2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2010. That’s about 4 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 26 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 6 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 1mb.

The busiest day of the year was September 11th with 80 views. The most popular post that day was The story so far.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, twitter.com, journobiz.com, thefitwriter.wordpress.com, and flowerpotdays.blogspot.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for marathon mum wordpress, marathonmum, wordpress marathon mum, marathonmum wordpress, and marathon mum.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

The story so far September 2010

2

Disillusioned September 2010
9 comments

3

Don’t run before you can walk September 2010
4 comments

4

The penny drops October 2010
6 comments

5

Calorie confusion September 2010
4 comments

Moratorium

Whoever said that things have to be done one step at a time wasn’t lying! After weeks of tension, worry and trying to do everything at once, things have been left things in the lurch.

I do have a lot going on at the moment personally, so things have had to be shelved for a few weeks. But not totally. The least I can do is to not go stupid with food, so I am trying at least to be sensible, even if the gym has taken a tumble.

Don’t worry – I’ll be back. Just give me a couple of weeks to sort things out.

Allie x

Frightfest progress report

Generally it is going well, though points three and four seem to be merging. I did intend on cycling and exercising each day, but life has got in the way this week – as it inevitably does whenever I make plans.

Monday – partial success. Ate as planned but did indulge in leftover lasagne for dinner with a slice of garlic bread and a Penguin (the biscuit, not the bird) but once dinner was over I didn’t eat again. The down side is that I cycled home after working late, got rained on and decided I’d rather get out of my wet clothes and have dinner than go to Pilates.

Tuesday – another partial success. Ate as yesterday, once again once dinner was over there was no snacking. Cycled to and from work again; I can now make the three-mile journey in just under 20 minutes. Went to bed at 8pm. Someone asked me if I had lost weight today, apparently you can see it in my face. (Note to my body: lose it off the arse first, please.)

Wednesday – Half way there! Cycled to work again, the early night helped with the whole getting up and eating porridge thing. I find that I actually look forward to putting some music on and cycling home. It’s a nice end to the day. Eating went to plan, but with the addition of a rice crispie cake made for me by my son at school. He would have been upset had I not eaten it.

Thursday – massive cockup. Doctor’s appointment for son later means I have to go in the car to work and I missed breakfast. Must go to gym later, no excuses. I have resolutely avoided the scales as the ones I have at home are a bit wonky and need chucking out. But I measured myself this morning and I seem to have lost an inch off my waist and a bit more than that from my hips in the last week. Are things moving at last?

The flab-u-less five-day fitness fright-fest

I have decided, after easing myself in gently last week with two days of cycling into work, to put what I have learned recently into practice.

As it’s Hallowe’en, I’m calling it the Flab-u-less five-day, five-point fitness fright-fest. I feel this would be particularly popular with fans of Hallowe’en, hyphens and pain.

The plan is this:

1. Get the things I need together the night before.

2. Get up in time to make porridge and eat it before leaving for work.

3. Cycle to and from work all week – a six-mile round trip.

4. Exercise daily.

5. Don’t pig out.

I was thrilled today to find a canned French onion soup (I love the stuff) in Morrisons. I bought four cans for my lunches this week as I am only working four days.

Dinners are trickier, though I have developed a liking for rice with Teriyaki sauce, which I may serve with chicken and veg. Snacks will be fruit only. No alcohol, chocolate or junk food.

My evenings will be filled with Pilates and gym-type stuff, so maybe I will finally brave the yoga class I have wanted to do for so long.

I’ll most probably update as the week goes on, including tomorrow’s weigh-in with Jane at Pilates.

Too much information

A quick Google search this morning brought up stories about a man who ate nothing but potatoes for two months, a miracle shot to make you lose 30lbs and the cookie diet.

Apparently, almost one in four adults in England is now classed as obese. That’s twice as many as in France, Italy or Holland, and there has been a rise in the use of diet pills such as Alli.

Having taken a similar drug (Xenical) in the past, I can tell you that, from personal experience, the side-effects of this type of drug – which prevents the body from absorbing fat – are too much to cope with. Failure inevitably follows.

I then did a search for healthy diet and was presented with 63,700,000 results. Change that to weight loss and get 174,000,000 results, but make it into sustainable weight loss and the results are reduced to just 1,830,000.

There are all sorts of diet plans, from blood type to Atkins to GI to organised slimming and weight loss clubs. All profess to have the highest success rate. They can’t all be right.

So, what should I do? Up the protein? Eat only unprocessed foods? Are baked potatoes good for you or just starchy carb-laden belly bombs? There are just too many answers. Maybe it’s best not to ask.

What’s stopping you?

After my last post, I wondered what it was that stopped me from changing. I found a really informative series of articles online about how to change your eating habits which revealed that the main barrier to change was fear.

It made me think about how I can break this fear and really embrace the change I so desperately need. I know for me the main thing is getting organised. If I don’t have anything healthy to eat in the house, I’ll end up making bad food choices.

Organisation will work for exercise too. For example, I fully intended cycling to work last week as I had signed up for the Bike Boost challenge. When Monday came, I couldn’t find my jogging bottoms and decided to take the car instead. Being weighed at Pilates just highlighted my perceived failure.

Tuesday was my 40th birthday, so Wednesday was spent recovering from the “£15 for two courses and a bottle of wine” offer at Chez Jules. By Thursday I was so upset at having wasted three days I gave up and told myself I would start again at the weekend. Can you imagine how differently my week would have been if I had just taken a little bit of time on Sunday to get my stuff ready? Such a simple thing.

So let’s do this one step at a time.

Today: Do Grant’s exercise/weights routine at home, using some hideously pink hand weights that I found in the sale at (of all places) TK Maxx. Get my things ready for tomorrow so I can cycle to work for week two of Bike Boost. Plan my meals for the week and make sure I have the things I need in the house.

Tomorrow: Cycle to work. Pilates is already part of my routine, so it’s a given that I’m going there. 

Tuesday-Friday: Cycle to work. Either go to the gym or do the weights session at home afterwards.

Serious crisis

I have to make a decision. I have to decide once and for all to do this and stop using excuses not to knuckle down. Okay, it was my birthday yesterday. Yes, I was ill last week. But throughout all that I have been making bad food choices and using any old excuse to get out of training. The only reason I can think of is because I am so used to living a totally different way and those old habits are almost impossible to break.

It’s heartbreaking to leave my old life behind – but I’m 40 now. And with less than a year to go until the marathon, I have to make a choice; either eat properly, give up the wine and cake and do the work or give it up, spend the rest of my life fat and miserable and look back years from now and wish I’d gone through with it. I know I have to do it. But it’s just so… difficult. Particularly when I thought I was doing it right and my weight wasn’t changing at all.

In the words of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone: “This is it. Don’t get scared now.”

Fed up!

It’s so frustrating not making any progress and this whole losing weight thing is bloody difficult.

I was last weighed on October 4 and again today. here are the findings:

	Oct-04	Oct-18
Weight	17st 2.4lb	17st 2lb
Fat %	42.7%	44.2%
Fat Mass	7st 4.6lb	7st 8lb
Muscle Mass	9st 4.8lb	9st 1.2lb
Bone Mass	7.0lb	6.8lb
BMR	1931cal	1887cal
BMI	34.5	34.4
Degree of obesity	56.7%	56.5%

I don’t get it! I’ve been suffering from a cold so I haven’t exercised, but I’ve hardly eaten either. Not only that, but the scales at the gym read less than 16st 8lb on Saturday. I have no idea what happened, but one thing is clear – this is going to be MUCH harder than I thought it would be.

In other news, I am getting more impressed with the Polar by the day. Apparently, today’s Pilates class burned just 128 calories, but 61% of that came from FAT, which is brilliant. Maybe I should weigh myself again?

Back in the saddle

I’m feeling much better and thanks for all your lovely messages! In this last week I have wondered whether I can actually do this, even to the point of wondering how much shame I could take if I were to quit now. Ultimately, I decided that a) something has to be done about my weight, and b) I wouldn’t be able to take the shame. So it was with a heavy heart that I went to the gym yesterday for the first time in over a week.

However, I did want to try out my New Shiny – a Polar FT60 heart rate monitor. More than just a watch, it picks up my heart rate from a chest band and it can even tell me if I am in a fat burning zone or a fitness zone. It’s pretty impressive. There’s a website where I can download the data wirelessly using a special device so I can look at them in more detail. I’ll have a play with this later and let you know if it is any good.

I did ease myself in gently at the gym, with only one set of weights and stretches and a gentle trot on the treadmill, so my musical choices were more laughable laid back. I was even listening to this at one point. Hey, what can I say? We all have our guilty pleasures – and it could be a lot worse. (I saw it for sale in a shop the other day. Unbelievable.)

I haven’t eaten much this past week but when I did eat, it was invariably whatever took the least effort. Toast, soup or (on one occasion) a McDonald’s, usually at 5-6pm and after a day of eating very little and sleeping a lot. Yesterday wasn’t excellent by any means but despite starting with doorstop toast it did include a protein shake and a healthy dinner – the prawn balti is from Anna Richardson’s body blitz book. I’m back on the straight and narrow tomorrow but if I can be good from Monday to Friday, it won’t matter if I bend the rules a little on weekends as long as I don’t go stupid.

I’ve also signed up for the BikeBoost scheme at work, which means I’ll be doing lots of cycling over the next couple of weeks. I’m exhausted even thinking about it, but it provided an excellent excuse for me to take advantage of the good weather.

Sick

I have a virus. I’ve not been well all weekend but I have clearly succumbed to whatever illness Youngest Son brought back from his recent residential in Anglesey. There won’t be any Pilates for me tonight but if I am able to I might just go and be weighed, depending on whether I feel up to leaving the house. Ugh.

What if this happens on the day of the marathon? Can you call in sick from a charity run? Obviously not.