It’s been hard to get enthused over the last few weeks and so apologies for the lack of recent updating action, but for the first time this year my weight has gone up. Since my miraculous and illness influenced drop to 13 stone my weight went straight back up to 13.3, and for the last two weeks it has hovered around this area. On Saturday for my weigh in I had gone back down to 13, but then by the next day I was back up again.

As for the reasons for this, well firstly I think that when I got that far down it was at the end of a pretty nasty illness, but when my body adjusted to me eating food again it just went straight back up again. On top of that I have to admit that I’ve been pretty rubbish on both the food and exercise front. I haven’t been sticking to my calorie counts particularly rigidly, but this wouldn’t be so much of an issue if I had been doing my exercises as well. But aside from a couple of evenings last week I’ve been failing to do them as well.

There is another thing that I think is having a bit of a random effect as well. My weekly weight in is on a Saturday morning, and most weeks Ellen and I will celebrate the impending weekend with a drink on a Friday night. Obviously with the diet we tend to stick to spirits and a bit of wine rather than beer, but although these drinks are still quite calorific, I’ve noticed that on the morning after a hefty few drinks, my weight is always artificially lower than it should be. I suppose this is to do with the dehydrating effects of the drinking, but it means that often I think I am doing better than I am. For instance this Saturday morning I was back down (just) to 13.0 stone, but by the following morning I was back up to 13.2. I think that from now on I am going to change my weigh in morning to the day of the weekend which doesn’t start with a hangover, and stop kidding myself as to how well I am doing.

The truth is that the enthusiasm has gone a little over the last few weeks. One thing that was really lovely was a couple of weeks back when I went out with my friends and they all seemed genuinely surprised by how much weight I had lost, and were very ego boosting about the whole thing. But I knew in my heart of hearts that I had just finished a bad week, and instead of kicking me up the arse I think it actually made me a bit more complacent.

This is the really tough thing about this sort of challenge. It’s a full year of trying to keep a mental discipline towards your entire life, and the longer it goes on, the harder it gets. There are so many times when I just want to cave in. But so far, as much as I’m not doing great, I haven’t buckled and entirely given in. But I must be stronger. I need to regain the mental discipline that I had in the first few months, not just for the whole of this endeavour, but for all the other challenges I have set myself for this year. I’ve been falling back on all of them and if this year is going to be as life changing as I hope, then I am going to need to pick myself out of this temporary rut.  And so tonight I have stuck to the diet (and had a lovely mushroom and bacon stroganoff in the process) and now I am going to do some long overdue exercise.