flat line

No change in my weight last week.

This was a little disappointing, but then I'd forgotten I was expecting to go out for a meal, so that was a load of calories I wasn't otherwise compensating for, but also I... well, I was going to say cocked up, but that's not the right phrase. I did actually make the error I made deliberately, it's just I didn't think it was an error at the time.

Basically, I decided to try to mix my eating schedule and plans up a little bit. In particular, I wanted to try doing things on different days, as I've grown bored of my eating patterns. Unfortunately I made some poor choices and, in particular, ended up buying/making more bread than I needed.

As such, I basically had to eat some higher calorie meals more often than I should have done, so what I'm saying is the disappointment in a lack of weight change really stems from poor planning.

This week, I'll probably blame it on the fact that several people at work brought in cakes, but the real reason is I seem to have lost any real impetus. I'm still walking and so I'm continuing with the exercise, it's just that the good diet days seem to keep being balanced by days where I go off the rails a bit.

This became very apparent the other week when I started looking at the plans for the next chunk of the diet, which will take me up to the end of the year. Basically across this whole last period of about 4 months I've basically only lost about a stone. Now that's not a thing to be sniffed at, it's just that if you look at the graph of my weight, it went down at the beginning, but then has bimbled around the same sort of value for a while.

I think a big part of the problem has been my trips to Sainsbury's mid-week. When it came summer I decided to try varying my diet by eating things like strawberries and melon instead, but the problem has been I've then also almost always bought something really bad too. My particular Achilles heal being things from the bakery section. What I've effectively been doing is turning the mid-week thing into something like I used to do before I went on the diet.

The 'saving grace' is that otherwise my diet has been relatively good, so I'm not back to the old days where I gain weight, but these naughty things I buy have basically cancelled the good days out.

What makes it slightly more annoying (and slightly perverse) is that I've gone right off salad. Salad was a godsend previously as I could use it at the weekend to bulk out meals a bit without hugely increasing the calories. Also, I could snack on carrots and things like that.

But I think I've grown really bored of it, so there's even more impetus for me to find something different to eat, and there's not much you can replace it with. As I say, that's particularly weird because of course summer is when you traditionally eat salad, and I've grown bored of it because I've eaten it all through winter!

Which feeds into what I was saying above - my trying to mix up the eating schedule a bit, which resulted in me buying a bunch of baked potatoes (they were on special). My theory was to have 1 potato and half a tin of beans/chilli. Calories this was okay and would work quite well. Trouble was, because they were on special I ended up with what turned out to be loads and so had to have them during the week, and the only way I could do that and not end up throwing them away was double up (2 spuds and a full tin) which was therefore a whole load of calories.

As the 7 Ps would have it - Proper Prior Planning and Preparation Prevent Piss Poor Performance.