Wake Me Up Before You Go Go : A Breakthrough!

Last night I had a really down night, I felt rubbish and at 10.30pm I wanted something tasty, and nothing would satisfy me so I drove to Tesco ( at 10.30pm!) and bought ice cream and doughnuts and malteasers and then ate all of it. Did it make me feel better? Did I feel fulfilled and satisfied? NO! I felt uncomfortable, over full, sick and still fed up, but not more-so because I'd eaten all that rubbish! Then I couldn't sleep for thinking about it.

Our alarm clock is one which you can dock your iPhone and have it wake you up with music, and it was on shuffle. So I woke up to a song I've not heard before, called "Jump" by Gary Barlow. I woke up as soon as I heard the first bit of music and lay there listening to it and it really put into words how I was feeling. (Here are the lyrics in case you don't know the song)

Its basically about how you feel really rubbishy and down and you know what you have to do to make you feel better, to make your life better but you are too scared to do it in case you fail. And yes, you might fail but as long as you try again you will be stronger afterwards. It really touched me and made me think. Why did I 'need' to eat chocolate and ice cream last night? Well, since I still felt rubbish after I ate it, it obviously wasnt the chocolate I wanted, but I have associated feeling down/depressed/annoyed/rubbish with eating that kind of food so thats what I wanted and in my mind 'needed' to make myself feel better. I actually thought I was feeling depressed BECAUSE I was 'dieting' but that is obviously not true. So, my breakthrough this morning is to not dive straight for 'bad' food when I feel bad, but to try and dig deeper and try to find out what I actually want, what I am feeling. Its about time I sort this out and crack it before I end up putting the weight I've lost back on and more and more. Im almost 29 and I really want to sort myself out, get my weight off before I end up fat and 30!

"...maybe once or twice you’ll fall flat on your face

But when you move on you’ll be twice as strong..."

The Weigh In Day Blues!

Today was my weigh in day and I was very sad to get on the scales and get a 1 pound GAIN :( There's a few factors that are affecting my weight at the moment, primarily being my hormones. Its not star week, but as I have the implant I have random bloating and water retention at any time it decides it could have been star week! So that is the main reason I think but with me changing to a much higher dose of my pain killers - that has added to my water retention too, so I'm pretty sure if I stick to the diet it will show this week and next weeks losses, in theory! So fingers crossed for that, and if it doesn't then I will be so upset and cry a lot!

I was hoping for 2lb loss a week, so that I can get to my goal weight by X-mas this year, so I'm still on track for that as I have a total loss at SW of 4 1/2 lbs so as long as I lose my 2 next week I am still on target. I have to remember that I am human, and I can't expect bloating not to increase my weight. I just want my 'perfect' idea of weight loss to happen every week and since I changed from Cambridge to SW I just thought 2lbs a week was a good goal to aim for. If I end up gaining or staying the same next week I may need to re-think my plans, maybe even get back on the Cambridge bus to get more weight off fast. I just don't know and I got so upset at group earlier, just wanted to go home and cry, but I stayed to the meeting and it did make me feel a tiny bit better.

Cake in a Mug Trial

Last night I tried out the cake in a mug recipe that I got at my SW group on Tuesday. It looks.... not great, but it tastes really chocolatey and almost cake-like. All you do is put 3 teaspoons of options hot chocolate (1 1/2 syns) powder in a mug, add 4 teaspoons of sweetener and 1 egg. Give it a good mix and put it in the microwave for 1 min 30 secs. Give it a try and don't go off its looks, give it a taste and it is alot better than it looks.. as you can see!

Its worth a try and a taste for only 1 1/2 syns for a 'cake'. It would be nice with other things like a yoghurt and fruit, going to do it again and see if i need to tweak the recipe at all to improve it in anyway. Watch this space!

Its Foodie Friday!

Tea tonight was my new favourite SW friendly, honey & mustard chicken with pasta. Its 4 syns for the whole lot and its incredibly tasty, definately worth a try if you fancy something new. I've decided I will post a new recipe every Friday, and I'm calling it Foodie Friday! So today's first Foodie Friday is that very recipe!

Honey & Mustard Chicken w/ Pasta

4 syns for whole recipe.
Ingredients

1 Chicken breast per person.

4 tsp dijon mustard

1 tbsp honey

150g quark

320ml hot chicken stock

cooked pasta to serve

1. Spray a frying pan with frylight and brown the chicken.

2. Whisk together the stock, quark, honey and mustard.

3. Pour the stock mixture into the pan and bring to the boil.

4. Reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes.

5. Season to taste.

6. Serve with cooked pasta in a bowl and enjoy!

Its so simple as you can see the recipe only has 6 steps. If you try it please let me know and share your photos. What recipes have you found since you started SW?

Happy Eating!

Cereal Synner!

I can't believe it! I made such a silly mistake with my syns yesterday. I had 2 Alpen bars for breakfast, a Healthy Extra B choice, and then I had an extra one after my tea for a snack. Now the Alpen Light Double Chocolate bars are only 2 and 1/2 syns so I thought I would just double check the syns for the "Fruit and Nut with Chocolate" bars later on and it would be too bad..... or so I thought. While I was looking at what other flavours the bars come in I couldn't find the fruit and nut ones anyway and thats when it hit me! It turns out my really tasty Alpen bars were NOT light bars, they were just normal non-light Alpen bars! NOOOO! So I had actually eaten 3 of these full fat alpen bars yesterday and that meant I had to syn them. They are 6 1/2 syns EACH!!!! So I had infact eaten 19 1/2 EXTRA SYNS!! I could have cried. I already had eaten 6 syns so I ended up having 26 1/2 syns yesterday! Not a good start to the week at all! Its sort of okay if you over eat on purpose but accidental binge eating Alpen Bars! Ha! I have to laugh about it, theres nothing I can do and it was a genuine mistake, so I drew a line under it and Im not going to try and scrape it back, its done so onwards and inwards for the rest of the week.

My husband has been doing SW with me the last week and a bit and because I need help with mobility he is going to join SW too so we can go as a family trip each week to weigh in and to the meeting. Its also great to have the positivity from him as he is a real inspiration and helps me so much in all areas of my life. I wont get too soppy but he really is a fantastic husband and father to our daughter. *sigh* ok, enough of that!!

In other news, between me and my 14 month old We've managed to damage my laptop and it keeps turning itself off at random and sometimes wont charge, luckily we are a 2 laptop household so I am using my hubby's laptop to write this. Hope to take it into the shop to have it looked at sometime next week, Im going to back it up onto my external hard drive later so I don't lose my hundreds (possibly thousands?) of pictures of my daughter from the last 14 months! That would be horrible so I must make sure I put backing them up to the top of my to do list. Also on that list is writing a shopping list from my menu plan and a bit of planning for this little blog of mine. Im thinking about getting a domain for this blog in the not too distant future.Something to think about anyway.