the cold/sore throat or the diet or both but I’ve been feeling mighty tired. My tummy is still bloated, I ache and all I want to do is sleep. I’ve added meat back into my diet in the hope that eating protein-based meals as well as juicing will help me pick myself back up but it’s proving challenging. I just want to snoooooooooooze! Still, I must keep pressing on because I don’t want to be this size and feel this unwell all the time. I CAN DO IT. PMA!

Until next time…  x

Juicing for Wellness, Day 2

Carrot, Apple and Ginger Juice

I’m still alive!!! I honestly thought at one point yesterday that I might die before I got to post today because I was so hungry and so tired.

As promised, this is an honest account of my juicing experience so here’s a run down of what’s happened in the last 24 hours.

Day 1:

Breakfast – Carrot, Apple and Lemon juice
This juice was bloody lovely and when I posted yesterday morning, I really thought I could do it.

Lunch – Cucumber, Apple, Kale and Parsley juice
By lunch time (12pm) yesterday, I was blinkin’ starving and this juice just did not hit the mark. As separate ingredients I like all of the components but as a juice, this was green yuk. It wasn’t the worst I’ve ever tasted but it did nothing to entice me to drink it either. I was ready to give up, I was grumpy and I had to re-evaluate.

Re-evaluation
As always with me on any sort of diet or healthy eating plan, I find that I am instantly grumpy and dreading the rest of the programme. With a cold as well as what felt like a starvation plan, yesterday was unbearable. I took a cold, hard look at what I want to achieve and came up with these priorities:

1. Health – I’m fed up of feeling tired, looking tired and having a pregnancy bump sized bloated tummy
2. Weight Loss – I have clothes I can no longer fit into. This is new to me and I HATE IT
3. Sustainability – Yo-yo dieting just isn’t a good idea, what I want is to change the way I think about food and actually use food to nourish me, not just to feed my sugar cravings

Once I’d prioritised, I looked at my options again. I could juice for weeks on end, making food the enemy, feeling grouchy, probably bingeing on junk along the way, OR I could make the plan work for me. Now let me share what I had for dinner…

Dinner – Corn on the cob, lightly cooked broccoli, spinach and Brussels sprouts with garlic and chilli, with a handful of black grapes for pudding.

I also had a “snack” juice yesterday, made with pineapple, yellow pepper and ginger which was pretty darned tasty.

I made it through and the way I did that was by tailoring the plan to suit me. My dinner was still just vegetables and it wasn’t particularly satisfying but it took away some of the hunger pangs and still contributed a lot of goodness to my eating plan.

This is how I’m going to do it from now on. I’ll juice in the morning, as I have done again today. I’ll probably have juices as snacks too and the rest of the time I’ll eat. I’ll eat like a vegan and I’ll get to my goals, taking this like a marathon rather than a sprint. What I realised is that this is about control; it’s not that I can’t have the Maltesers sitting on top of the book case, I’m choosing not to. In the same vein, I can choose to eat well but without just living off juices that leave me feeling like I’m missing out.

I still have no idea of my weight but I *should* go home today where I can check that out and report back. In the following posts, I’ll share any fab recipes I encounter which I think could help others trying to do the healthy thing.

Anyone else on a similar plan? x

Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead…Well Not Quite

The Weapon of Choice

Happy 2015 everybody!!!

I have to say, my year has got off to an excellent start as I sit here typing away with a gorgeous, snoring Beagle lying next to me 🙂

Anyhow, this isn’t just a generic happy new year post, I thought I’d conform to what society expects even more than that. This is a “welcome to my new year detox” post! Oh yes, it’s January and I thought I’d make it a challenge by starving myself. I mean getting healthy. Not starving myself, getting into a fit, healthy place.

Seriously though, the bf and I watched a docu-film on Netflix the other week, Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead and it was all about one chap, (Joe Cross) and his quest to sort his life out. He wanted to change things up, stop relying on medication, lose weight and generally feel more alive, and he brought a few people along with him too. Now, we’ve all seen these documentaries before and we’ve had juice diets rammed down our throats just about as much as we possibly can but something in this film just made me sit up and realise that I CAN DO IT! I really can.

I’m not fat per sé, but I am packing quite a few extra pounds at the moment which I wouldn’t mind losing. However, that’s not my main motivation. My main goal is to stop looking and feeling sooooooooooooo tired. It’s got to the point of ridiculousness and I know for sure that the food I’m putting in simply isn’t up to scratch. So I’ve set myself the challenge of turning that around before the spring comes. I have heaps of fun things going on so I need energy and I need it now.

Starting today, I’m on a juice diet. A hard hit of nutrients! Any avid readers will be pleased to know that I have a new juicer, following the disaster that was my Jason Vale detox back in May. (Read all about it here) There are no hard and fast rules to what I’m doing, I’m just juicing from now until whenever and I’ll be charting my progress along the way.

To join me, you can grab some juice recipes from Joe’s website, here. I’m currently on my first juice, 4 apples, 4 carrots and 2 lemons and it’s actually bloody tasty. What I like about this plan is that I’m not limited to 3 measly juices per day so every time I’m flagging, it should be juice time. My aim is to give you a real person’s run down of how juicing fits into daily life and just how low the lows are and how high the highs are.

Day 1 – 10.45 am – It’s a bank holiday, I can totally do this. I’m bloody starving but there’s a dog here to distract me and I want that healthy glow. Weight is currently unknown as I can’t find a scales anywhere in the bf’s house but I’ll check that out tomorrow.

I’m looking forward to this as the start of the best year ever! x

Day 2 of my James Vale, Juice Master 3 Day Detox – MAN DOWN!

It’s all gone pear-shaped…(do you see what I did there!?!)

My juicer has DIED! Well, it hasn’t exactly died but everything it produces tastes like burning plastic, the juicer itself smells like burning plastic and I’m not a huge fan of the smoked effect it’s started giving my kitchen.

This sounds like possibly the best excuse ever for flaking out of my juice diet but I am not making this up, not even a tiny bit. I’m now drowning in fruit and veg that don’t usually go together to make a meal. Hmm…

The advice from today, friends is not to buy a Phillips juicer. Hidden among all of the amazing reviews are lots of reviews that talk about the juicers going up in smoke after a few uses. Amazon have even stopped shipping my model because it is defective.

I’ve ordered a new juicer and it looks like I’m going to have to shelve this diet until it arrives next week. Yes, next week. I even ordered silver (yuk) instead of red (love) to expedite the recommencement of the juice detox. THAT’S HOW DEDICATED I AM!!!

Until then, I’m sorry. I failed. But really and truly, for once it wasn’t my fault 🙂 x

Day 1 of my James Vale, Juice Master 3 Day Detox

Things on this blog have been a bit serious for the last few posts and it’s been ages since I did any sort of review so I thought I’d jump back on it and try something new. With a hen do coming up this weekend, I’ve decided that I need to run some sort of detox program to try and get my body back to looking and feeling good. Given my past history of failure at these things, I’ve decided to try a 3 day detox.

I’ve downloaded Jason Vale’s 3 day Juice Master detox app and I’ve actually got as far as starting it. According to his motivational video, I’m already doing better than most because I’ve bought the food and started the detox. BOOM! This is the kind of information I need to hear to keep me on the straight and narrow.

The Shopping List

However, the people who said I wouldn’t be hungry LIED. These are the same idiots who say their bloating decreases, their energy increases and they love it from day one.

I’m struggling, it’s 2.30pm and I’m thinking of going straight to bed post evening juice when I get home because I am THAT tired and hungry right now. I even cheated and ate a satsuma…a whole satsuma! My teeth loved the opportunity to chew something 🙂

Then I ate an apple. Just now I ate an apple because I was feeling light-headed. I’m really not sure these diets factor in the extreme eaters like me. WHOOPS!

To be fair, I think it’s been extra bad for me today because my juicer overheated last night so one of my “juices” is full of bits as I had to resort to the blender. Tomorrow’s menu looks much better as there’s a fruit smoothie and there’s ginger in one of the juices which is pretty much my favourite flavour ever! Not that that makes me any less hungry right now. What I’m currently thinking is that might just eat the components of the juice for dinner. No juicing, just actual huge chunks of food. I can’t get more bloated than I am right now and it should fill me up enough to allow me to actually do some exercise which has to be a good thing.

Watch this space to see if I’ve fallen off the wagon by this time tomorrow… (think thin, think yummy smoothie, think bikini, think…oh sod it!) x

Clean 9 Detox – The Finale

Hello!

So anyone who was reading the blog last week would probably have been expecting further updates on the Clean 9 Detox that I was doing. Although I was pretty hungry most of the time and I hate the taste of aloe vera, I was doing well. That was until Thursday when I received an email I didn’t want and got all moody.

I woke up tired, achy and generally a bit down on Thursday anyway but I still stuck to my shake in the morning and had my low calorie lunch. However, I was so miserable by the end of the day that I went to M&S and I binged. Not only did I eat too much but I ate loads of bread which always makes me really bloated. Then on Friday I had my breakfast shake in the morning, goat curry for lunch and that was it, detox over. I gave up and actually, I felt much better as soon as I did.

A good friend reminded me that I’m not a dieter, food does make my world a better place and I don’t have any problems attracting members of the opposite sex just the way I am. I wasn’t feeling healthier for my efforts so now I’m back to good old fashioned exercise and trying to eat more fruit and veg. and less junk. 

If you really want to detox or if you really do need to lose some weight quickly then I’m sure Clean 9 is a great plan and I certainly found it easier than I’ve found other plans so far. However if you are like me and get depressed when you are hungry and use food as a support mechanism when all else fails, don’t even bother. Just eat more of the good stuff, less of the bad stuff and crack on with some exercise!

Have yourselves a great week my friends! x