DRAGONWYST

24 July 2010

Within a day or so of the previous blog entry, I suddenly fell through my plateau and dropped 1.5kg seemingly overnight. It was positively bizarre! I have now lost 4kg. It’s a nice steady pace – slow, but steady. I have found that it’s time to reassess what I’m doing, look at the weak spots in the plan and tighten things up a little. Despite my allergy to the word “diet”, I have picked up a little book called The Flat Belly Diet by Liz Vaccariello and Cynthia Sass (2010, Rodale,London).

This book caught my eye for two reasons: it is aimed at belly fat, and we all know how difficult it can be to get rid of belly fat, and it tells me to eat my favourite food at every meal – things like avocado, nuts and seeds, olives and so forth. It’s based on the idea of eating more MUFAs or mono-unsaturated fats which do all sorts of good things for us, including letting our bodies know that all is well, there is no famine, so ease up on the storage! The book not only includes heaps of recipes, but also tackles looking at emotional eating and ways to recognise when one is genuinely hungry rather than just looking for something for one’s tastebuds.

I’m not sure how I’m going to use the book yet. The idea of following it exactly, doing the four-day anti-bloat section first and so forth, is something I find quite daunting. I don’t know how much the budget will groan if I go out and buy the exact things I’m supposed to, and the time it takes to prepare all those meals is a bit daunting. I’m so in love with my quick throw-together salads. My shifts make the whole thing more challenging too. I think my best strategy is to do what I have done before and slowly replace things. If I learn and tackle one meal from the book and teach my spouse (the Chief Cook and Bottle Washer) to cope with it, there is more hope than doing a sudden, radical change. I hope I can learn quickly from the book exactly what four 400 calorie meals look like, so I can adjust and tweak what I need to.

I have also ordered two more Callanetics DVDs – Callanetics Evolution and Cardio-Callanetics. These will give me greater variety where exercise is concerned, While still looking after my back. If the weather is inclement, I can replace my walk with the Cardio option.

As for my back, I am slowly coming to terms with the idea that bulging discs don’t necessarily heal. Instead, one learns to live with them. It’s more likely to be sore and unhappy at the end of a busy and tiring week than on a Monday, so Fridays in particular are likely to be the day that I rest and don’t exercise. The way Callan tells her students to move and get out of certain positions in the DVDs is proving to be something I can translate into my day-to-day living, and I am learning the fine art of listening to my back and not doing things that hurt, rather than feeling I ought to push on regardless.