Down sizing

Now it's clear to me I'm wired differently from some folk and what works for me is just plain bonkers to a lot of other people.  A year ago I came off anti-depressants and cut myself some slack with regards to things such as weight gain, telling myself if that's what it was going to take to get myself through that period of adjustment then so be it and I would deal with any subsequent weight increase ... later.  At an unnamed moment in the future.

At the end of last year / early this year; I can't be sure, the time had come to deal with the weight increase.  It had not been substantial but was certainly enough to affect my morale going forwards.  The bike, or in particular the spinning classes on the Watt bike have been a mainstay of weight loss, although these days the week day commuter bike rides are not about the body image, they are about getting fitter to enjoy my true love, the mountain bike.

It is worth reflecting though on how the period of weight loss has gone.  My method was simplicity itself.  Move more, eat less.  Nothing fancy about that at all as far as physiology goes.  Things I've realised it really took were

1.  Change.  Acknowledgment that for the situation to change I had to make changes, and this isn't make a change then trundle on back to usual with the change having been a one off, one day of doing exercise or one day of eating more, this needed to be a hard earned, sustained change over a longer period.  I had to accept that just thinking I was on a diet was not the same as eating less.

2.  Do what you need to do, not what you want to do.  I have a tendency to get home from work, tell myself I'm tired, tell myself it's raining or cold or that I simply don't want to do anything other than get tea, sit on the settee then have a bath and go to bed.  What I want doesn't necessarily make me happy either; what I want can leave me sat there, bored and lonely.  What I need is to walk to the library, to go to the allotment, to do a short bike ride, to do something, get out there, be productive or at least energetic.

3.  Make only really small changes, and make them stick, then make some more small changes and make them stick too, then some other small changes.  Building up all the little changes over time since the start of this year now sees me eating breakfast every day, and a reasonably nutritious one at that.  No snacking happens in the morning now, I'm full until lunchtime.  I have learned to really enjoy enormous quantities of salad in wraps or sandwiches or just as part of a main meal.  Beginning to do more exercise built up and up until I was doing 7 hours a week minimum by April.  I have a four o'clock snack at work, and often it's an apple.  I don't drink alcohol on "school nights" any more and not so much at weekends.  Lots of little changes really add up.

And let's not forget the bike in all this.  100 hours is a normal month, from January onwards, and the plan is to double that by the end of summer.  The bike is not an instrument of torture and it certainly doesn't feel like the kind of exercise you do because you feel you have to, the weekends of mountain biking are a joy and not a chore, and there's a lot to be said for that.