In the beginning

I created this journal about a week ago and have been debating how to use it.  I've finally decided that I won't replace my LiveJournal with it and will continue to post there about my life trials and tribulations.  Instead, I'm going to use this as a place to document my journey back to health.  For this, I'll need to post a bit of history, my aims, some pictures, progress along the way and my feelings along the way.

To start - currently I'm recovering from a cold that's laid me out for a week.  I'm 41 years old, female and in full-time employment, with no children.  I'm about to embark on getting a no-fault divorce after two years of seperation from my husband, subsequent to fifteen years of marriage.  We had problems which we tried to work through, but sadly, we moved away from a partnership relationship and less sadly into a friendship.  I've moved away from the county where I grew up and where he still resides, to live alone in a county where my closest proper friends (rather than lovely colleagues) are at least 15 miles away.  I have a partner, also seperated and not yet divorced, but he lives 60 miles away and has the complication of three daughters, aged 10, 14 and 18. 

I'm overweight, teetering towards obese, I think.  Actually, I'll work out my body mass index right now.  I was somewhat downcast to find that it was 13 stone and 7 pounds when I got on my scales on Saturday evening (no clothes involved), but not really surprised.  So, 189 pounds in total - so thats 85.75 kilos.  I'm 5 feet and 6.5 inches tall, or 169cm in metric.  So, that gives me a BMI of 30.4 (you divide your weight by the square of your height - I used kilos and metres).  Eek! I've teetered out from overweight, where I've been residing for a good many years, into obese.  I knew that the news wasn't going to be good, when a pair of size 14 trousers that I only bought this time last year were uncomfortably tight.  I'm not sure on my body measurements right now, but will duly measure properly for a subsequent post.

I also smoke and have done on and off since I was 15.  A bad habit, started on the school bus.  But I've always enjoyed the taste of smoke and the smell of fresh smoke.  Not the smell of ashtrays however, stale smoke is bleah and I don't smoke inside at my own house because of it - sometimes I'll lean out of my bedroom window, but that's normally the closest I get to smoking indoors there.

Finally - I'm hideously unfit.  The most exercise that I regularly do is either a ten minute walk to or from work, or walking round the shops.  That's it.  I sit in front of a computer at work for eight hours per day, I go home, turn the computer on and do the same for another six hours, before going to sleep.

So - I have several aims:
To cut down on my smoking.  My partner smokes and I'm not sure that I'm mentally prepared or signed up for quitting
To do more exercise.  I NEED to do this - being so sedentary is ridiculous.
To lose weight. I don't want to do this for the sake of looks, although my vanity is telling me that there's a huge wardrobe of clothes that I own, much of which I'll be able to wear again once I've got rid of 20 pounds, most of which I'll be able to wear again once I've got rid of 35 pounds and all of which I'd look great in if I manage to lose 45 pounds.  More importantly, I'd improve my health, particularly by observing sensible diet guidelines, such as eating more portions of fruit and vegetables and less of junk food and processed food.

My word though, 45 pounds loss is a long way away.  Aiming at a pound a week, nearly a year away.  Although, experience tells me that I can lose more than that over the first couple of months.  And I'm conscious that I've got a holiday coming up in mid-September, eighteen weeks away.  If I managed to lose 12lb in the first six weeks, 9lb in the second six weeks and 6lb in the third six weeks, that's a total of 27lb.  Just a shade under two stone.  12.25 kilogrammes.  A BMI of 26, which would be in the low overweight category.

If I eat well, following a sensible moderate diet and gradually up my exercise - that should be easy!  It's time to get cracking.

History part one - childhood.

I've been in and out of being overweight since puberty.  It all started with glandular fever, or infectious mononucleosis as it now seems to be called, contracted when I was 11.  Up until then, I'd been a highly active child, climbing trees, riding, working towards gymnastic awards, swimming and sailing regularly.  I managed to contract it just before moving to secondary school too - this coloured a great deal of my life subsequently.  The new school was a selective high school, my parents were overjoyed that I'd been offered a place and up until then, I'd breezed through school, motivated as a big fish in a little puddle - getting all As, as I was equally adept at music, art and sport as I was with english and maths and other academic subjects. 


Aged about ten, hanging off a tree - a fairly normal ten year old in build.

The new school was a long way from home and I had to leave the house at around 7.30, to walk about three quarters of a mile to the bus-stop to catch a contracted coach, that took another hour to drive to the school, picking up other children en route.  I started on a Thursday I think, and by the weekend was complaining of feeling horribly tired.  My parents put this down to the new travelling and change, until I fainted on the Sunday, when out walking with my mother.  I'd NEVER fainted before, so this worried them a little and I was duly taken to the doctor and after a week and some blood tests, the viral infection was confirmed.  One of the side effects of the illness can be serious fatigue.  And I got that in spades.  I was back to school after three weeks at home, but I'd gone from being able to swim indefinitely to not being able to get down the length of the school pool.  Every subject exercise book I had, had accusatory blank pages in the front, where I was supposed to copy up what I'd missed from other people.  I was doing a much longer day, leaving home at 7.30 in the morning and frequently not getting home until well past 5 in the evening.  For the first time in my life I was expected to do homework.  It all added up to overwhelming me.  I was withdrawn and miserable.  The other girls at school had paired up or grouped up into friends, I still knew nobody and was rubbish at sports, following the illness.  Every time I handed in homework, I got sarcastic comments back from the teachers about not having caught up with the work I'd missed.  I stopped doing homework.  I started puberty and all the hormonal misery of that.

So I retreated into a world where I'd go to my bedroom - ostensibly to do homework, but actually to read books and escape that way.  And to comfort myself with food.  I bought sweets daily and ate them incessantly.  When I was home, I'd raid my mother's baking supplies. I'd eat sultanas, raisins, nuts and go down the cocoa jars, the syrup tin or the sugar cannister with a teaspoon.  The peanut butter jar and the Nutella jar weren't safe either.  I crashed on weight, around five stone that year - that's seventy pounds.  I was still growing, but even so, the weight going on around my hips and onto my breasts was causing huge embarassing stretch marks.  And the breasts!  I remember being in the sports changing room and thinking how flat chested I was.  By the end of that year, I had the biggest breasts in the year group.  But of course, the not doing homework was starting to get me into trouble - I'd lie about having done it in my roughbook, or any other excuse I could dream up.  It didn't help that other girls had help from parents who were teachers and then allowed others to copy their homework, altering the phrasing sufficiently for it not to be obvious (being selective, no-one was daft).  I disdained such practices as "cheating" and felt above that, by just not doing it.  But of course, this didn't endear me to teachers, although I passed any test or examination effortlessly still.  Neither did it lead to home being particularly harmonious, as my parents attempted to get me to work and I did anything to not do it.

I always attended school though, I actually always enjoyed learning, just not homework.  I didn't really see the point in homework, since I could manage the exams.  I hated sports still and managed to do the absolute minimum.  I went home and did little in the way of exerting myself, but continued with all those bad eating habits.  I should point out, that these were on top of being fed an extremely good diet by my mother, so I at least had the basis of good health, growing up.  She provided us with lots of veg and lots of fruit and pretty minimal stuff in the way of things like sausages or chips.  I loved milk too, so my bones grew sturdily.  By the time that I was 13, I was my full height and 11 stone in weight - 154 pounds.  My body shape was that of a full grown woman, my vital statistics were 40", 26", 36".  That, coupled with a fairly acute intelligence, meant that if I was dressed up properly, I was mistaken for an adult.  Emotionally, I was a long way off being grown up, I was miserable, sulky and often anti-social.  I'd finally shaken off the fatigue of the disease, but now I had the malaise and moodiness of being a teenager.


Aged around 13 - now fully grown and already pretty heavy, although still playing like a 13 yr old.

My weight stayed roughly the same, because although I regularly continued to overeat, I gradually resumed physical exercise, mainly through Girl Guides, where I canoed, went camping, did night hikes and what we called wide games and generally ran round with lots of people.  Most of my friends were through either Guides or Scouts in the small village where I grew up.  My weight stayed roughly the same until I left home aged 19.

Today

 Full of resolutions, hardly surprising for a first day.  I had a slice of the raisin and cinnamon loaf that my partner bought over the weekend, for breakfast, with a mug of coffee with a generous amount of skimmed milk and a couple of artificial sweeteners.  That's the way I generally take my coffee.  On arrival at work, I made my coffee, but with a teaspoon of sugar and semi-skimmed milk, because that was what was available at the time.  I'd completely forgotten the big jar of granulated sweetener in my desk drawer, doh!  I'm still feeling under par, from the cold or flu virus that bit me a little while back.  Consequently, I've allowed myself to do virtually no physical exercise at all today.  I took the car to work, thence to Sainsburys at lunch time to replenish my fresh foods.  I bought pork steaks, chicken breasts, prawns, smoked salmon trimmings, grapes, oranges, apples, salad, veg, skimmed milk, low-fat probiotic yogurts and low fat houmous. 

For lunch, I had some more of the raisin and cinnamon loaf, a yogurt, grapes and an apple, plus coffee again.  I had a cigarette at lunchtime, but it was the first of the day.  I made it through the afternoon without having one, too.  Packing the stuff into the fridge, I noticed that the fridge could do with a proper clean, but I settled for just wiping the worst of the stains away with a damp sponge.  I'll need to do it properly sometime soon, but I procrastinate terribly with housework.

On returning to work after taking my shopping home and unpacking it, I got my Acer laptop returned.  It has been being repaired under warranty and I'd been unsuccessfully looking for how to query the status of the repair earlier in the day, so that was a pleasant happenstance.  After work this evening, I had a list of things that I should have got on with, such as mowing the lawn, finishing all the washing up that can't go in the dishwasher, ironing the blouses that need it, generally tidying up and vaccuuming.  Suffice it to say that I've done none of them.  Instead, I've been reinstalling all the programmes that I use regularly onto the laptop, pulling my music library off the external hard-drive and generally sitting in a chair with a computer in front of me, again.  

But I did enjoy this evening's meal, of four thin slices of seeded bread, spread with a little reduced fat salad cream and stuffed with prawns and cos lettuce, accompanied by a bottle of orange Fruit Shoot.  I intend to make a smoothie later on if I'm hungry - there's plenty of frozen fruit and milk.  

It's a start, albeit a very gentle one.