fat bastard

I mentioned previously I was intending to do a food diary.

That didn't quite work.

A part of the problem is that I was doing it online and as this very blog shows, sometimes I can't be arsed.  Also the format for doing it - a blog - wasn't very helpful, because this blogger thing fits better with single posts a day.  Editing posts is a pain or just posting after each time I ate wasn't practical and didn't make a lot of sense when I was trying to review it.

So basically I gave up, but one thing it did prove was that I was eating quite a lot of bad things.  I mean, I hadn't gone back to the old ways of eating loads and loads, but I was certainly eating lots of things that I wasn't eating while I was properly losing weight.

Over the last few months I've unfortunately been steadily gaining weight, such that I'm about a stone heavier than I was at the peak of the weight loss.  To be fair I only hit this peak for a very brief period and about a stone is the maximum I've been over that.

My weight has actually been bobbling around quite a bit during that period, where I'll lose a few pounds for several weeks running and then have a bad week where I put it all back on plus a little more.

One problem I've been having is the weather.  The period when I did my best weight loss was when we last had something resembling summer.  I found it much easier to lose weight when it was warm as you more naturally eat less when it's warm (or rather, you tend to eat more when it's cold - it's a natural reaction that is made redundant by our modern central heating).

Also it's much easier to eat salads and things like that when it's cold.  I found it a bit naff trying to eat salad when it was cold and I have to admit I got a bit sick of it.  It's also much easier to walk for longer, more concentrated periods of time (meaning the mornings) when it's warm.  I mean, walking in the winter is nice enough (assuming it hasn't snowed and isn't raining) but I tend to find longer walks easier in the summer, not least of all because it's lighter earlier and later.

So I'm hoping that this warm spell represents a summer proper and will last a while.

I've also decided my cereal at lunch idea hasn't really worked properly.  It works in terms of the number of calories I'm eating as a meal and it's perfectly good at filling me up until dinner.  The problem is it seemed to encourage me to eat poorly in the evenings.  I think a part of it is that the meals are very repetitive, so I end up craving variety - not only in terms of taste, but also texture too: the cereal is very samey.

However, also, because I know that the cereal meals are light on calories it seems to have encouraged me to have treats (this was clear from the food diary) thinking I could "afford" the calories.