First things first.  Today I measured my weight (Saturday morning is my official weekly weigh-in time) and I have now achieved a total weight loss of a stone and a half!  So the momentum is back with me again.  I must admit that there was a while there when I was starting to lose faith in this whole process, with nearly a month with no weight loss.  But the movement is back with me again.

As for what has caused the turnaround, it could be the fact that I’ve signed up with Nutracheck, and as a result I am watching what I eat a lot closer than I was, amd on their recommendation I also have a much lower calorie target.  It could be that I have now really started to get into the exercise regime that I mentioned.  I am really starting to notice a difference too.

And now for the bad news.  I am sad to say that Ellen has decided not to carry on with the website side of things.  She is still carrying on with the whole idea, but she was never really all that sold on the idea of the website itself.  And so now you’re stuck with me.  I now appear to have two blogs all to myself.  Oh well.  I’m going to keep this place going as a journal of the year, but I’m sure you’ll understand if it doesn’t get updated as much as I’d like.

Also, I am formulating a way at the moment to make the whole thing  bit more interesting.  Don’t want to give too much away but stay tuned for an announcement soon.

-Paul (gonna dispense with these tags after this, it’s always gonna be me now)

Well I’ve been exercising for nearly a week now, and I think it’s starting to have an effect. I’ve started off slowly. On the first day I did 25 sit ups and 10 push ups (proper ones mind, not silly little ones that involve your knees) and I’ve been slowly increasing it so now I am up to 35 sit ups and 13 push ups. Not an earth shattering increase granted, but still going in the right direction. Also, on Saturday we all went swimming at the local water park, and we both made an effort to do some proper swimming while we were there as well. I managed to do 16 lengths of the (small) pool before feeling as though my entire body was going to shut down and I was going to sink to the bottom like a paperweight.

But while some things are going in the right direction, others aren’t. At the weekend we invested in some new scales, seeing as the other ones we had were varying dramatically over the course of minutes. At one point I put on three pounds in the course of a minute. So we got some more, and they are a lot better, but they are just confirming what I pretty much already knew. I haven’t lost any weight in about a month. I have been really really strict, and as far as I’m aware I have only gone over my calorie count once this year. At first I lost a stone on two weeks, but since then, nada.

But while this is certainly dispiriting, I’m not going to let it stop me. My aim was not about weight, it was about getting in shape, so the key for me now is to keep up the good work with my diet, but to start taking the exercise more seriously. I’ve made a start, but in the next few weeks I need to think of some ways to step it up a gear. I really feel as though I’ve got the smoking beat now (I’ve been off the patches for four days now, and I’ve not killed a single person!) so this has to be my focus now.

-Paul

This weekend marked a pretty big moment for us in that it was our first big meal out.  All day we had eaten barely nothing in order that we could indulge a bit, but we both agreed that we would take it easy nonetheless. At least, until we saw the menu and decided that basically, we were gonna let ourselves off the leash.  We ate like a king and queen, and drank merry amounts of wine.  It was glorious, and we haven’t really suffered any attending weight gain or ill effects (save for the sledgehammer hangover the next day, but you can’t have everything.)

Other than that though, nice as the food was, the rest of the meal was an absolute shambles. A birthday party with ten people in attendance, the service we received was so comically bad that we all moved through denial, onto anger, and eventually into fits of giggles every time one of the ten or so different waiters who served us came over.  My personal highlight was when Ellen and my starter came out, already after everyone else had finished theirs. We had ordered Dim Sum, and opened the pot to find three large white balls. Confused we served them up and cut into them, only to find that what we had actually been served was three very large balls of dough.

‘Excuse me,’ Ellen asked of the waiter, ‘What’s this?’

‘Nothing.’ came the response, which may have been pretty factually accurate, but not particularly helpful.  Eventually we got the dim sum, which was lovely, but it didn’t quite shake the shock of being served a big ball of dough.

Obviously we’ve not been doing the best job of keeping this site up to date, so apologies for that, but I have been working on a new site which is now launched, so things should get a bit more regular again.  As for the time I’ve miseed, if I am going to be brutally honest, the last few weeks have been a bit demoralising. Having lost a stone in a little over two weeks, I then put on two pounds and then my weight just sat there, not shifting at all, but instead mocking me. At the same time, I find myself losing just a little bit of the zeal that I had going into this whole thing. I am bored of a lot of the food that I have now, and the smoking has been made harder by the fact that I ran out of nicotine patches and couldn’t get any more for two (very hard) days.

It was enivitable that it would get harder, but for those first two glorious weeks I was convinced that the whole year was going to be an absolute breeze. But it’s not, that much is clear. The choice now is how you move forward. Either you give in, or you redouble your efforts. So I think it’s about time that I start to tackle the issue of exercise.

I think it’s fairly safe to say that both Ellen and I lead quite a sedentary lifestyle. We do do exercise, for instance I walk to work, but as for ‘proper’ exercise, I haven’t really done anything since school, and I wasn’t exactly the athletic type back then either.

My main aim in this whole thing was never about getting to a certain weight. My aim is to get into shape. And by that, I mean to change my whole shape. I want to get rid of the moobs and the gut, yes, but I also want to make my spindly arms into something a little more impressive too. I have never been in shape before, and perhaps in the last few weeks I have let that goal slip from my mind.

So, starting tonight, I am going to endevour to do some light exercise. Thanks to Macca’s comment, I’ve found onehundredpushups and twohundredsitups, both of which have some nice gentle breaking in before the hard work starts,so starting tonight I’m going to start on these and see how they go.  Thankfully the smoking side of things has started to get a bit easier now, so we will see how it goes.

-Paul

Both Paul and myself are trying to stay positive this week because after the initial surge we don’t seem to be losing anything even though we are still being really good about what we eat. I weighed myself on Friday and had lost a pound but Paul had lost nothing. I’ve stayed the same since then. My common sense tells me this is nothing to worry about and this is how it works with diets but it’s a downer nonetheless.

I’m still keeping a food diary of everything I eat and have found a fab website that can help with this called Nutracheck. First of it worked out how many calories I should be eating to lose the weight I want to based on height, age and current weight. Mine came out at 1400. Then I used it’s food diary application to record everything I had eaten and how much and it worked out all the calories for me.It has about 35000 items in its database so pretty thorough and if there is something missing I can add it myself manually and it will be there next time. At the bottom of the page there is a chart to show how many cals I’ve had and how many I got left. As well as cals it also analyses other things in your diet such as fat content, alcohol units, and five-a-day. It even has an exercise application so you can work out how many cals you are burning off throughout the day. As you can probably tell I am pretty impressed with this site. At the moment I’m on a five day trial but am seriously considering signing up properly so will let you know.

Only other thing to say is that I have been taking the fat inhibiting tablets for over a week now and am relieved to say that not noticed any really bad side effect but they also do not seem to be making me lose any weight either so maybe I’m immune to them or something.

-Ellen

I’ve been on the nicotine patches now for 20 days and the good news is that they are really working. Day 20 and I’ve not been tempted once. Not a singe cigarette. Tomorrow will mark three whole weeks, and from that point on I know it’s going to get much much easier.

There is one downside to the nicotine patches, however, woe betide the poor fool who goes to sleep without taking it off first. My particular patches are the 24 hour kind, so the idea is that you leave them overnight so you don’t get a craving in the morning, but to my mind it must only be masochists and the deeply insane who would think that this is a good idea. For leaving a patch on overnight can only lead to one thing, nicotine dreams.

Over the last three weeks I’ve been stupid enough to fall into this trap, and what I’ve experienced has been the most lucid and horrible dreams.  For instance, the first one involved me walking outside of York University when I came across a very distressed Joe Biden, Vice President of the United States. He told me that someone was trying to kill him, and suddenly we were attacked, but I got the upper hand. After the kerfuffle out popped from behind a hedge Ros and Lucas from Spooks, who congratulated me, but not before I realised they were in on the plot, and off went me and Joe Biden, running for our lives as shots rang out from all around us.

Now ordinarily this sort of dream would be a laugh, something you giggle about the next morning before promptly forgetting, but not if you have a nicotine patch on.  Then, you experience every nerve shredding moment. When I woke (and I did wake up, several times throughout the night, not aware that it was the patch responsible) I was genuinely as scared as if I had lived it, and then when it came time to get up I felt as though I hadn’t slept a wink.

So the moral of the story is quite simple, if you’re going to quit smoking by all means use the patch, they are excellent. But make sure you take them off at night.  After each instance I feel like I’ve been attacked by mind bullets, like my medulla oblongata has been used as an exercise bag for Mike Tyson. I don’t recommend it.

Other than that the diet side of things has been going really well. This week was when everything starts to slow down considerably and the weight has stopped falling off, but we knew this would happen.  Having conquered the smoking more or less, the next thing that I want to get started on is the exercise regime. So far I’ve not been doing much more than walking to and from work, but starting next week I am going to start doing a few push ups and sit ups every night, as well as the occasional ab-crunch that I saw in a magazine article. Obviously I’m not going to start too full on, I don’t think my body could take it, as unaccustomed to exercise as it is, but it’s more about starting to get into a routine with it.

But three weeks in, more or less, I think we can both be really proud of what we’ve achieved so far, but now the hard work really starts!

This has been one very busy week. I’ve had a job interview for a job I didn’t get, so less said about that the better and I’ve also been preparing my UCCAS application for my Masters which I hope to start September. I got that completed last night past midnight. Things are never as straight forward as you think they will be. On top of this, Paul and I have decided that we have got to get out of the dump we are living in and get somewhere decent so I have been doing some serious house-hunting and we’re doing some viewing next week.

However to get on to what I should be talking about, week to……oops I am now writing the rest of the post a few days on because we had a power cut right in the middle of that. How annoying. Well to get back to what I was saying, my weight now stands at 15.2 so I’ve lost another 5 lbs and 11 lbs in total. I’m a bit disappointed I haven’t lost more this week to be honest as I feel I have been keeping to the diet really well. Also I am feeling rather under the weather at the moment and on Sunday had such a dodgy stomach that I barely ate at all so I would have thought it might have made a bigger difference. Oh well.

One new thing to report is that I went to the doctor’s last week and mentioned that I was on a diet and she suggested that I try some new tablets called Orlistat. What they do is to stop your body absorbing the fat that you consume with your food. It can reduce your fat intake by two thirds so you are still retaining a little but any excess is dispensed with. It just passes through. She stressed that the tablets only work as part of a diet because if you are eating a high fat diet it can make you feel unwell. I imagine things could get quite messy!! But anyways I am on a low fat diet so the tablets may give me an extra bit of help so I shall let you know how that works out. I hope no-one thinks its cheating.

Right I’m off because as I said, I’m feeling a bit grotty at the moment so am going to chill out in front of the telly for a while. Thankfully it’s not a work day.

-Ellen

Paul and I have both just weighed ourself on the scales upstairs and I am happy to announce that we both have lost 6 pounds each at the end of our first week. Result! Paul now weighs 14.10 stone and I weigh 15.7. I am extremely happy with this as it just goes to show that we do not have to starve ourselves to lose weight. We are just eating low calorie meals using fresh ingrediants.

One thing I am doing is writing down everything we eat and working out the calorific content so I know exactly what I’m eating. The maximum daily calorie intake I’m allowing myself is 1500 and Paul gets 2000 just because he’s a bloke. Life is so unfair sometimes. This is 500 cals below what the recommended daily allowance is so we should definately lose weight if we stick to it. The really good news is that I’m finding it very easy to eat to this limit. Today in fact I have only consumed 1196 cals and it 10.30pm now so I doubt I will eat any more before bed.

Here is a quick rundown of what I’ve had today.

Mid morning – Chicken sandwich made with weightwatchers bread and with some of Jenny’s lovely chutney on it. 200 cals.

Lunch – medium jacket potato with home-made ratatouille and tbsn parmazan 380 cals.

Afternoon snack – 25g  jumbo raisins. 70 cals

Dinner – Spicy red pepper penne pasta. 546 cals. I followed a recipe here out of our Good Food Cookbook. Made a couple of alterations such as I used wholewheat pasta instead of white because it has less cals and is more filling. I also ommitted the 3 tbsns olive oil requied and used a few sprays of Frylite instead which is only 1 cal a squirt. So this meal was probably rather less cal0rific than stated.

I still will be using olive oil to cook with as I love it and it is the type of fat that’s good for me but it has to be everything in moderation. I think I will be using Fry-lite the majority of the time and just using proper oil when I make something like an omelette to stop it sticking.

I think the most surprising thing I’ve found this week is how easy it has been to stick to the restrictions I’ve placed on myself and that I haven’t been craving bad foods like I imagined I would be. I think this is purely down to eating proper healthy food. So roll on next week!

-Ellen

Sorry for the lack of updates over the last week, very bad form I know. Rest assured though that we are both still here and doing well, now on day 8 of healthy eating and for me, not smoking. I had a bit of a hairy day today when I forgot to put on my nicotine patch before I went to work, and as a consequence I ended up eating all my food ridiculously early out of sheer frustration and then sitting and stewing for the rest of the day. I got through it though, and went to my Doctor to get a prescription for some more. (American readers yes, over here we can get things like that on the NHS, yay NHS!) Other than that we’ve been mainly enjoying and cursing in equal measure the constant snowfall in York.

Ellen will be back shortly to give a bit more comprehensive overview of the week, and I may be back over the weekend at some point to talk about the hell that is leaving a nicotine patch on overnight. In the meantime, though, thank you to Jennie and Kerri for the nice comments, and to everyone else who has said nice things on twitter and to my actual face.

Day one wasn’t too bad for the smoking side of things. More than anything I found the main problem was when my brain told me that I should be going for a cigarette, and there was a split second or two when my conscious self went ‘ooh, good idea.’ But the nicotine cravings weren’t too bad, due to the single nicotine patch that we found in our medicine box.

This morning was a whole different story. I woke up feeling weak and shaky, my mood all over the place, and I felt sick. I fished around in the hope I would find another patch but to no avail, so I trudged out into the snow and went to the chemist for patches and an inhaler. The last time I quit I did it with willpower alone, mainly because my quitting was financially motivated and I couldn’t afford the patches. So this time I figured I would do the same, but I didn’t take into account the fact that quitting is made ten times harder when you are also trying to lose weight.

Ellen and I have both been very good so far at the calorie counting, and although it’s been a bit weird being hungry and not doing anything about it, the worst thing is that when a cigarette craving strikes, my natural instinct is to squash it with a snack.

Now that I have my patch on, things are going better, and although it’s not been a great morning, at no point have I found myself tempted to go and buy some tobacco, so that’s a good thing.  On the exercise side of things I think we’re both of the mind not to do too much too fast, so I did the stairs exercise (one up, one down, two up, two down, continue up until feel like collapsing) yesterday and will do the same again today.

But truth be told the planning of this left out the very simple truth that it’s a lot easier to talk about going healthy in the abstract than it is in reality. But on Day 2 we are both still here, and still dedicated to following through on this.

-Paul

So it has begun. I spent a lot of time with Paul over the last week in preparation for today and I’m really glad we can finally put our plans into action. We have brought a couple of really good low fat cook-books to base a lot of our evening meals around and we have  our evening meals for the week. We will have a more flexible approach to lunch and dinner as we don’t tend to eat these together much. The books we chose are “Ultimate Low Fat” and “The BBC Good Food Healthy Eating Cookbook” If we’d have paid the full retail cost, this would have set us back £45 but thank God for the sales. We only spent £12.

I had to get up early today to go to work. The joy of being a support worker means I get to work on days like New Years Day (heavy sarcasm). Breakfast was 2 crumpets with Marmite and a satsuma. I took lunch with me which was a tin of Heinz soup and a turkey sandwich made with Weight Watchers bread. This bread is blooming marvellous. It’s thick cut, and tastes like proper bread. Only difference is the slices are smaller but I can’t moan about that when I’m meant to be dieting. Only 68 calories per slice!

Tonight I’m making Pork Stroganoff and I can’t wait for it because I’m starving now. I think the hunger really started to kick in around 3pm. I had a banana and a couple of Weight Watchers biscuits (very yummy) but I’m still hungry. I guess I’m so used to eating whenever and whatever I want that it is going to be very hard for a while but I am very determined to lose this weight. I weighed myself today and my weight is now 15.13 stone. This means I have put on about half a stone over Christmas which is a bit shocking especially as I knew I was going to be dieting. Oh well at least I had some fun.

Of course, Paul has also started today. I think he may be having a harder time than me because he is also giving up the fags. I gave him an old Nicotine patch that I had from when I was giving up and maybe that’s helping but I don’t have one for him tomorrow. He says he wants to go cold turkey so we shall see how he copes with it. Unfortunately giving up smoking and cutting down on food intake doesn’t really go well together so he’s a bit grumpy today.

-Ellen