We seem to be eating better on the diet, than we did before

The Hairy Bikers healthy cook book is a god send and is really helping with this diet thing. I can cook the same for us all, and the kids scoff it without a word of moaning. While at the same time Ali and I really enjoy each and every meal, with none of the being tortured and eating lettuce and dust

The best so far has been their lamb hotpot, bleeding gorgeous. This one has slightly more calories, but at 450 per portion that's still not bad going. I do have to admit that we replaced the carrots for parsnips, so that was probably not good from a dieting point of view. I don't have a clue if carrots or parsnips are the lowest in calories, but I sure do love my parsnips.

You know that comfort food, when at the end of the day you want something hot, lovely and filling, this is certainly within that category.

I need a bit of a kick up the butt

I did well and reached that first goal, and now have hit a stumbling block and seem to be stuck on the 11st 13lb mark.

I am not pretending that some magic fairy has cursed me to stop the weight dropping off, I know I have been a bit rubbish at the diet thing, so only I am to blame.

How can I kick start that motivation again, at the moment I seem to need the sugar rushes to keep me awake, come on Tracey get on with it and cut the crap.

Right I need to shift some more, so I will go back to some of my basic ideas:

Drink lots ( of boring water sadly, not lovely wine)
Fish at least once or twice a week
Soup at least once or twice a week
Eat breakfast every day
Avoid those sweets and the late night trips to the shop.
Avoid too much potato, pasta and bread

I will get to that 11st 7lb mark, I will, I will, I will!

Who came up with the idea of all you can eat buffets

Now when I was a kid you went to a restaurant, where they proceeded to serve you up a nice but plain plate of food, which you then ate, leaving room for pudding without having to roll home. If we were really lucky we might get to go to a carvery, but having as much veg as you can eat is not that big a thrill to a child.

I am not moaning about the range of food now available, especially as my all time favourite is heading out to the local thai restaurant, yum yum mixed starter yes please. However there do now seem to be  a plague of all you can eat buffets places.

We should have some kind of loyalty card for the number of times we have visited the local Chinese buffet over the years. However today we took our lad to his Dyslexia appointment in Reading, after the assessment we offered him the choice of where to eat, kind of assuming that the lure of Macdonalds would be too much for him to resist. Macdonalds is bad enough, its certainly the enemy of my diet ( especially considering I don't even like their food, and just eat because the kids are).

Today he dragged us to the place that must be the arch enemy of my weight loss, the lunchtime Pizza Hut Buffet. You just have to order a bottomless fizzy drink, its the law, equally you just have to go for the buffet option, otherwise you seem just a little bit mental. An all you can eat buffet of hot and cold pasta, garlic bread, various pizzas, salad and more is not going to help anyone to reduce the size of their gut.

So after eating some salad ( good me), I still managed to eat a fair few slices of pizza. Here are the factors that I am counting in my favour ( to demonstrate that I am not a complete waste of space):

- some salad with no dressing
- only thin based pizza ( although this was because I don't actually like thick bases)
- no pepperoni topped pizzas
- no garlic bread
- hot chilli pizza ( I am sure hot food is meant to help your body speed up the digestion)
- ham and pineapple pizza, surely the pineapple must count as one of your 5 a day.

Will have to have some salad for tea to make me feel a little less like a hippo.

Snow, a keep fit aid

After growing up on a farm in the middle of no where I am certainly not a big fan of snow. Many were the times when I was a kid that we were completely cut off by huge snow falls. I can certainly recall trudging through huge snow drifts to get to the nearest town, bleeding freezing.

I am not a complete grumpy troll, Watching the kids play, hearing their squeals of joy and seeing their excitement at the "school closed" news are all great moments.

However maybe today it was a very good thing, walking for a while with all three kids ( the girls being pulled in their sledges and Elliot in the sling) must have used up at least a few calories.

I don't like not being able to use the car, and leaving the house being such a huge chaos of gloves, hats and wellies. However the exercise part of the snow has got to be a good thing for my diet.

Let me hear you say whoop whoop

Despite all my excuses and the snow triggering my hibernating/ eating instincts I have managed to actually lose weight over the last week, I know shocking.

The scales have tipped below the 12 stone mark for the first time in many years. I am now officially only 11 stone and 13lbs. I have been so focused on getting below that magically 12 stone mark, and it has seemed impossible for a very long time, so I am very excited to finally be making some slow progress.

I will now have to put some serious thought into how to set my next little goal. Obviously the 3 stone thing I started out with is a terrifying and daunting figure, which I would certainly give up before ever achieving with no small successes along the way. Maybe I will just set the next one at 11st 7lb, not sure if that's too big a target for now, will have to think about it.

Fat ward - great motivation

I know many of the people featured on this program have had issues in their lives that have caused their weight to spiral out of control over time.

However its easy to see how the weight gain can sneak up on any of us, so have a watch its a great documentary. I really liked that a huge part of it focuses on the emotions and fear that go alongside morbid obesity, makes for a much more interesting documentary than the more usual look at the fat people and judge them type.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2245958/Inside-Britains-FAT-ward-Where-clinically-obese-patients-weighing-47-stone-treated-reinforced-wheelchairs-industrial-weighing-scales.html

Here come the list of excuses, my top 6 reasons for dieting failure this week

I know it sounds just down right pathetic, but for this week I am going to build a big pile of excuses, and snuggle down to hide amongst them.

1 - Its that time of the month, so lots of sugar keeps my mood more level, and stops me falling asleep.

2 - Its birthday month for the girls, so having their party last Saturday has since involved having a huge stock pile of food sitting there looking at me.

3 - Elliot has not been sleeping great as usual, so the sleep deprivation has called for the usual sugar rush to keep me going.

4 - On Thursday my job went under threat of redundancy, so what better time is there to comfort eat.

5 - My lovely sister in law did a big cash and carry shop and dropped off a huge quantity ( and I mean huge) of sweets, how can I resist.

6 - Its freezing cold so I enter hibernating preparation mode of an evening. Shut the curtains, whack the heating up and eat.

I could just admit that my will power ( if I have any) has failed me miserable this week, but making excuses is so much more fun. I am desperate to get below the 12 stone mark, but I think that goal may have to wait a few extra weeks. Don't get me wrong I am still motivated, I am just trying to be more accepting of my failures, taking them to hard will just stop me in my tracks, and that's not going to help anyone.

One week in - 12st 1lb

I would love to be posting with news of some magic sudden weight loss, sadly during the week I have not discovered the cure to fat. Its still mostly sitting their occupying lots of space on my backside.

However I am seeing some slow progress, so lets keep it up, although I did fail like a miserable failure tonight. Never go shopping when hungry, if you do you end up with meals that include very large fat covered lamb chops, oh dear.

This morning I was 12st 1lb, lets hope the lamb chops have not done to much damage.

Macdonalds, shocking

In my opinion no one in their right mind thinks that Macdonalds is a healthy option, despite their attempt to seem healthy of late.

So just a few days into the diet I was not impressed when my youngest girl insisted that she wanted her birthday meal to be a Macdonalds, sadly she showed us this by drawing the big M logo in the air. Come back those days 10 years ago when, as new parents-to-be we insisted that no kid of ours would ever set foot in the above mentioned eating establishment.

Nearly a decade later I am ashamed to admit that there have even been a handful of days when one or more of the kids have had two Macdonalds meals in one day ( generally when they have been to a party or with other people, but none the less, how embarrassing.  Off we headed to Caitlin's chosen destination, and I immediately started to look at the calories of the various options to find one with a reasonably low count.

I was shocked to find that my other halves favourite, the Big Tasty was a monster on the piling on the pounds front. Don't quote me, but the burger alone was well over 800 calories, add chips and a fizzy drink to that, then you must be using up a huge chunk of the daily guidance.

I opted for a Big Mac and dumped the middle bit of bread. I don't expect myself to be perfect, at times I know that all I can aim for is going for the best of a bad bunch. I have to be fair and say, all credit to Maccy Ds that they do post the calorie count so very clearly, it really does help. But I wonder how they can possibly get so much fat into the Big Tasty. Do they roll the burger and bap in the stuff, then inject more fat, then add butter as the dressing, finally topped off by a brushing of ghee?

The big weigh in - 12 st 3lb

The last time I weighed ( a while ago), I was pushing the 12 and a half stone mark, but I knew that at least a little of that had shifted, thank goodness.

So there we are this morning after agreeing to weigh in every Saturday morning. Ali is putting me to shame and doing well already, so I had my fingers crossed that my starting point would not be higher than I had anticipated.

Anyway onto the scales I jumped and read the little digital display which told me that I was 12st 3lb, so that is certainly going in the right direction, phew.

Ali insisted that clothes make a big difference, but I am going by the clothes on weight to save having to strip off each week when I forget to weigh before getting dressed. I tend to ignore my husbands knowledge and wise words, after all he is a man, and they are not that bright ( although they think they are). My darling other half was insistent that clothes aid an extra 3 to 4lb, now to me that sounds like a heck of a lot.

Turns out he was right ( for a change), the scales do indeed read 12st when in the nudey, so that's 3lb of clothes weight. If I am having a bad week I will have to be sure that I wear very little on weigh in day, just to keep up the motivation and positive reduction in weight.

Those naughty little calories

Who knew how many calories were hiding away in certain little sneaky corners, the little ratbags. I am at the stage of wanting to make some long term changes alongside trying to lose a ton of weight, so its interesting to see where changes can be made.

When I was younger and started to put on a few pounds, I stopped having sugar in my tea, which worked well, I drink ALOT of tea everyday, in fact I am rarely found without a cuppa to hand, its my little comforter.

Then when I was about 26 I had a tumour which seriously messed with my tummy, leading me to quickly lose plenty of weight. I would highly recommend this from a weight loss perspective, but not from a stress and worry point of view.

After that I again gained a little, but decided to give up drinking coke completely. This worked a treat, for a while I really missed the addictive dark brown sugary gloop. Now it just tastes foul if I ever take a sip, odd how these things change.

Now after having a pregnancy and birth in 2002-2003, 2006-2007, 2007-2008, and then 2011 I have totally lost control of the weight thing. I tried to work it out the other day, but instead I opted for a conservative estimate, so I guess that over the last 10 years I have had roughly 7 years of being disturbed at night by screaming horrid little babies or children. I know there is evidence that poor sleep is partially linked to weight gain, and this is definitely partially to blame with me. To get over the tiredness I simply ate sugar, I think Lucozade was my main drink during my third pregnancy, this is highly not recommended for the health of ones teeth, mine are now paying the price.

Back to my point I now need to think about those little long term changes, but can't see any obvious things to completely give up. So instead of focusing on single elimination I am looking at those little changes.

I did not know that bananas had a lot more calories than most other fruit, I am a big fan of the lovely yellow fruit. I am a fan of most fruit, but I could merrily eat 3 or 4 bananas a day ( as long as they are on the lovely side of being slightly under ripe. At about 100 calories a banana, that's about 400 calories just gone on snacking on nanas. Simply replacing one banana with an apple will half the 100 calories to about 50, so that's an easy change to make. Don't get me wrong I still love nanas, but maybe not at a rate of 4 a day!

Then we have my favourite drink ( next to tea), I love lime cordial, ummm tasty. I can honestly say that I have never looked at the nutritional guidance on my bottles of cordial, so I was a little shocked to find each glass has about 60 calories, this may not sound a lot, but at 3 or so glasses a day that's nearly 200 calories wasted on drink.

I am not a fan of plain water straight from the tap, don't ask we all have our little odd ways. so I plan to replace the lime cordial with the occasional glass of water or cup of tea. Then I am going to dilute the cordial by about half the amount I currently have.

Those are a few starting baby steps, so watch this space to see how Ali and I do