Week Ten - Happiness Depends Upon Ourselves

Well we're nearly at Mayday and this will be my last Motivational blog post for the challenge. I want to say thanks to each and every one of you who has taken part, I've really enjoyed getting to know you all and will miss these weekend sessions at the laptop thinking positive thoughts!

This week I've been thinking about exactly what I want to achieve by losing weight. Obviously there are the usual reasons - looking after my health, feeling comfortable in myself and looking good but underpinning all of these has to be the desire for happiness. When I get a compliment, fit into my old jeans, feel confident going out for the evening or even try something new I've been putting off because of my weight I feel happy. When I think about getting to goal I smile and every time one of those 7lb stars pops up on my weight tracker I feel a little thrill. . .

So how will I achieve that happiness? In life we can only really reach our goals when we are ready to change and though we may benefit from support from our friends and family or look to others for advice and motivation, ultimately Aristotle had it right - "happiness depends upon ourselves". . .

I am the one person who has the power to make me happy and by extension that means I am the only one who can stop myself too. I have always let other people affect how I think and feel but if I want to be successful I need to take that power back and be in charge of my own life.

This week I took a big step and went to my first scuba lesson - I wore a nice pair of swimming trunks with a tankini top from Fat Face I bought specifically for the purpose, I left the changing room without looking in the mirror and I walked into the pool not caring what anyone thought of how I looked and you know what - I had an amazing time.

It was a fantastic evening, I enjoyed every second of it (barring the three or four when I first went under and had to convince my brain I could breathe in and out under water!) and when I got home I was more relaxed than I've been in years. I know I couldn't have done that just a few months ago and even a few weeks ago I would have been worrying about what everyone else thought not enjoying the experience.

So my final piece of advice for us all is to take control of our own happiness, don't let other people's negative thoughts (real or imagined) stop us from doing anything and let ourselves enjoy life. Good luck to all of you with your continued journey to goal, I'll see you on the 5+ board!

Week Nine - Sunshine Mood

I cannot get over the change in the weather. . . Just two weeks ago I was slogging through knee-deep mud in the pervading drizzle to destroy the vicious bramble patch at the back of the garden and this weekend I was lounging at my parent's place with a glass of wine in blazing sunshine!

I'm completely convinced of the correlation between weather and mood - much as I love a good thunder storm and am a night-time person I still find myself feeling happy and contented when the sun is shining and the world looks bright. With this in mind I've been thinking about how much more positive and motivated I feel when I'm in a "Sunshine Mood". . .

With the sun shining I'm definitely spending more time in the garden and hoping that hauling muck, fighting weeds, digging, forking and fixing fence-posts is adding to my weekly exercise quota. I've even got a little colour in my skin, even if it's just the freckles joining up, and the bike is out of the shed for the first time in months so if the weather holds I'll be cycling ten miles at the weekend to go to a beer festival - that's got to be worth a pint or two surely!

Week Eight - I Can Resist Everything Except Temptation

So Easter has been and (just about) gone and I managed to limit the chocolate damage fairly well by forgoing the standard eggs and indulging in a few high quality chocs instead.

One of the key reasons I have failed on other diets in the past is that they cut out all the things I love completely and I spent hours each day wishing I could just have that chocolate, cheese on toast, pint of beer or tall latte. . . and in the words of the immortal Oscar Wilde, "I can resist everything except temptation". . .

So Weight Watchers is a great way forward for me. I know I'm controlling what I eat but I also know I can fit in my favourite treats as long as I plan ahead. I can have that occasional Chinese or Pizza without the associated feelings of guilt. I can have a creme egg and know I haven't fallen off the wagon. I can go out to the pub and have a couple of pints in the sunshine without the nagging feeling I'm misbehaving and all this makes it easier to stick to the good stuff the rest of the time!

It's often said on 5+ that WW is a lifestyle not a diet and I have to say that seems right to me. I know it's my lifestyle and my relationship with food that got me here in the first place so I have to change both to make a change in my weight. WW is working for me, (however slowly!) and I'm looking forward to getting closer and closer to goal.

Week Seven - Do Not Stop

Well as some of you may know I had another 0.5lb loss in Week Six of the challenge. I really am a slow loser and sometimes get a bit down over how long this is going to take but I've been thinking about an old quote from Confucius - "It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop . . ."

Well I don't know about you but that sounds like a great philosophy to me! I sometimes feel like I just want to wake up tomorrow and have the figure I had at 19 - in reality even if I somehow got to that size I'm pretty sure gravity will mean I'm a different shape though :0)

I even dream some nights that I'm thinner again - I see myself in the mirror with a flat stomach, long, slender legs and a pert backside! It feels wonderful until I wake up and realise I'm still at the start of a long journey to a fit and healthy body.

But in a way I'm really glad for those dreams too. They remind me why I'm doing this, how good it will feel to get to goal and how much I really want to lose the weight. It won't happen overnight, more's the pity, and it may take a year longer than I'd hoped but I'm going to keep on chipping away, however long it takes, and never, ever stop!

Week Six - Accentuate the Positive

On Saturday night I went to a 70’s Disco themed birthday party – fancy dress is always fun but fraught with the perils and pitfalls of dressing in a totally different style to your usual look.

The sixties and seventies are notorious for glamorising stick-thin women in tight tops and tiny skirts, or covering them in voluminous, floating dresses that cover all sins so my first thought was of course a lovely, long kaftan to the floor!

When I dress I always find myself looking for clothes that cover my ‘bad-bits’ rather than playing to my strengths, so I decided to change my attitude, ditch the kaftan and dress up to “accentuate the positive . . .”

I have a traditional hour-glass figure and whilst many think this is a fantastic, womanly shape this does not seem to include clothes designers who think hips and heaving bosoms went out in 1952. Whilst my waist has disappeared over the years my recent weight-loss means I’m getting that definition back and my legs are beginning to firm up from the exercise too.

So I wore a 70’s style mini dress, low cut and tight over the chest with a pair of shorts over thick, black tights and knee-high lace-up platform boots. Well I have to say there were a lot of ladies there who looked more svelte than me, but I felt fantastic.

My male friends were extremely complimentary, my female friends all commented how much lighter I was looking and my husband was very attentive! I’m convinced much of this was due to the excellent ‘hour-glass’ support tights I was wearing but a lot was down to the fact I felt great. My shoulders were back, head high and tummy tucked in all night :0)

Ok I wouldn’t wear anything like that if I were just going out as usual but fancy dress lets you get a little out of the ordinary and it has taught me that if I concentrate on the positive things I like about myself instead of all the negatives I can feel good and look good too.

So – what are the things you love most about how you look? Come on all of you, let’s get at least one positive each on here this week!

Week Five - Tipping Point

We've all had it - that one point in time be it final straw or moment of truth that tipped the balance. It might have been a picture from a recent wedding, a favourite pair of jeans consigned to the 'too small' pile, a passing comment from someone you've not seen in a while or an uncomfortable journey squeezed into a too small aeroplane seat. . .

I'm talking about the moment when 'I could do with losing a few pounds' tipped and became 'I HAVE to lose weight'. I have gradually become bigger over the 12 or so years since I left Uni. I've made attempts to lose weight in the past but always failed or fallen back into bad ways and ended up bigger than before.

Last August I got married and had spent the six months beforehand promising myself I'd diet before the wedding. . . but didn't. The dress I wore was lovely, but sleeveless, and on the day of the wedding the shawl I'd chosen just didn't work so I went bare-armed. Now I'm an hour-glass shape and my arms are one of my worst features - I don't know what I was thinking!

I got my photos of my special day and hated every single one with me in it. My eyes are baggy and hooded, my cheeks are pouched like a feeding hamster, my chin(s) dominate my lower face and nearly obscure the fat-fold-line between neck and collar bone. My pasty arms are flabby, my bosom appears to be escaping the strictures of my frock, my hips and thighs bulge under silk layers that reveal every mis-shapen lump and under it all I'm in torment from a bustier that is boring holes in my kidneys whenever I move!

I've avoided photographs for most of my life so this was the first time I'd seen pictures of me in a long while and I was pretty much appalled. That was my "Tipping Point".

After the wedding photos came through I spent a while berating myself for not dieting, ate the entire contents of my fridge to make me feel better (yes - I know just how daft that sounds) and got drunk. On sobering up I made a decision that I would go back to Weight Watchers and this time I'd stick to it and lose the weight.

Well that was back in late September and I've had a few ups and downs since then but I'm pleased to say I've lost 1 stone 10.5 pounds and I'm still motivated to keep going! This week I saw another photo of me, taken in the pub on holiday and, though I can still groan and list a whole parcel of issues with the way I look, I can also see a list of improvements since my wedding. It's hard work but it is working!

So what was your Tipping Point, the final thing that made you sign-up?

Week Four - No Pain, No Gain?

We all know that successful weight-loss is all about diet and exercise but sometimes I feel I concentrate far too much on the food and too little on the muscles. Earlier this week Starfish264 (Sue) and I were talking about her windsurfing holiday later this year and it reminded me how much fun I used to have windsurfing and canoeing back in the days before my weight crept up on me. For me, jumping on the exercise bike or cross-trainer is always going to be a chore - I will do it, but only to get the weight off and tone up as I get no joy from it at all - but does exercise have to be "No Pain, No Gain"?

So I've been thinking about other things I can do to boost the exercise half of the weight-loss equation that I might actually enjoy doing. As you all know by now I had a fantastic time skiing on hols and the improvement in my experience having lost 1.5st since last time out was incredible. Today I'm looking out at a beautiful sunny day and thinking racquets. . .I used to love playing tennis at school and we have enough room in the garden for a knock-about but DH is a badminton man so perhaps I need to look for a higher net and shuttlecocks instead.

And what about learning something new? We've been talking for a while about what we should do for our holiday this year and something I have always wanted to do is learn to scuba dive. The thought of shoe-horning myself into a wetsuit in full view of the public (and the number of weights they'd need to sink me) has kept it a pipe-dream for years but my confidence is growing and I'm seriously considering giving it a go this year!

Right, I'm off to dig my old badders net and shuttlecocks out of the loft. Have a great week all and let me know what sport you'll be going back to or trying out for the first time in 2009!

Week Three - Learning from the Hard Times

Here we are in week three of the challenge and I'm pleased to report that between us we've lost a very satisfactory 61.8lbs in two weeks so well done all!

I know a number of you have had a difficult couple of weeks with challenges in personal life affecting your motivation and impacting on your weight-loss journey. It seems like whenever the news is on there is strife and sorrow, hard times and horrors. The financial climate is biting down on all of us and I don't know anyone not hit in some way by the uncertainty of the economic down-turn.

Times of stress can easily have me reaching for the fridge door, ordering an extra pint or simply feeling like I just can't sustain the effort to keep on track. I recognise that this comes from outside forces working their evil way on me but get stuck in the feeling and struggle to bounce back. We can't ignore the fact that life is getting tougher right now, so today I've been thinking about how we can turn the bad around and start "learning from the hard times". . .

One of the hardest things to do in this whole weight-loss journey is to change embedded behaviours but even harder for me is recognising what triggers the lows that knock me off track. In the past on WW, when I've had a STS or a gain I've drawn a line and moved on but recently I decided that rather than just ignore the bad weeks I could learn from them. I began going back over my points journal for bad weeks and looking for clues as to why it went wrong. I found I had missed a few things here and there, gone over heavily the day before weigh-in or simply underestimated the points for my meals. This gave me an idea why I might not have lost weight but the question was then, why had I lost focus on those weeks?

So this time around I have kept a very brief journal. Each morning on the way to work I log a sentence to sum up how I'm feeling. I do the same at lunch and again in the evening. If I have a blow-out meal or succumb to the insidious vending machine I make another note (often just a grumpily scratched "because I'm bloody hungry"). By going back over the journal I've begun to recognise the key feelings that trigger my bad behaviours. Boredom and tiredness from insomnia are key elements but more so are feelings of low self-esteem. When I feel I don't deserve to be loved and cherished, when I feel I am not worth the attention of others or that there is nothing in me that is special and unique, I turn to food to comfort me or to confirm my lack of willpower and absence of self-worth.

I've made great progress on changing my habits, planning my meals, thinking before I eat, exercising more regularly and replacing 'bad' foods with 'good' ones but if I want the healthy lifestyle I'm aiming for I need to change the way my mind works too. So what am I learning from the bad times? That there are deeper reasons for my bad choices and I need to face up to those to move on. Right now my little journal is becoming rather bigger as I try to find the root causes of my lows and I'm considering looking for professional help to talk through the issues I have. If I want to be whole I have to accept the broken pieces of me and fix them.

So, here we are and I promise that this is a positive message guys, despite the dark thoughts in the above. Celebrate your wins, your good weeks and your happy times, but don't undervalue the potential strength that can come from facing up to the dark days and learning from the hard times.

Take care each of you and here's to a happy week for us all!

Week Two - All Things in Moderation

Well hello all and how are you doing this week?

I'm feeling all buzzy because I'm off on holiday at 5am - a week in the snow having a blast skiing with a bunch of friends. I know it'll be a great break but there will be temptations aplenty from the traditional apres-ski beers, the fabulous pizzas in the village and the hot chocolate with brandy that keeps me warm on the blizzard days :0)

I've promised I'll stay strong this year, plan my nights out and build up those bonus points with some heavy slope time, but I'm definitely taking the time to enjoy myself and unwind after a truly hectic and frustrating week at work. I know I may come back a little heavier than I leave (though hoping not) but I think it sometimes does us good to take a week out, have fun and not worry too much over the points.

I will be making healthy choices, planning ahead and not going too crazy but there will be some beer, some pizza and some hot chocolate in there. . . So this week is all about taking time out without going overboard, "enjoy the good things in life, but all things in moderation".

While I'm off it might take me a while to come back on emails, but keep sending in those weigh in's and I will get them logged. I'll be posting again a week on Sunday when I hope to have some charts for you to show just how well we're doing.

In the meantime, this week I've been thinking about NSVs (non-scale victories). What's your favourite NSV since starting this journey, or what NSV are you looking forwards too? For me it's that my wedding dress from August 08 is now nicely loose around hips and bust. Yippee!

Have a great week everyone, I know I will. . .

MorganAvalon

Week One - Motivation & Habit

So we're finally kicking off on the challenge and over the next ten weeks I look forward to hearing from you all. Check out the Diary post from 'Week Zero' to see what people have been saying so far, there will be a Week One Diary post soon so let us all know how you're doing.

I'm hoping to help keep us all motivated through this challenge and share a few thoughts on the whole weight-loss journey, but this is all about us succeeding together so use the comments to pass on your own messages or email me with ideas for upcoming posts. . .

I think it's fantastic that we have 37 people on this challenge all working towards the same goal and genuinely believe that we can help each other keep on track - I know I'll need the help over that dreaded Easter break!

But it's not just the short-term challenges we need to think about, as we all know WW is about changing your lifestyle to live healthier, get to goal then maintain. . .

So with that in mind I've been thinking on a great quote: "Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going."

I've been working hard on changing the mad, bad habits of an adult lifetime and replacing them with good ones. It's a tough job but I'm definitely making progress and the 5+ Board has been a fantastic help. What I want to know from you all now is: Since joining WW what is your top "drop-kicked habit" and your top "hot new habit"?

My top drop-kicked habit is . . . Lashings of olive oil in every meal
My top hot new habit is . . . Working out the Points before I eat the food!

Let's hear 'em guys! Best of luck to everyone for a great loss in the first week of the Mayday Motivation challenge, see you here or on the boards :0)

Morganavalon

Welcome to Mayday Motivation!

Welcome to the Mayday Motivation Challenge where the 37 members of the challenge team each aim to lose 1 stone by the 1st of May 2009!

We all need some extra motivation at times and the group challenges that are set up over the WW message boards provide great support to all of us when we need that extra push.

I know with Easter looming large I am going to have to have a will of steel to make sure I don't slip on this long old weight-loss journey, so I set up this challenge to keep me on the straight and narrow. Hopefully it will help us all keep that edge to resist Easter treat temptations :0)

To everyone who has signed up to the challenge, thanks for joining me, I look forward to hearing from you all over the coming weeks and will be posting stats, success stories and more as we head towards our Mayday goal of a 14lb loss over ten weeks.

Good luck to each of you!

MorganAvalon