Cheat! Cheat! Big fat cheat!

Yep. I'll admit it. Look, it's been a tough week. (or more). My eating plan allows for one cheat day in the first month, 2 in the second and 1 a week in the third, but I've completely rewritten the rules. They now read 'If you're having a hard time cheat, cheat and cheat again'. Seems fair enough to me:-)
Had my hair cut last week to go out for a meal with DH. Really nice meal and my only cheat was the alcohol and the strawberries, meringue and cream. Then had a horrible 2 days. Hit the pits. So I thought 'what do women generally do when they feel this miserable? They eat chocolate that's what'. And having discoveed that I can eat chocolate without getting too much of a rash, and given that I'd just bought myself a Lindt bunny, i scoffed it. And I loved it.
Then I found out that I'd run out of my vitamin and amino acid supplements. Now, there's no point sticking to the diet if I can't do all of it is there? So normal service will be resumed when they arrive. Till then I've been quite surprised that even though I'm allowing myself to cheat I'm not bingeing, I'm just giving in to temptation a little bit. A mars bar here, a half a glass of beer there.
Oh well. When my supplements get here I'm going to give it the full 8 weeks and not cheat at all, unless it's an officially sanctioned cheat day. I may have to bend the rules again...

handling stuff too

Reading your post helps me feel that after all not all is lost. I keep falling off the wagon too, I don't think that i eat a lot, but as soon as \i try to eat less i end up wanting to eat more. I am sure there is a direct connection or link, trying to eat less equals wanting to eat more. Every time i try to eat less my poor body immediately tells me things like "You are so hungry Dawn, and you so need to dip 4 biscuits in your coffee. The craving is dire and urgent and physically demanding, I feel as if i will never be able to eat properly again and as a result I make sure I CAN eat.
It's true how ever hard I try that I find it really hard to say no to food and the more I say no the more I feel impelled to say 'yes' it feels physical and almost impossible to not say yes.
Then I have all these guilt hang ups about how I look and feel, and how annoyed my doc will be.
Because lack of food equals increased desire, I need to make it more 'do-able' so now I am concentrating on specific task, well 2 actually. The main things i eat that are fattening are chocolate and bread, also if I eat a lot of bread (ie couple of slices) I feel bloated and get heart burn, so I am going to cut both of these out completely. As I've said before I stopped smoking , I could say no fags, and I could refuse to have them at all. With food I can't say no food at all, so the boundaries and the desires get all muddled, and the "I'll just eat a bit" mentality sneaks in until i can't ignore it.
So now I can say NO and I have s strict criteria for the 'no', no chocolate, no bread. It sounds do able, it might make a difference, keep you posted.

Handling stress

Oops. I've been forgetting to post in purple. Been thinking about stress and how to handle it and still carry on being careful about what I eat. Whenever there's any kind of conflict, even if it's just black clouds on the horizon, or someone else not handling their emotions terribly well ( I'll leave you to guess the gender) I immediately feel that tight little knot and find myself fantasising about food. Or even succumbing.
So I am going to have to find different ways of dealing with stress, and as I can't just drop everything and sink into a hot bath it'll have to be something else. Probably something active involving the kids. And I'll have to take a leaf out of my own pet peeves book ( the one that gets annoyed when I suggest something and the person I've sugested it to comes up with reasons why it just can't be done - when I know it darned well can and needs to be!) and stop that annoying little voice in my head telling me negative things and why this won't be possible or that won't be practical, and by the way shouldn't you be doing x. y or z, I mean you *are* supposed to be educating those kid, you know! After all, who makes my schedule for me? Who is it who decides what I should be doing and how and when? Don't answer that!

Some positive stuff

I've noticed two positive things this week. The first thing is my big knickers: they fit better! They come up to my belly button where before they kind of slouched a couple of inches lower. It's a big thing for me. I daren't measure my waist and hips in case it's all an illusion and I haven't actually lost inches, but it FEELS like I have and that's good enough for me.
The other thing is that I find I'm not scuttling past the mirror, scared to look at myself. Even in my slobbiest everyday clothes I no longer feel flabby. I've been wondering whether the way I was eating before actually affected my brain and the way I perceived how I looked. I've heard it said that anorexics have a distorted view of their bodies and believe that they look fat even when they are little more than skeletons. Again even if I haven't lost weight, I feel as though I look better to myself and that'll do for me. Smiley, hopeful, positive Liz is a nice Liz to be around.:-)

Different blog

This looked worth a look:

http://alardoffmymind.wordpress.com/

I mean, we all need another blog to read don't we? ;-)

Crash, bang, thud!

That's the sound of me falling off the wagon. I didn't do it just to show solidarity, I really didn't see it coming. I'm allowed one cheat day in the first month, and I guess strictly speaking that probably means at the end of the first month. Now my first month isn't up till the middle of next week, but I'd been ill for a week for so and lost my appetite ( no excuse to go making up for it, I know) and part of the illness, just a bad cold and general bleugh feeling, seemed to be feeling very down and tearful. When I feel like that the old way of thinking crowds in on me and I feel overwhelmed and unable to cope. The housework piles up, making the feeling even worse because now I have a chaotic house and no energy to do anything about it and even less inclination because it's now such a major task that I can't see where to start. I decided to be nice to myself and bring my cheat day forward by a week or so. So I had a few pieces of the fudge that the girls had made and then had fish and chips (home made, there's no fish and chips shops for miles!) and figured that was it, hop back up on the wagon and head for the hills. But no. I had a fun evening planned the following night, a dance at the local village hall, and it was a 'bring a dish' supper. I didn't really know whether I'd cope with the restrictions of my diet as most if not all of the food would be off limits. I also didn't want to play the game of not eating anything and politely declining the food on offer. That just seemed so naff. So I cheated again. Properly. Not just a mouthful of this and a smackerel of that. I had exactly what I wanted, including the chocolate desserts, and made up my mind not to feel guilty about it. So that was nearly the end of it. The way I see it Mother's day is a day for mothers to do what they feel like doing. Given the fact that dh has also come down with the lurgy I couldn't have everything i wanted, as I was on duty looking after kids, animals and house, so I chose to treat myself to a box of choccies. Haven't done that for a couple of years, due to developing an allergy to chocolate, but I decided to put up with the resulting rash (actually, and this is very dangerous for me to admit to myself, I haven't come out in a rash...yet). I ate the whole box except for a couple that I shared, washed down with two cups of decaff coffee, also off limits. And I loved every self-indulgent minute of it.
I don't really know how or whether to justify all that to myself. It really was a horrible week. I had my first major wobble about having moved to a small, close knit, very rural community. I began to wonder whether we'd moved to the right place or not. I don't regret moving to the north east at all. It was absolutely the right thing to do, but the community we've moved to is kind of difficult. We moved two and a half years ago so I'm probably doing well not to have wobbled before now. Wherever we lived we'd probably feel like square pegs given our views and our lifestyle, but I feel soo alien to the prevailing attitudes round here, and there are some things I don't dare admit to the people I meet as I don't want my family or me to be ostracised. And it's very stressful to feel that you have to hide your true self so as not to upset other people or cause an argument. Also dh pointed out that we don't know anyone else in our home community who has small children. We know one woman who has two older children and that's about it. No wonder I feel a bit isolated and out on a limb. Well, I guess the next year or so will be a time to assess what we've gained by being here and what we've lost, and see how the balance sheet looks at the end of it all.
In the meantime, has anyone seen a wagon around here with a seat spare?