Kmart

I have a strange addiction to the shop known as Kmart. In New Zealand we have only just received some updated stores with excellent design and a fancier shopping experience… but it never stopped me before. Those low prices, so many items, so much variety and every week I go back I find something else that I really “need”. I especially love the fact you can shop until midnight in some stores – it is quiet, there are free changing rooms and no queues to pay.

Instagram channels like the Kmart Forecast do not help my addiction

Yes, I think I do need that letter box. I have so many important things to say in under 30 letters

My house will never ever look as good as this, but perhaps if I buy this stuff THIS TIME it will work

My friends are similarly addicted. One searched for a candle holder for weeks after seeing it on the Kmart Forecast on Instagram (which shows the newest trends at Kmart). I found it for her while doing my (almost) weekly shop and she was ecstatic. When I went to visit Danni in Auckland we made sure to visit the biggest one in New Zealand and I got some super comfy PJ's.

I have so much of a problem that this week I am LTLWO Kmart. When I went there this weekend I came away with $50 worth of Kmart merchandise – a $6 tshirt, a $14 sports bra that came in my size (what is this sweet miracle??), 2 sets of 3 for $3 black socks, a 3 for $10 pack of lacy underwear, a $9 special pair of black work pants and finally what I actually came in for – a pair of 0.5kg weights with grips for walking/running at $6. All of these things are handy – I was low on socks and underwear and after my weight loss I need a few basics that actually fit well. HOWEVER I am supposed to be saving for my holiday instead of spending my savings here in NZ. I only have 2 months to save as much I can for Australia, and I am not off to a good start. A big issue is that I know I feel the same way about Kmart as I do about IKEA... but here in little New Zealand we have yet to feel the touch of the blessed IKEA so it seems like a fun and strange thing. When I was last in Australia I got a photo frame and pillow from there and I am very keen on having a good shop when I go. In reality, LWO Kmart will give me more space for IKEA gear. I need a cushion to take travelling to Phuket, and will attempt to limit my IKEA shop to what can be carried on the plane. 

Luggage

I forgot that I had said I would upload all of my notes from my phone onto this, so here's a note dump in chronological order.  You will understand why the title is LTLWO Luggage by the end I think...

Weight 8 Jan =92kg. This is not the heaviest I have been but it is pretty close. It doesn’t feel right, that I could be carrying around essentially the size of a bag of luggage all day every day but yes, I am 27kg heavier than I would like to be. That is a lot to lose. I need to lose 14kg in 6 months to go on this holiday so I will have to step up my game to deal with this. I already can’t have gluten and controlling that is easy now, so I just need to keep myself on track so I can get down to only being carry-on baggage overweight, and then just handbag overweight.

Weight 11 Jan 91kg. This has actually been fun. Robbie is great to work with for weight loss, he is competitive and gives me the drive to succeed. At the moment the plan is for twice weekly Wii Fit weigh ins, with Thursday being our reward day (if we meet targets we get a reward e.g. movie or timezone). This Sunday weigh in was good, lost 1.3kg since last time but Robbie’s was after he had dinner so he lost less. I’m sure this Thursday he will give me a run for my money! Emotion-wise I think I am doing ok. I am trying not to stress about what I eat as long as I record it so I gave a good picture of how much I am eating. The exercise thing is still not great but I know that weigh in challenges are a great motivation. We need to lose 2kg between us for Thursday to do it – around 1kg each. 

14 Jan – weigh in is tomorrow and I ate two pieces of ginger slice. I shouldn’t feel bad because I can make it up in other ways but I have that guilt now. Just have to stop it from spiralling and causing me to give up all at once in an inferno of chocolate. This is going to take a long time. Pretty much the rest of my life. Sucks. I hope I don’t need surgery to get rid of loose skin. I hope I don’t lose a whole lot and gain it back over Easter. I want to lose between a kg and half a kg each week but I am sure there will be plateaus somewhere. I don't want to give up. I don't want to stay fat. I want to wear a bikini on a beach. I want to shop for size 12 or medium. I want to be able to run.

15 Jan - Weigh in today! That means it has only been one week but it feels like much longer hmph. Side effects have been grumpiness, tiredness, strange poop, sleepiness at 2pm and cravings. Oh the cravings! Sweet salty savoury sticky forbidden goodness. A whole week without gummi lollies, chocolate milk, bad potato chips and my other favourite monsters. It isn't that I can’t have them, its if I do I have to do twice the work to make up for it. I am not a fan of work. I hope I have lost another kg. That would be super. Having all of it drop off would make me very happy. If I was really trying I wouldn't drink water or eat food for at least a few hours before but I can't ruin this with sick cutting style diet work. I will have afternoon tea so I am not fully starving at 5, then strip down and do the weigh. 

Weight 19 Jan = 89.9kg woop woop! I am under 90! So sad to think I thought I was at 85kg. I remember at high school when Erin was 80kg and how bad I thought that was when I was 75kg myself. 14kg is how much weight I need to lose to go to Vanuatu so how much is that going to bring me to? 92-14-78. Not super skinny but close to 75 which is then only 10kg from my goal weight. Ideally I would like to be 65 when I go to Vanuatu but I have to be realistic – losing 28kg in 28 weeks isn’t really that healthy and if I am honest with myself I think my mental health would benefit from taking it slow.

Measurement tum 113.5cm, thigh 65.5cm, lovehandle 95cm

Weight 25 Jan – 88.5! Whaaaaa. So good, funny to think I am 3.5 away from what I thought I was though. Boobs haven’t gotten smaller but back has. One of my bras is too loose to wear now.

When I look in the mirror I don’t see any changes. Its funny to think that I have so much fat that the current losses don’t mean much. I also know I have to slow down the weight loss a little – if I lose too much too fast I could have loose skin, whereas if I take my time it should be able to keep up.

One thing I would really like to do is exercise before breakfast. I could get up at 6, go for a run or a swim and be back by 7 ready to shower and go to work. Another idea is to jump rope- we have a courtyard we can use, I just need to shift the plant containers around some. Jumping rope gives a full body workout too, just not great for the bewbs. The reason I don’t get up isn’t because I am too snuggly, it is because he doesn’t want to get up, he wants to snuggle. I hate to say no so I don’t get up. Maybe I should talk to him about it.

I have this gym membership so I need to use it! Maybe I should go to the gym proper rather than classes. All I know is I need to get fit to wear a bikini, not soft. Trying to imagine what I would look like 20kg lighter is pretty crazy but I want it.

29 Jan – Weigh in is tonight. I have sabotaged myself because of a slip up yesterday. It started with one marshmallow egg, which was not so bad. Approx 500kjs which is high for a snack but it was just one. By the end of the day I had bought a tray of the eggs (a little smaller at 410js) and eaten two of six. Today I ate the rest, That’s 400x4 today and 500+800 yesterday, 1600 today which is as big as my lunch. 2900 omg so much. I will be interested in this weigh in because last Sunday I was down to 88.5  and tonight after these kjs I might gain some more. Doctors appointment tonight so I will get him to weigh me and compare it to the Wii. I hope my already low levels mean I can still lose weight today. I will have a plan for next time I crave. I will not eat them again until April.

-           That’s enough for one post. So many more of these little notes to go!

Cheesecake

This weekend my boyfriend and I decided to make a cheesecake. We are both on diets, so all of the intelligent people in the audience are asking "Why?". Because cheesecake. I am coeliac (no gluten or I get very sick) and last week was Coeliac Awareness Week, which led to some specials on gluten free goodies at the supermarket. I chose some ginger biscuits and some arrowroot ones – and thought they both make great cheesecake bases! Boyfriend agreed so off we went to gather more supplies for a white chocolate cheesecake.

Flash forward two days and I realise I have been responsible for eating half of an entire cheesecake. HALF! Granted if I was left alone with it I would have eaten the whole thing, but since January we have lost 20kg between us (10kg each) and I have been very careful about what I allow myself to eat. Not only did I eat half a cheesecake this week, but I got Thai takeaways for dinner after my step class because I believed I had earned it from all my hard work.

Cut to today (5 days since cheesecake creation) and I had my bi-weekly weigh in. We use the WiiFit to weigh ourselves on a Thursday and Sunday so that we can track our progress more accurately. On Sunday I was down to 81.5kg, and planning on being around 80 for this weigh in. Yesterday I had only eaten an apple and some cheese for lunch so that I could eat leftovers from the takeaways for my dinner guilt free. When it came to the result I was shocked. 1.7kg weight gain. The WiiFit went from calling me Overweight to calling me Obese again,  and the teeny voice in the Wii said “Too High!”.

I cried.

I cried because I realised I had been kidding myself. I cried because I realised I knew better than this. I cried because I understood in that moment, that although I love cheesecake and we had a great time making it and eating it, we could never eat it like that again. The time of the cheesecake was over.

My boyfriend went to the Wii and did his weigh in… only to be told he had not gained or lost anything this week. Nothing. He does not go to exercise classes. He has a home gym that I know was not used that week. However, he is a man, and he is taller than me – therefore his body could handle the food and not gain anything like my body did.

I cried some more, got mad about how unfair it was that I had done the work and gone to class but he had not gained 1.7kg and I had. I cried because I knew I had to do so much work to lose that extra weight. I cried because he could eat the cheesecake if he wanted. The results for him were not as they were for me.

Once that was out of my system, I wiped off my messy mascara and decided I would only have yogurt for breakfast. Upon reaching my work I discovered my yogurt had expired. This is obviously just going to be one of those days I guess.

Paper

Hello, Dear Readers and welcome to the first installment of a new blog/diary/image collection which I have started just to pull some of these things from my brain and voice them with the wider world. It is narcissistic to think anyone will read this, which is actually helpful in a way as it lets me just BLEHHH all of it onto the page without fear of repercussions and without actually forcing someone to listen to what I feel like saying. I have been keeping a little electronic notepad of these ideas on my phone but I always fancied having somewhere to collect them. As the theme here is learning to live without, I will make topics for each post to fit into this idea, and today’s is Paper, as instead of keeping a paper diary (the kind of thing certain ex-boyfriends would scowl and write in while sitting in front of you at Christmas In The Park, as you were there with your new boyfriend and that did not sit well, but scowling and writing in a book at home has less of a dramatic effect) I will keep an electronic one. One of the benefits of using Blogger is that I use my google login a lot so it is only a buttons click away at all times. How time flies – twenty years ago would this have been a common thing like it is today?

So this time I am LTLWO Paper. For years (even this year in fact) I would go out and seek the perfect notebook so that I could pour my heart and soul onto its pages… only to give up two days in. All of that paper wasted – I never used them again because that wouldn’t be a fresh slate, a new start. There would be pages torn from bindings and it would make me sad to look at them.  I tried to be strict with myself, and yes -once when I had a series of big breakups I kept notes -but they were awful. Cryptic poetic clues to try and decipher. They made sense at the time but when I go back to look at them it is really painful, but not for bad memories - instead for the cringe you get from reading something taken so seriously but written so badly. That inward chill that follows your spine when you see someone do something incredibly embarrassing and it reminds you of a similar time when you had done something of a similar caliber. Regrets are awful but they are part of the human experience I guess. 

This time things are different. Using an electronic copy is both secret and not. If I hate this blog I can always delete it. I doubt anyone will read this, so I doubt anyone will worry if it disappears in time. I am sure I will miss the feeling of paper that has been scrawled all over, where you can feel the bumps on each page and together as a book they make that delightful crinkle sound. 

Next time I will put in all of the notes from my phone's notebook but for now, I think this explains enough. 

 - Beth