weight for it

Last year didn't go well on the diet front.

Well, if my aim had been to gain a stone then it would have been a good year, but as it was almost exactly the opposite, it was fairly poor.

Christmas was particularly problematic this year.  I always put on weight at Christmas as I tend to stuff my face, but this year I had a bit of a problem with a tendon in my left foot and so decided to snot walk on it for a few days while I was on leave.  However, I didn't reign in my eating at all, so I gained 6 pounds just in the week that I was off, which is double what I've done before.

I'm fully expecting that over the next couple of weeks this will come off as that's the other part of the pattern.  However, the 6 pound loss was a addition to a 7 pound gain across the rest of the year, so not at all good.

This also actually pushes me back into the morbidly obese range, where I was hoping I would get a good way under that.  I never really set proper goals as such, but it was always the basic aim of the diet to take myself a good way under the morbid obesity range.  The odds and stats get quite... sobering for people who are that size.

On the up-side the walking has gone pretty well.  Apart from Christmas where I couldn't walk I stayed on target throughout the year.

It became particularly apparent to me how much fitter I was when I took my leave at the end of summer.  There's a little village I often walk around in Devon and where in previous years I'd struggled with some of the walks, last year I was easily able to walk right around the village (it has this loop around it) and wasn't really tired at all.

One of the things I have thought about on that front was whether I should step up the exercise.  Now that I'm able to walk longer distances with no problems does that mean I am working less hard?  Certainly I'm carrying around less weight so it's not quite the same level of workout.  And is that part of why my weight has gone up - I need to do more to achieve the same affect?

However, I think when I analyse it the reality is that the weight gain has been more to do with eating.  There have been a lot of weeks in the last year where I've not really stuck to my diet properly.  Indeed, it would be tough to really say I'd dieted with any consistency across the year, and it was that rigid sticking to my diet that I think gave me the greatest gains in previous years.

The problem I think therefore comes down to a slip of willpower combined with a fatigue over the diet.  I ate a lot of salad during the time I was successful and that's great if you want to fill yourself up, but I think I got very bored.  I've never actually been that big a fan of salad and after months and months of it I think I really wanted change and that change meant I strayed into areas of buying rubbish.

Anyway, I guess the point is I don't really make New Years resolutions, I really need to start taking this thing seriously again, particularly if I'm genuinely going to do some of the other stuff I want to in the next few years.