Category: Dieting

Blog, Dieting, Summer

Headspace Needed—For Food, Fantasy and Forward Planning…

christinahollis
This isn’t me…yet!

I’ve written before about trying out Paul McKenna’s I Can Make You Thin. I’ve been listening to its self-hypnosis CD to help me lose weight. It has been working almost too well. The CD runs for about half an hour, and is so relaxing I usually drop off to sleep.

The subliminal message must be sinking in, as I feel more positive about reaching my goal. I want to weigh 9 stone 12lb (that’s 138lb, or around 63kg) by the time the new university term begins. That’s on 23rd September—only six weeks from now!

I’ve lost six pounds already, but I still have nearly twelve pounds to go. Losing 2lb per week will be tough. I love my food. If I can stick to eating smaller portions than usual that will be fine. I’m working on the basis that there’s no such thing as a forbidden food, only forbidden amounts. Doing plenty of exercise to make sure I expend more calories than I take on board should help shift the extra weight.

The problem with that is I already spend a couple of hours each day walking Alex. Add on the forty minutes of running I do on the treadmill every other day, and that’s quite a chunk of my working week accounted for already. I still have to fit in doing the washing, cooking—not to mention eating and sleeping—as well as earning my living.

Good food is one of my hobbies. Writing is supposed to be my job, although as I scribble in my spare time, it’s a hobby too. Writing as a career has one big downside— I’m constantly searching for opportunities. Research and promotion take big bites out of my working time, too.

I’m already racking up between 12,000 and 17,000 steps each day on my pedometer. Much more legwork, and I’ll have to be resoled (I already have a spare tyre, thanks!). I decided to use a combination of the CD and the mindfulness and meditation app Headspace to double my chances of achieving my weight-loss goal.

After trying it out for a while (you can read about that here) I took the plunge and subscribed. That costs around £72 per year. It is a lot of money, but that fact acted on me as an incentive. I want to lose pounds in weight, not waste pounds in money! I’ve meditated with Headspace at least once a day for several weeks. It’s helpful that the app has varying lengths of meditation. If I can’t manage a twenty-minute session, I can squeeze in five-or-ten minutes, instead. There are also short animations and films, which are fun to watch as well as informative.

York RNA Tea, here I come…

When I’m trying to plan projects for my next year at university it’s tempting to spend hours each day sitting in front of my computer. That will lead to me putting on more weight, rather than taking it off.

To give myself an added incentive. I’ve booked my hotel and train tickets ready for the York chapter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s afternoon tea in September. I’ll need to have reached my target weight before sitting down to a wonderful spread like the one we had last year (the picture shows only one of several cake-stands delivered to our table!).

The McKenna CD at night gives me a good night’s sleep. Headspace’s Mindful Eating sessions in the morning is a lovely way to ease myself into each day. You’re talked through a ten-to twenty-minute session (you choose the length) of relaxation. It has encouraged me to think about my relationship with food. That may sound snowflakey, but as it seems to be working I’m not too bothered about that.

Any spare time I have now involves either losing myself in a fantasy inspired by Paul McKenna’s improving talks where losing my excess weight sees me beat my personal best time for running a mile. If I’m not doing that, I’m planning meals so I never become desperate enough to snack on something sugary.

It’s made me think hard about whether I actually want to eat something, or whether I’m simply bored (answer: get working instead!), feel in need of a treat (get out into the garden, away from the cake tins!) or thirsty. That last reason, suggested by Headspace, surprised me. To test it, the next time I had the urge to eat I drank a cup of tea instead. It worked. From now on, there’ll be more tea, and less food. More tea can also mean more exercise. While the kettle boils, I’ve got time to fit in a few lunges and squats!

Blackberries—perfect for summer puddings.

Looking back on my long and loving relationship with food reminded me of those endless, school holidays in summer. When it was too hot to work in the garden I’d take a book and hide in the shade of our big old Bramley apple tree. Its branches swung so close to the ground I could climb out of sight without much effort. I would lose myself in something like The Once and Future King or The Goshawk (both by T.H.White). Mealtimes were feasts of home-grown new potatoes, carrots, peas, beans or cabbage, with lamb chops, sausages, or bacon and egg on top. At this time of year, there were big bowls of stewed blackberry and apple with custard for pudding. It was all delicious, and we had to sit to the table until it was all finished. That was never a problem for me—but in those days I was still growing upwards, rather than outwards!

What’s your best memory of those long summer holidays?

Blog, Dieting, Food

Can Listening to a CD Make You Lose Weight?

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Sitting around, eating too much cake and not taking any exercise wasn’t doing me any good at all. I started using music to nibble (!) away at the problem, as you can find out here.

The second reason I couldn’t lose weight was outrageous. Over the centuries and around the world, people have killed over a “problem” like mine. Eating when I wasn’t hungry was a luxury that not many people can afford. My weight wasn’t anybody else’s problem. I had nobody but myself to blame. If I wanted to shift those extra pounds, I’d have to take responsibility for doing it.

I began by eating smaller portions. This was tricky. The truth is, I hate being hungry. When I was a child, there wasn’t much money to spare. Our household operated on the army principle that you got just enough food. The idea was that you always got up from the table thinking you could eat more. Blow that for a lark, I thought when I left home. Food—both cooking it and eating it—has been one of my hobbies ever since.

Using a smaller plate restricted my intake. There simply isn’t enough room for a big meal. That didn’t help with the food I was eating after my last meal of the day, though. Sitting in front of the idiot lantern was a time for eating straight out of the bag, tube or box.

It took me a lot of nerve to enrol here as a mature student…

It took a personal development course offered by the University of Gloucestershire (you can find out more about that here) to persuade me to change my habits. One of the group exercises involved brainstorming our personal problems. My team gave me some great ideas for low-calorie TV snacks. For instance, an apple sliced very thinly takes a long time to eat. It has fewer than 100 calories. Contrast that with the 300 calories or so in the amount of Pringles I could shift in half that time!

It was a start. Then I remembered how shy, retiring me found the confidence to apply for a place at university in the first place. I used Instant Confidence by Paul McKenna—and it worked. You can read my review of that here. There was clearly a link between the success of that self-hypnosis system and my lack of willpower over food. That should make McKenna’s I Can Make You Thin the perfect weapon in my weight-loss campaign. Its subtitle; Love Food, Lose Weight appealed to me, too.

I sent off for it and set aside half an hour each evening to listen. My heart sank with the opening words. It was a warning not to listen to this “eyes-closed process” while driving or operating machinery. I had no complaints about that—only the ridiculous way it was delivered. It was read out by an American man who must earn his living announcing programmes such as Are aliens living among us? or Was this teenager eaten by Bigfoot? on cable TV. He bellowed it with such excitement, it made me want to switch off.

Luckily, I didn’t. Paul McKenna’s I Can Make You Thin follows the same pattern as his Confidence CD. McKenna lulls you into a state of relaxation which makes you sensitive to his suggestions for regulating your appetite, and improving your lifestyle. I’d like to tell you what those suggestions are, but McKenna has such a restful voice I can’t remember what he said. As I soon began to lose a little weight without consciously dieting, his system may well be working. It’s going to take time, though—and my weight loss could be due to replacing those starchy evening snacks with fruit.

The big advantage of I Can Make You Thin are that it takes absolutely no effort at all. You just lie there, and let Paul McKenna’s voice wash over you. It’s lovely—which is my only problem with it. Every time I’ve tried it, I’ve fallen asleep. That’s fine, but then I wake up a few hours later in the middle of the night and have trouble getting back to sleep. If that happens, how can my brain take in the information? The only way to tell is to see if I keep on losing weight.

I’ll let you know, so follow my blog to find out!

Blog, Dieting

Three Good Reasons Why I Couldn’t Lose Weight…

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Number One: It’s A Health Thing…

I NEVER buy cake. I make it instead…

One of the many reasons I became a writer was because it involves a lot of sitting around. To a chubby child who was always last to be picked for sports teams at school, it sounded like the perfect career. It has turned out to be my dream job, but the biggest advantage I saw in writing as a child is actually one big drawback.

Once I left school and began life behind a different sort of desk, I started piling on the weight. “If I eat a 200g bar of chocolate, I put on a kilo of weight. Anything that goes into my mouth heads straight for my hips, and stays there. It must be genetic, Doctor!” I wailed.

“Rubbish!” he snapped back, for this was in the days before fat-shaming was A Thing, “I know your family. Keep them away from cake and they’re built like whippets. And don’t bother saying you’ve got a slow metabolism. The bigger you are, the faster it has to work.”

I was given all sorts of tests. The only thing wrong with me was a marginally under-active thyroid gland. I was prescribed tablets. I started taking them, and sat back expecting the weight to fall off. It didn’t. The clue, although I didn’t spot it at the time, was in those two slender words, “sat back”.

Wholemeal bread, cheese and home-grown salad. What could be healthier? Er…

I didn’t think my weight problem could be my fault. A lot of people expand because of poor nutrition, but I knew that couldn’t be the case for me. I’ve always grown as much of my family’s food as possible, and to make sure we all get our “five-a-day”. I cook meals from fresh ingredients almost all the time, conveniently forgetting that organic doesn’t mean “non-fattening”. I love food almost as much as I love writing, and that’s the problem. If I’m idle, tired, bored or unhappy, I eat. Like the workhouse boys in Lionel Bart’s Oliver! I love that full-up feeling.

The only way to enjoy that, and not become spherical is to use more calories than I take in. I bought a cheap pedometer, and started walking 10,000 steps per day. That was easy when the children were at our local village primary school. I was walking a minimum of two miles per day each working week during term time (and avoiding all the school-gate squabbles over car parking).

Then I was struck down with a bad reaction to an insect bite. I went from walking miles each day to barely being able to hobble as far as the garden gate.

My husband bought me a treadmill to help my recovery. Slowly, I built back up to being able to reach my target of 10k per day again. Then DD borrowed Running Made Easy by Susie Whalley and Lisa Jackson from the library. After reading only a few pages over her shoulder, I sent off for my own copy. I’d never run before without a ferocious PE teacher snapping at my heels, but I wanted that book. It had charts to fill in and boxes to tick, and I can never resist a progress chart!

On the single occasion I’ve run outdoors, this is my time for 1500 metres.

I worked through the book, then discovered the NHS’s Couch to 5K programme. Working on my treadmill because I was afraid of falling on the uneven forest tracks, I went right through the programme. I now exercise for half an hour, every other day. My sessions are made up of five minutes walking, twenty minutes running at a speed that leaves me just about able to hold a conversation—as long as it’s simple!—then a five-minute cool down walk.

If I’m honest I find running both a chore and a bore, although the high I get when I finish a run is fantastic. The trouble is, I have to do it all over again, forty-seven and a half hours later. I run as soon as I wake up, before I can think of an excuse not to do it. I can’t write while I run, so that’s annoying. I find even thinking about work difficult while I’m running. Having the radio on full blast so I can hear it over the sound of the extractor fan and my pounding feet is not an option at 5.30am. I had to wait until I got an i-phone before I discovered a way of bringing some fun to running. I made a playlist specially for my sessions on the treadmill. It definitely speeds things up.

Here it is…

  • Lawrence of Arabia (Main Theme) by Maurice Jarre —This is loud, evocative, and perfect for my warm-up as the march section is just over 5kph—my walking speed!
  • The Trap (Main Theme) by Ron Goodwin—For as Dr Sheldon Cooper said, “What is life without whimsey?”
  • Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash—When I saw Walking the Line, my joints were so painful I could only sit and watch other people moving, and that definitely tortured me!
  • Chariots of Fire by Vangelis (Main Theme) See The Trap above!
  • Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (Main Theme) by John Williams—this was playing on the radio one day when Number One Son walked in and saw me flagging during my run. “Just pretend you’re being chased by a big boulder, Mum,'” he said.
  • Spitfire Prelude and Fugue by William Walton—I used to work for Rolls-Royce Aero, in Filton. The staff there had seen it all, and done most of it, too, but at the distinctive sound of a display Spitfire coming in for a service they’d all drop everything, and rush to the windows to watch it.
  • The Great Escape (Main Theme) by Elmer Bernstein. When I first put my playlist together, this was the final track. The title says it all! Unfortunately, this collection turned out to be a couple of minutes too short when I tried it out. I needed one more track. The Magnificent Seven was too long, but
  • The Dambusters March by The Central Band of the RAF is exactly the right length to complete my sessions. The speed matches the last part of my run and cool-down, then during the last moments I walk down the drive to our front gates and do my stretches. Perfect!

While I haven’t actually lost any weight through running, as long as I keep doing it regularly it stops me putting any more on. Which is progress, of a sort.

Next time: The Second Reason Why I Couldn’t Lose Weight…

Dieting, Resolutions, snowdrops

Dieting, And A Destination…

christinahollis
When the first of the month falls on a Monday, it’s a great time for second chances. How are you doing with your New Year resolutions? I’ve struggled with cutting down on carbs, so since Christmas, I’ve been busy losing three pounds in weight, then putting two of them back on again. It’s the little things I miss. OH brought a still-warm loaf of wholegrain bread back from our village shop one day last week. I managed to resist it for a whole day, but my willpower failed before the family managed to eat it all. Bread and Marmite has never tasted so good!

The second of February is Candlemas Day, a Christian celebration celebrated annually. It represents the Virgin Mary’s purification and the presentation of Christ, and in our church all the candles for the year are blessed. Snowdrops are traditionally known as Candlemas Bells, as they flower at this time of year. When some brave daffodils were in flower at Christmas here, I thought the snowdrops would all be out and over by now, but they followed their own calendar. The photos on this blog were taken here at Tottering Towers, but if you’re anywhere near Colesbourne in Gloucestershire over the next couple of weeks, try and get to Colesbourne Gardens, where you can see them by the thousand. The gardens are signposted from the M5, and opening times for this don’t-blink-or-you’ll miss it event are on their website.
chocolate, Dieting, Food, Keira Knightley, weight

Three Top Tips For Losing Weight

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(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia CommonsHTML
Photo: Matthias Kabel
My body is a work of art – rather like the Woman of Willendorf. As I work from home at a sedentary job, jogging for twenty minutes a day isn’t enough to stop my weight creeping up. Six weeks ago I decided to take radical action, so I started dieting. The process is hell, but I’m losing weight. More importantly, I’ve learned some invaluable things along the way.
1. There’s Only One Keira Knightley
People come in different shapes and sizes. Don’t let the media influence the way you see yourself.  It’s your body that matters.  All my female ancestors have been er…substantial, so no one is ever going to mistake me for the Wraith of the Black Pearl. On the other hand, looking like a badly-filled sandbag is not a good idea.  
Visit your doctor to get an official decision on how much weight you should lose to stay healthy, to find out if there are any special precautions you should take before dieting, and if your clinic can offer you any help. To put it crudely, eating less and exercising more is the best and most sustainable way to lose weight, but it’s not easy. You don’t want to make it harder than it needs to be.
2. Take Control
Once you know your suggested target weight, draw up an achievable timetable for doing it. Avoid starting a diet before any of the traditional feast days – Christmas, Easter, birthdays, etc. Resisting food is always difficult, but starting to count calories when there’s lots of delicious temptation everywhere is asking too much. Wait until you’ve had some experience of restricting your intake before putting yourself to the test like that.  Have set mealtimes, and take time to enjoy your food rather than grabbing something on the run. Drink plenty of water – in particular, have a large glass of water about half an hour before you eat. Make sure you eat a balanced diet. You want to lose weight, not become malnourished. Fibre fills you up, so eat whole fruit rather than just juice. I find celery is a great for those times when I feel the need to nibble. It takes a lot of eating, tastes nice, and unlike my other great standby, chewing gum, it doesn’t contain a long list of ingredients in a tiny typeface.
3.Don’t Beat Yourself Up
Let’s face it, the type of person who can stick to a diet and lose exactly the amount of weight they specify within an allotted timespan is not the sort of person who is likely to get heavy in the first place. Accept that there will be times when you can’t resist that chocolate bar. If you eat it, forget it once it’s gone but learn from the experience. DON’T give up! Instead, keep temptation out of your way in future. Don’t go shopping when you’re hungry. If you can’t resist biscuits or chocolate, don’t have them in the house. That’s easy if you live alone. If you have children, or a husband who can eat what he likes and never put on a pound (looking at you, OH), it’ll be hard – but not impossible. My family and I all love chocolate, so our house is permanently packed with the stuff. Luckily OH and co. like it chilled but I don’t, so it’s all stored in the fridge. The theory is that by the time the bar I’ve pinched from the chiller has come up to room temperature, I’ll have conquered my impulse to eat it. 
In other news, research for my current WIP involves suspending a Bounty bar over a recently boiled kettle. Allegedly…

What’s your favourite tip for losing weight?