To eat or not to eat (breakfast!)

Back to work, and so back to normality, and the daily question; to have or not have breakfast? I've discovered since I started this journey that I very rarely feel hungry first thing in the morning. This is fine at weekends and in the holidays (I'm a teacher, remember?) but in term time it's a bit harder as I can't choose when to stop and eat.

So what I have started to do is to have something, say a banana or fruit of some sort at 8.45 before the children come in at 9. This keeps me going until breaktime, when I can sit down and eat something with my coffee. On a playground duty day, I do tend to eat some breakfast as i wont get a proper break until lunchtime.

I think I have discovered that I like waiting until I am hungry to eat, and that I dislike the feeling of being overfull, so this is good progress as far as I am concerned.

6 monthiversary!

I've just realised that it is 6 months since I started this journey. I attended the Beyond Chocolate Workshop that started it all last October, and this was when I made some promises to myself. I promised that;

• I would never diet again.


• I would eat when I was hungry.

Because of years and years of dieting, binging, and yo-yoing with my weight, I was so fed up, tired and just generally at breaking point with my relationship with food. Before I attended that workshop I was really desperate for something, and during and after it, I knew that I had found the thing I was looking for. I know from my own experience that diets don't work, and that my realationship with food was pretty disordered. Now I don't think about food and 'forbidden foods' the way I used to. I don't stress about the things I am 'not allowed' to eat, because basically those things don't exist, I am 'allowed' to eat anything I want. But having given myself permission to eat what I want, my diet is actually pretty good. I actually don't eat loads of chocolate, cakes, chips, sweets etc which is quite a surprise. I actually walk past these things in the supermarket, and don't give them a second glance!

I have come a long way in 6 months!

A Box Of Chocolates

My darling son (20, 6 foot tall and hairy!)A bought me a box of chocolates today :) So unlike him, but bless him, he felt guilty because the Mothers day card he sent me got lost in the post! So I have just sat and eaten one slowly......................and four others in quick succession, and very unintuitively (if there is such a word!)

I also have been doing a bit of 'grazing', or rather 'carrying on eating past the point where I have had enough' if you like. I have had a curiously upsetting couple of days emotionally (my daughter has been home for a few days and she is finding it hard to adjust). While I can recognise that I am upset, and have been determined not to eat emotionally, I have slipped up now and then, and found myself eating mindlessly.!

But at least I recognise what I am doing!

Easter Weekend!

Normally this would be a difficult time for me; well difficult in that I would probably have thrown whatever diet I was doing overboard, and would have started eating everything in sight already! Or be struggling to keep to my diet/cut down ahead of the holiday. Now I feel a lot more in control, I am not stressing about what I am going to eat, and I'm not casting longing glances at Easter Eggs in the supermarket. In fact my kids( both adult now; but they're still my kids!) have asked for cds this year and I was feeling quite superior in Sainsbury's today looking at people with stacks of cheap chocolate eggs in their trolleys. I have chocolate at home, but it's good quality chocolate that I eat a couple of squares of when I fancy it.

We will have a big family dinner round my Mum's on Sunday, and I intend to enjoy it, but not overeat. I'm just looking forward to spending quality time with my family without gettting stressed about food!

The weather is lovely here at the moment so I've been doing a lot of walking (Its the school holidays too, so no work!).

Hot Snot and Bogie Pie.

An old playground rhyme;
Hot Snot and Bogie Pie
All mixed up with a dead dog's eye
Stir it up and eat it quick,
Wash it down with a cup of cold sick!

That old rhyme is pretty gross, it's what we used to say about our school dinners when I was at school. Really the point of this post is how when I was a child, (and many others too I guess) I was forced to eat foods I hated. This was especially the case with school dinners, we had to have a clean plate, and were not allowed to leave anything. This has left me with an absolute aversion to certain foods; butter beans, haricot beans, and kidney beans being the worse, I cannot abide these foods. The reason for making us eat all that was served up to us (we didn't have any choice in that either) was a fallout from the post war thinking about food being wasted I suppose. I was at primary school in the sixties (yes I am that old!) and the post war period was not that long ago.

How it has affected me is the above aversion to pulses, which I absolutely cannot think of trying to eat (which means most Mexican foods are out) and also a vague feeling of guilt when I don't clear my plate, even though I know it is ok, and not helping anyone if I don't!

So for me, and perhaps others of my generation, food is loaded with all kinds of feelings of fear and guilt which go back to our childhood.

Not surprising that we have 'issues' around food!

Fun, fitness and ... vampires(!)

Well I had a great day yesterday at 'The Vitality Show', at Olympia in London. The show is all about health, beauty and fitness, there is so much to see and do. I got loads of goodies, in fact I had to buy a box on wheels to trundle it all around in! The box itself is great too, as I've needed something like this for school for ages. I got to try some different products, some I liked; like hair straighteners, and makeup, and some I didn't; which was an instant eye lift! It looked great, but felt very stiff and uncomfortable, and the woman who applied it was a bit rude, to be honest! I met a new friend there from the Beyond Chocolate Form, and we tried every type of juice on offer in the place, and found some very nice new ones; plum was my favourite; yum!

I saw some fitness demos; my new friend participated in Tai Chi, which she found a lot more strenuous than it looks! I also thought it looked good, I'll have to look out for a class near me.

As I was about to leave I found out I could have had an injection of botox or fillers! Maybe next time!

Something really strange happened on the way home though; I saw two vampires on the tube! They were young, in their twenties, usual goth clothing, but they had fangs! And they didn't look fake, it looked like their real teeth, it was so wierd. Course they couldn't have been REAL vampires, cos it was daylight lol!