Wednesday 30 November 2011

Stats for November and goals for December

It's the last day of the month so time to look at how my efforts have been paying off :)

Average weekly loss: 0.6 pounds (last months was 0.86)
BMI at end of the month: 42.9 (last month was 43.3)
Average daily calorific deficit: 301 (last months was 428)
Total calories burned at the gym: 3424 (104 less than October)
Average daily calories burned at the gym: 114

I never hit my goal of increasing my weekly loss to 0.9 a week, but this month has been difficult; for a start I've been plagued with injury and illness of various sorts, so even though my workout has increased in intensity I was unable to make it as often. And then to be fair I've not been strictly strict on myself with food this month, and meet ups with old friends and a week where I basically binge ate my way through most of the chocolate in Liverpool have clearly taken their toll. It's had its ups and downs, and it's that time of the year when I don't want to be active, I just want to curl up and commit suicide by chocolate. Delicious, delicious chocolate.

With that in mind I'm pretty pleased that I've actually been good enough inbetween the difficult weeks to still maintain a loss. I may have set myself a goal for November to hit 0.9, but my overall long term strategy is to maintain and average of 0.5 a week (As I think I've mentioned before, taking into account my PCOS etc) and in that sense I've been succesful.

But all these numbers are all very abstract. The proof in the pudding is that on the first of November I was 318.5 pounds and today I weigh in at 313.2 pounds. I'm not sure how hackers is working that out as an average half a pound a week loss but I'm presuming that's taking into account daily fluctuations etc.

So where do I want to go from here? December being notorious as it is, I've never not gained weight in December so whilst some may be aiming to plunge in and get stuck in to lose this month, I'm aiming to maintain my weight this month. Any loss will be welcomed with open arms, but as long as I enter January having not put on a stone (an annual event for me) I'll be pleased!
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Saturday 19 November 2011

Friday 18 November 2011

Killing time...

Two blog entries in the space of two days? I know, it's been a while...but everything was a bit put on hold yesterday (suffering greatly with a headache, wooziness and generally feeling sorry for myself after my dual with a steel shutter) and today I thought hey...why not write a little of my adventures recently, being that this is called "Adventures with Bex" after all?

Well, recently my adventures have mostly revolved around my Xbox. I wouldn't class myself as a big gamer, but every now and then there is a game that sucks away at my personal time until I get bored of it, and it pretty much takes over my entire mind. The last game was specifically the multiplayer aspect of Assassins Creed Brotherhood, and before that it was any number of The Sims games and variations thereof. Inbetween it all has been Oblivion, which popped up in my life from time to time and sucked me up before I got bored of playing it over for the ten millionth time (and I've still not played it all).

Mammoths in Skyrim, they are awesome because
they are big and shaggy, like me, {via}
Well, now it's Skyrim, Oblivions younger but oh so much more talented little brother (or sister, they aren't sexist in Tamriel) that has me sucked in, so much of the radio blog silence from me here has been at the hands of this game. I'll be fair, it only came out a week ago, but the weeks before that I've been enjoying my social life, and actually have plans coming up, ranging from coffee tonight to a trip to Birmingham for the Christmas market. I'm very much looking forward to this trip as it's with old friends I don't really see very often at all (most of them I haven't seen in at least a year) but of course I have to tear myself away from the Xbox to do that.

I'm sure I'll survive the shock though :)

I'm also look forward in the next few weeks to Twilight (you may judge, I care not :p) and the ChildLine Christmas do (Ben can finally see all these crazy people I've been pouring my deepest, darkest secrets to during training). All in all, aside from the unsuprising "I LOVE SKYRIM" line I've been pulling around with me this past week, not a lot to report on, but an awful lot coming up to enjoy :)

{via}
Oh, you may also notice that I've not said anything about writing, which considering I announced with some excitement that I was partaking in NaNoWriMo again this year (in order to strike a task from my day zero list) may strike as suspicious. Well suspect away dear friends for I jacked it all in a week into the frivolities. I'm just not feeling the creative juices flowing this November, which is ok because they very much were last year and so the chances are that they will be next year, or the year after...but after that I've failed day zero, so they'd better not be waiting till the November after that to resume the flow...you get my point anyhow. This year is a NaNo fail.

As for the weight loss, this is actually coming along quite nicely this November. As is usual with me so it seems, as soon as I stopped pressurising myself with challenges and immediate urgent goals I've started losing again. As of today my weight is 315 lb...still much too high and way too unhealthy, but if I'd been hanging around on FUFF I would have surpassed my weight loss goal! What's even sweeter about this number is that I've only got one stone and a pound to lose before I'm out of the 300 lb's, and since I've already lost more than this in total you can imagine  that I'm feeling pretty darn positive about seeing a 2 flash up on the scale. The really important thing is though that this is a significant loss after a pretty stagnant period where I was losing at best a half a pound a week. It just goes to show that in this particularly tough world of scales and gyms and portion sizes and vegetables, the fruits of your labour aren't always instantaneous.

Anyhow, just thought I'd drop in a line. Can't wait to bring you news of all the wonderful things that are taking place over the CHRISTMAS IS NEARLY HERE *ahem* season and err...I hope you are all enjoying yourselves too ^_^

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Thursday 17 November 2011

Raising my cup to Specsavers

For the high level of discomfort I'm in right now, and the pain I was in last night, I'm desperately disappointed by the fact that I don't have a pair of black eyes to show off for my efforts in not watching where I'm going. Without said black eyes, Ben can't joke that he's been beating me about...not that domestic violence is ever funny in reality, but if you could see me and Ben together, you'd understand that even in the purely physical sense Ben is not the one who would be doing the beating in our relationship.

Nope, I am extremely disappointed that I don't have a pair of whopping shiners just to milk this for all the comedy value it's worth, because despite my constant throbbing headache and the fact that I can't even rub the sleep from my eyes without it stinging now, it is actually really very funny.

Yesterday at work was relatively stressful. Not because of the customers, who are often a cause for stress in our business (or...well....any business I guess!) but because of one thing after another piling up. For starters, I'm in the last phase of my probationary/training period, and this involves me learning to open and close the shop up on my own so my manager for the evening was taking me through the end of day procedures, which meant everything took three times longer than it usually would. So that just through everything off anyway.

It didn't help that the day shift had obviously been really ridiculously busy and the place was in a state. I mean, I went to sweep up and do a shop tidy and some dirty old beggar had trodden mini ritz crackers into the carpet. I was like dude, where's the party and why wasn't I invited? We were behind on our processing and some cash had gone missing in the system (but don't worry, we found it!).

To add worry to it all, we were waiting for a repairman to come and sort some pretty important stuff out and our cleaner has been away (not sure whether AWOL or just on holiday and without a replacement) so we had to take on the cleaning jobs after the shop had closed at 10pm. To add insult to injury we had a problem with the lock for the gate outside (I was momentarily locked out in the shop yard at about quarter past ten...oh yes, a fun filled night for all) and everything that could have gone wrong pretty much did.

When it got to 10:40pm, a time when after a late shift I'm usually ensconced at home eating my tea, we'd done what we could and decided it was time to lock up and leave. My duty manager sorted out the alarms and then unlocked the front door, while I took my phone out of my bag to let Ben know I was on my way. She stood by to let me out so she could lock up behind us and I flew like a demon out of that dastardly shop, eager for home, food and...

At this point there is the almighty sound of my face crashing into a steel shutter, which had been conveniently pulled halfway down to be on level with the bridge of my nose/eyes/glasses. The stupid thing? I was the one who'd pulled it down about half an hour beforehand. With the lights in the shop casting on the glass front door and the night outside being so dark, you couldn't tell it had been drawn and I'd completely forgotten about it. Obviously, with phone in hand, I hadn't been looking where I was going and I was power walking my way out of that shop.

The next thing I can remember is me standing out on the street with my hands over my nose laughing hysterically with my duty manager but also crying bucket loads of tears because oddly enough ramming your face into the bottom edge of a steel shutter really really hurts (If you don't believe me, you should try it some time!). I could well have knocked myself out but what I'm really chuffed about is that my glasses, which also took a fair bit of the force, survived without even a scratch. I would have really been up the creek without a paddle if they'd not survived...and the prospect of the lenses breaking into my eyes really doesn't bear thinking about.

So today I have a swollen nose and some icky brownish bruises under my eyes and purple blotches but sadly no really big brusing by which I can brag about my battle with our shutters (actually that's probably for the best putting all jokes aside, as I can use some cover up for this and get away with it!). But despite my throbbing head and wounded pride I can honestly say I've learned some valuable lessons from this whole experience;

  1. Stress leads to embarrassing and potentially dangerous mistakes
  2. I can survive being hit in the face with steel
  3. I still cry like a baby when I get a boo boo
  4. Watch where you're going
  5. Specsavers glasses can pretty much survive anything!
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Monday 7 November 2011

Simmer down for myself...

Ah, I hate feeling like I've let you all down but I'm dropping out of FUFF. I know we only have a couple of weeks left but I've got too much going on. Nothing extra or horrible or anything, just regular life, with work demanding such a flexible rota (aka I have no routine!) commiting to posting FUFF is moving lower and lower on my list of priorities as I try to fit family, friends and poor Ben into my "work, work out and collapse" schedule.

The past few weeks I've posted late or not at all and to be fair I'm finding it difficult to think of striving to hit my FUFF goals such as the drinking x ammount of water and what have you. For now I'm content to just try and get my brain in order and focus on going to the gym and sticking to my diet.

I am hoping however to get back on board come spring if these seasonal challenges are still going and maybe think about another more singly focused fitness or health related challenge or some such thing if I can find one.

Also, to put it bluntly, despite all the evidence to the contrary, I never actually started this blog as a weight loss blog, and I feel like I can't talk about anything BUT that at the minute! There's nothing wrong with it being a WL blog, however I miss just talking about any old crap, so I think that I might just do that and then keep my monthly statistics post that I initiated this month.

Sorry guys, blogging is all very well and all...but real life is calling :)
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Tuesday 1 November 2011

Stats for October and goals for November

I've decided to make this a monthly thing...I think it will help me keep my eye on the goal of maintaining a loss, however small, on a monthly basis, and will help keep me motivated. Also, in very rough theory, I can see where most of my weight loss is coming from...So without further ado...

Average weekly loss: 0.86 pounds (last months was 0.79)
BMI at end of the month: 43.3 (down by 0.4)
Average daily calorific deficit: 428 (last months was 397)
Total calories burned at the gym: 3528
Average daily calories burned at the gym: 113

So...I can glean that actually, if weight loss were uniform and strictly to the rules (I know it's not but let me be all clever for once!)...I'm loosing most of my weight due to my diet but a substantial amount is coming from working out. Also, considering I wasn't working out in September if you look at the numbers you could say that actually my diet has been worse this month but the working out has been a safety net. I knew the gym would be a winner for me :D Now the goal for the month of November will be to get the diet back on track to let the working out do even more for me. I'm going to aim for an average weekly loss of 0.9 pounds a week, to just push myself a little bit further.
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