The good news is that I am down 2 lbs – yay! The bad news is that this is all I have lost since the middle of May. It means that I have now lost 24 lbs in total and possibly a couple of dress sizes. I am not sure about dress sizes as I have been wearing stretchy clothes. However I plan to do a blog about my on-going wardrobe edit to explain this in a bit more detail.
The sugar challenge ended on Saturday 4 June 2016. I was not able to attend the grand finale and relied on the weight loss I had registered on Saturday 28 May 2016 of 4 kg. There were 5 participants in total and I was joint-second. The winner lost 5 kg. As usual with me, life got in the way and I lost my focus meaning that I don’t know if I did as well as I could have. Again, on a positive note, I am lighter than I was at the start so that’s a reason to be cheerful.
The fact however is that no matter how positive one is, it is difficult to ignore the fact that I have only lost 2 lbs in an entire month of healthy eating and regular exercise. In fact exercise has been going so well that I can actually now run on the treadmill and feel that I am finally putting my injury behind me.
My diet has improved in the sense that I don’t really crave large portions of food anymore. I have never really had a sweet tooth and these days on the rare occasions that I indulge in sweet treats I tend to suffer from stomach upsets. However I keep chocolate made without sugar in my kitchen cupboard so that I can enjoy chocolate without the nasty side effects if I want to. I still like to enjoy a cheat day usually on Fridays when I have rice and/or plantain or yam usually with some sort of tomato based sauce or stew (Nigerian stew is mainly tomato based and my non-Nigerian friends say it tastes like curry).
I have been weighing myself a lot of recent and noticed that I have huge weight gains usually towards the end of the week after my Friday cheat days. They are quite dramatic increases and the largest I have observed is a swing back up to 168 lbs. Naturally this has worried me because I feel I have been here before. At the end of 2012 I tried to get my weight under control by working with a personal trainer. It was not a good experience for me for a number of reasons. In the end however, the main reason that I gave up was that I got so fed up of feeling so anxious about seeing my trainer that I could not sleep very well the day before a session. I was not cheating on my diet and I was sneaking in extra workouts and yet none of this effort showed up on the scales and I began to feel fed up with my trainer’s suspicion that I was cheating on my diet.
Last year when I was a member of Curves, I noticed the same thing. Some weeks I would lose nothing and others I would actually gain a pound or two. Again, I would work hard at my exercise and try to stick to the diet. My body seems to have a mind of its own when it comes to weight loss.
On the bright side, I have noticed that my clothes feel a lot looser and I can wear a lot of things that I have not been able to wear in years. I think even my face looks different – in a good way.
Thanks very much for my friends, family and training partners for your help, advice, support and encouragement which is much appreciated