He who fails to plan, is planning to fail . . .

and, I would argue, that same applies to she's. By the way, aparently that title of this post is a quote by Churchill.

So I've been on this official Get Fit and Healthy Project for a month now, and it occurs to me that I have achieved very little.  In fact, I can't quite pin point my last chocolate or caffeine free day, if anything I'm beginning to feel that I'm firmly on a downward spiral.

However, I have been reading a couple of books lately, that are making me think that, rather than my standard Dr Phil "sometimes you've just got to white-knuckled it" strategy, a radical change of approach is in order. Which brings me to another quote by Churchill "Those who plan do better than those who do not plan even though they rarely stick to their plan". I think its because if you take the time to make a plan, you become more committed to the goal and you can measure your progress and refine your plan until it works. At least, that's what I'm telling myself.

Back to the books, the first one was lent to me by a friend who thought it might do me some good.  It's called The Creative Life: 7 Keys to your inner genius by Eric Butterworth.  Overall, I found the book a bit over the top in that new agey sort of way.  But there was one idea I quite liked.

The book is structured around the 7 days of creation (dare I say) myth from the Bible.  Day Four is "Let There Be Two Great Lights" refering to the creation of the sun and the moon.  Butterworth suggests that we think of the sun as representing Understanding (knowledge, ideas and the like), while the moon represents Will - not the "will of gritted teeth" (doesn't that expression just capture the concept perfectly) but a willingness to go with the flow.

The two concepts compliment and reflect each other. If you throughly understand something, but don't actually do anything, you get no where.  Conversely, if you set your mind to something and say "this time I will lose weight", you become emotional and stubborn and also get no where.

After reading this I realised that when I started this project it was all Will based - I will eat right, I will exercise everyday, etc, but there was no understanding of what was motivating my current eating and lack of exercise. In my defence, I think everyone does this.  Something triggers the motivation, (in my case the threat of losing a body part) and we say with anger and determination "I will do it this time!".  But we don't understand how we got to where we are, so how can we hope to get to where we want to go?

The second book is a not-so-old favourite The Places That Scare You by Pema Chodron, but I'll discuss that next time.

They're not weaknesses, they are development opportunities

Well, there was no spectacular crash this week, but the scales seem firmly of the view that spreading the same amount of "treats" out over the week is no better than eating them all at once (surprise, surprise).

Successes
Stuck fully to my diet Monday, Tuesday and Sunday.
Walked to work on Monday, and half-way on Tuesday.

Areas for Development

1. Need to keep up the walking - walk at lunch time if I don't manage to walk to work
2. Going to bed on time - although beginning to think my thyroid medication is working too well at the moment as the last few days I've had trouble staying awake 
3. Avoid comfort eating - I've never really seen myself as a comfort eater, but this week I have been eating just because I've been feeling fed up (also think this is related to the thyroid medication)
4. Need to become more discriminating about accepting food - for example, was on a plane on Thursday and accepted a biscuit, which I later found out contained 300 calories.  Regardless of the amount of calories, I shouldn't be eating biscuits (particularly as I am philosophically opposed to them - seriously, cakes & chocolate yes, but biscuits? I'm sorry, I just don't really understand the point of them)

There's no such thing as failure, there are only results

OK, I might as well just get the horror story out the way up front:

Scene: Family function - 1 year old birthday party / weekend away
Result: 12 "treats", 2,853 calories over the day, 190g carbs
and that was just the Saturday.

The extraordinary thing is, I did actually hold myself back - not necessarily a great deal, but I did actually turn food down, eg I didn't eat any potato chips, or any of the large cupcakes (as opposed to the small cupcakes of which I ate only one).  What this means is that in the past I would have eaten even more. 

On the Sunday, I tried to tell myself it wasn't a treat day, so no leftover cake for me.  I managed to get through morning tea by waiting ten minutes for a cup cake, by which time, I didn't feel like one anymore.  However, at lunch, I dived into the chocolate ripple cake like there was no tomorrow.

Coincidentally, I have been reading a book on influence (Influence: The Psychology of Persuastion by Robert B. Cialdini) which I think touches on part of the problem with these types of situations for dieters - we (humans) have an automatic emotional reaction to scarcity which makes you want the scarce item far more than you would if it was widely available and this reaction actually prevents you thinking rationally.  Note, the book doesn't talk about dieting, this is just my extrapolation given I read the chapter the day after I ate 2.4 times my usual calorie intake.

To counteract the emotional reaction to scarcity, the book recommends:

• recognising the feeling as a standard reaction to a scarce item and a warning sign to proceed with caution
• realising that it is your desire for the food that has changed not the food itself (the book discusses an experiment in which people, who were made to believe that a set of cookies were scarce, rated their desire to have the cookies as higher, but did not rate the taste any better than people who were just given the cookies without any suggestion that they were scarce)
• considering what it is that you want from the item - I think part of the reason I have trouble resisting temptation at family functions is that food offers not just a pleasant taste, but a shared experience and rapport building, which can be useful when you can't remember the names of half the people there but feel that you should because you (only) see them a couple of times a year at similar family functions.

Successes

Stuck to my diet fully Monday, Tuesday and Thursday.
Said no to a free muffin on Friday
Actual did some exercise on Sunday

Areas for Development

... are many and varied.
Need to get the exercise happening
Did not get to bed on time other than on Saturday night (mainly as a result of three glasses of red wine)
Over did the treats on Wednesday, Friday, Saturday was out of control and Sunday (not a treat day).

Refinement of strategies going forward

• lights out at 10:30pm no matter what (this week have come up with a wonderful array of excuses, all of which lead me to being up too late and not getting up the next morning, thereby having a flow-on effect of not getting my morning walk)
• get up when the alarm goes off (I am not a morning person, but history has proven to me that this is the only strategy that works)
• when going to a business lunch with a set menu, only eat half the desert (I know I don't have the willpower to eat no dessert, so this is a stepping stone to building up my willpower)
• when going to a business lunch without a set menu, don't knowingly order a dish that comes with food I shouldn't eat (Friday I ordered duck with rice, thinking "well, I just won't eat the rice", however that was the sum total of the dish - duck and rice, I was starving, so I ate the rice)
• develop a strategy for dealing with family functions - I'm thinking something along the lines of bring a dish with me, eg a fruit platter, and go in armed with alternative strategies for "working the room" other than "ooh, these cup cakes are nice".

Starting Statistics

Today is the big day - Day 1 of my Get Fit and Healthy Project.

Here are my starting stats:

Weight: 65.1 kg
Body Fat: 32.6% (according to more than one website this makes me obese)
Waist: 74 cm (although took this measurement after dinner so may vary with food eaten)
Thigh: 62 cm

Here goes.

New Project - Getting Fit and Healthy

I seem to have done all I can on the decluttering front.  That’s not to say my apartment is perfect, but I think the real problem now is that I live in an apartment designed for two people, but we are now three people.

I’ve been tossing up whether or not to make getting fit and healthy my new blog project.  I feel in part that I am setting myself up for failure.  Firstly, there are so many get fit / lose weight blogs that peter out.  Secondly, there are so many really good blogs that will remain fair better reading (eg A Neurotic Glamour Girl's Weight Watches Experience and Fitness Adventures and Being Primal), but in the end I thought, “well, if nothing else, it might keep my honest”.

My main goal is to keep my thyroid (hence the “and healthy”).  I have been on medication for about a year and my thyroid hormones have just gone back into the normal range.  If I can be weaned off the medication by the end of the year and keep in the normal range then I should be set.

My secondary goal is to get down to 60 kg, because there has to be a fun pay off to all the self discipline required.

I’m basing my strategy on the guidelines on paleo diet principles from Mark's Daily Apple, here it is:

• I will base my diet on fruit and vegetables, animal protein, raw nuts 
• 50 - 100g carbohydrates a day
• 44g of protein a day
• 3 treats a week, each no more than 70g carbohydrates (actually this is from Being Primal: how-to-cheat-and-still-lose-weight-part-2)
• walk to work every morning (unless I have to go in early)
• 2 “Lift Heavy Things” sessions a week (this is five exercises in the Primal Blueprint Fitness E-Book, which you get when you subscribe to Mark's Daily Apple)
• Sprint session on Sundays (also from Primal Blueprint Fitness E-Book)
• Lights out at 10:30 pm unless I'm out (I'm never out, I have a toddler)
• I will track my eating on www.myfitnesspal.com

All starting tomorrow 25 July 2011 – so I will post my starting stats then.

A Decluttering Christmas

If ever there were two words that didn't go together, they are "decluttering" and "Christmas".  However, this year I decided to stay true to my belief that a decluttered life is a good one and thought of ways to avoid adding to the clutter of loved ones.

To this end, I employed two strategies:

1. Asking people what they want - in the past I have always tried to surprise people with the "perfect" gift, but this only works if you are a mind reader.  For my nephews and niece, I asked my sister what they want (the answer - vouchers because they like to put them together with money saved to buy things).  For my husband, I told him what I want ("Earth" by John Stewart) and asked him what he wanted (lessons of some sort, eg cooking, singing or guitar lessons).
   
   If you want to add the element of surprise, you could ask people to give you a wish list, so while they know they are getting something from the list, they don't know which one.
   
   
   
2. Buying non-decluttering presents - when we think "gifts" we usually think "things", eg CDs, DVDs, jewellery, books.  But when you ask yourself the question "how do I have a non-clutter Christmas?", you realise there is a whole host of gifts out there that do not take up space, eg tickets to a play or movie, voucher for a massage (Colleen over at 365lessthings has put together a fantastic list).  I decided to put together hampers of yummy stuff.  While there seem to be a lot of shops selling hampers this year and for quite reasonable prices, the thing that put me off them was the basket.  It seems no matter how exotic the contents, suppliers can't get away from sticking everything in a wicker basket and when all the chocolates have been eaten and the wine drunk, you're still left with a wicker basket, aka instant clutter.
   
   I bought Christmas present boxes from The Reject Shop ($3 each - how do they do it?) because I thought, if you want to store things in them they stack neatly in the cupboard, they are hardy enough to recycle next year to "wrap" presents for someone else, or, if all else fails, they can be put out in the paper recycling. 
   
   Making your own hampers also means you can tailor the contents for the person you like.  With the pre-packaged ones there is always going to be something in them that gets thrown away (for me, its the fruit mince tarts - seriously, I just do not understand the purpose of those things).  All the contents I bought at Target, in their Christmas section - fudge, chocolates, shortbread biscuits.  Then in the queue at the registers I grabbed a few "stocking stuffers" for the nephews and niece so they had a little something to play with along with their vouchers.

These strategies worked very nicely, if I do say so myself.  Having left my Christmas shopping to the last weekend before Christmas, I was dreading hitting the shops.  But as it turns out, the interval between heading out the door to heading back in it was less than three hours - and that included one hour of travel.  I think the true beauty of hampers is that, as adults you go out and buy what you want, but you will hold off buying little treats for yourself because they put on weight.  Hence, its far easier to find a bunch of little treats for a few dollars each that people will like and be a novelty for them, than it is to try and guess what one big thing they would really enjoy.


I will see what reaction I get to the hampers, but I think I'll be sticking with these two strategies for years to come.

Quick update

A quick update to check in and compare where things are now to where I started.

Here's what my daughter's room looks like today:

Here's what it looked like when I started decluttering:

I think there's been some improvement there.  Here's another set of "after and before's" from a different angle:

When I took the photos earlier today, I was feeling quite annoyed about how much work was still to be done.  But what I notice now, is that while the room today requires a bit of a tidy up, there is not a lot of decluttering work left to do, and what is left to do (eg remove the bookcase on the right, clear the shelves of the remaining bookcase for toys) is straight forward and does not require a lot of "what am I going to do with this?" type thinking.