Ok, I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth having a blog - such long periods of time elapse between me being able to blog and so much happens in those periods of time, that I would need to do very big blogs to cover it all ...
In fact the enormity of the task daunts me ...
For the next week, then, on each week day I will commit to blogging once, however short and see if it's possible.
If it's not, I'll abandon the idea.
If it is, I'll continue.
Do we have a deal?

Cool, rainy July

And so it's July. Dad's birthday month, the strawberries are over, the cherries are lipsmackingly good and the weather has taken a downturn into cool, cloudy grey days with periodic heavy rain. The rain tends to co-incide with my cycle ride home. Funny that. Not ha ha because I get wet, but funny peculiar ... by the time I get home, rush inside and drip all over the kitchen floor (and the cats who come rushing to meet me hoping to be fed!) it has stopped, dried up and is hot and sunny.

I think my henna tattoos are already starting to wear off - I shall miss them but won't have them replaced with anything permanent.

I ordered 2 rose bushes named after my two daughters and OH has planted them next to the Buddha statue in the garden that marks the grave of our last beloved cat, Smudge. I hope they'll take although I suspect roses are fussy and I know nothing about looking after them.

Back from hols, brown and quite relaxed

So, I'm back. I had a lovely week of doing exactly what I wanted (within the restrictions of location, time etc) and picked up a bit of a tan and 2 henna tattoos on my right ankle!
I swam every day, sometimes several times a day. I also showered several times a day, partly to wash off the sea-salt and partly to cool down (it was VERY hot). I sat in cafes and ordered drinks in a thoroughly decadent manner and charged them to my room. I walked to places I wanted to see and took photos of things that caught my eye or attracted my interest.
I lost my glasses somewhere in the sea ... luckily I had a pair of prescription sun-glasses with me, which looked fine during the day, but a little strange at night!
I ate when I was hungry - not always at conventional meal-times, and enjoyed the food I chose to eat.
And I got home at a reasonable time last night; in time to show my family the photos I took, dish out the small presents I bought them, deal with a week's worth of post and get a good night's sleep before coming back to work today.
I highly recommend it!

Various things

Well, I saw my play performed on Saturday night and was in a state of nervous tension throughout! The performance was exactly as I'd imagined it and they'd really done well with costumes and scenery and props - again, exactly as I'd imagined they would be. There were 3 other short plays performed as well and it was great to see how very different they were and the sorts of themes each of them explored. If I never have another play performed, I shall be happy - recognition of my writing is very much appreciated.

No.1 daughter came home for the weekend, to see my play and 'squish the kitties' (in her own words!). She is so full of energy that, by the time she went home on Sunday afternoon, we were all exhausted and collapsed into bed!

Today I have challenged myself by wearing colours that I wouldn't normally put together - because not being colour-co-ordinated bothers me - so it's something I like to challenge myself with occasionally. And it certainly doesn't hurt.

Tomorrow I'm off on holiday (on my own, if you recall - so the house WILL BE OCCUPIED - ok I'm being paranoid here, but there are B*%$ards out there who use the internet for their own disgusting ends including burgling people who announce they've gone on holiday ... may the fleas of a thousand camels infest their armpits).
I'll be back shortly with accounts of my experiences ...

Until then ...

Feeling rather unwell today ....

And since yesterday, actually. I went to a new yoga class Sunday morning, for an hour, and it was tough. The class leader was a tiny, very bendy woman, who was quite encouraging, but a little stern. I managed to do most of the postures and stretches, but was left feeling rather unwell for the rest of the day and today. It may be co-incidence, of course, or it maybe that I'm not used to doing yoga for that length of time, or it could be something else completely.
Whatever - I have been feeling rather fragile in the digestive area and tired and grumpy, since I don't like feeling ill.
Feeling a bit better since lunchtime - but still a bit fragile. I'll take it easy today, I think.

Update!

I sat both my AS level Classical Civilisation papers a couple of weeks ago. The first one didn't go so well - some of the low mark questions were asking for facts I couldn't remember, so I know I have lost marks there. I ended up seaguing from one higher mark question to the one following it .. and then had to go back to the earlier question and write most of the same information all over again ... it was partly that the 2 questions were remarkably similar and partly that this was the first exam I'd sat in over 10 years and I was in quite a panic!
Before the 2nd paper, DD2 sat down with me and worked out my timings for each questions, including time to check through at the end. She also revised me on some facts, in case they came up. That was very helpful (and most amusing to have such a role reversal!) and I sat the 2nd paper with much more confidence and didn't mess the questions up at all. I suspect I've dropped a couple of marks on the shorter questions but hopefully the longer questions will be enough to carry me through. I won't get the results until near the end of August. Fingers crossed!

Sorry for paucity of recent posts ...

I'm still suffering from Blogger's Block ...
However, it's very dry and we're now officially in a drought.
Our small garden is producing enough green veg for me and OH (DD doesn't eat it, unfortunately) and it's really satisfying to pop out the back door and come back with a handful of broad beans, mange touts, spinach(es!) and kale for supper.
I'm reading 'Starcrossed', which is rather like 'Twilight' meets 'Percy Jackson' and I'm enjoying the sheer trashiness of it.
In just over a week I'm off on holiday - but on my own, so if anyone's reading this and has worked out who I am, the house WILL NOT be unattended. So there!
The play what I wrote will be performed in a week's time - ulp!
I'll be seeing it on the Saturday night and it will be fascinating to see what they've made of it.

Long time no post

Sorry for the long delay between blogs, but I am suffering from pre-emptive blogging. When away from the computer, I think of wonderful, eloquent, witty, profound etc things to write about, but by the time I sit down in front of the computer, it's all gone ...
Perhaps I need a dictaphone - do they still make them?

You can eat whatever you want!

I remember thinking that about some women, usually prefaced with, 'It's not fair!' I used to think that really slim women somehow managed to be so slim effortlessly and that they had the 'key' to some miracle something that meant they could eat whatever they wanted, all the time, and still remain so slim. I used to find it infuriating when I saw a really slim woman eating an icecream or a chocolate bar - how dare she! How dare she be so slim and still eat all those fattening things!!
And, to some extent, I still catch those thoughts from time to time - my Gremlin is good at hanging on to sticks with which to beat me whenever I let my guard down. It's all your fault (so says my Gremlin) that you're so fat, look at what you eat! Don't think you can get away with eating stuff like that, gloats my Gremlin, and think you can lose weight! If that Gillian McKeith woman put all the food you eat on a table, the nation would be sick and food sales would go into a downward spiral ... everyone would just be DISGUSTED because you are disgusting....
It's poisonous stuff and if I catch the Gremlin at it, I give him what for (what does that expression actually mean?!) and do my very best to rid my mind of those slimy, poisonous, UNTRUE slanders.
And, how do I know what those skinny women eat? I may have seen them eating icecream or a cream cake or a chocolate bar, but what if that was ALL THEY ATE ALL DAY?! I know from my own experience that if I want to eat icecream, cake and/or chocolate, other food has to go out the window - there simply isn't room for it all any more. At one time I would have eaten the icecream, cake and/or chocolate AND my meals and then more icecream, cake and/or chocolate because I was so disgusted with myself. And so it would go on, giving my Gremlin ample sources of sticks to beat me with.
So when Daughter Number 2 said that to me today, I was quite shocked to hear those words I'd so often thought to myself, applied to me ... Daughter Number 2 was being complimentary, rather than envious; she was noticing that I no longer restrict the foods I eat based on some diet or other. She was supporting me as I did my exercises by noticing that I have toned up and am looking pretty good considering my advanced years ;)
I went for an osteoporosis screening yesterday and to my great surprise and relief, I have the bone density of a much younger woman - which means that I'm in little to no danger of osteoporosis in the future - although I will get it checked again after the menopause.

Well, Blogger's been off line for a while so I haven't been blogging.
Several things have happened since then, of course.
I spent all last week having packed lunches instead of eating out as an experiment to see how I would feel about that and how it would impact on my eating.
Actually it was fine. I had lots of salad stuff in the house and made myself a salad for lunch each day (lettuce, grated carrot, radishes, chopped up quorn scotch eggs, grated cheddar, crumbled blue cheese and mayonnaise)and took fruit and yogurt for snacking during the day. Some days I cycled home and did some exercises, other days I did some shopping round the town. One day it was a good job I'd popped home as the stoopid cat got himself shut in the sitting room. By the time I got home, he'd scrapped up the carpet from under the door, so I couldn't open the door to get him out. It took me several minutes to flatten the carpet enough to slide the door over it so the cat could get out. He was fine, but the carpet is rather wrecked. OH had to tack it down to the floorboards ...
Daughter Number Two is about to start her GCSE exams but seems pretty calm about it. I'm sitting my AS level Classical Civilisation exam tomorrow (1st of 2) and am not yet feeling nervous about it, but I know I haven't done as much work for it as I could have done, but life has kept throwing other things at me that have taken up my time and energy. It's a reason, not an excuse - but I will see how I do tomorrow. I'd like to feel confident answering the questions and not make a fool of myself.

You may have noticed the last 2 blogs are very similar ... the first one didn't disappear as I'd thought ... oh well. I live and learn.
We made the banana cake but left out the peanut butter from the recipe, which made the cake rather dry - a colleague suggested we should have put more butter in to compensate for the loss of the moisture provided by the peanut butter, and I suspect she was right. I quite like dry cake, so it was fine by me.
Last night Daughter Number Two wanted to make brownies - I have THE best brownie recipe - they end up gooey, chewy, very very chocolatey and really delish. I've got one to have with my cup of tea in a moment.
I've got quite a bit coming up and will have to keep my eye on the ball - two plays I wrote are to be performed, one 'live' and one on the radio - I'll have some input into the radio one and will be meeting the director shortly.
I'm about to start marking GCSE exams and I'm working full-time for the first time since I started the marking - it will be a juggling act to fit it all in.
Onwards and upwards.

Various Things

Bugger! I just typed a long blog and it disappeared! AHG!

Various things going on - I just finished a book about Catalhoyuk, the Neolithic site in Turkey - somehow I've completely missed out on this amazing place - I only found out about it by reading Bill Bryson's book about the home - Catalhoyuk was a very early village where the 'homes' were quite different in some fascinating ways to the homes we are used to. For one thing, they had no doors, so the villagers seem to have accessed their houses via the roof! They had no streets, so everyone would have had to cross all the roofs to reach their own house. Most strange and not repeated anywhere else - other Neolithic villages had quite obvious streets between the houses.

I want to read more about this fascinating place.

Other things going on - the elections, the first referendum I've voted in (as far as I can remember, anyway), the cats have caught 3 baby birdies so far this season :(

I shall be making banana bread for tea - request of Daughter Number Two.

And I'm shortly off to exercise - kettlebells and stretches. Stretches are most important as I discovered just after Christmas when I had a full body massage and it was AGONY! The masseuse said I needed to stretch the muscles as the kettlebells were tightening them up and they were staying tight .... I had been stretching before, but had lapsed because it adds another 10 minutes on to my exercise time, but I've just got to do it, find those 10 minutes.

And then there's the weather - the perennial English obsession, but how much longer can this very early summer last? All my summer clothes are in the roof and I am wondering if I should get them out and put away all my winter clothes? I can't keep wearing the same very things over and over again when there's a box-full of clothes I could be wearing, stuck up in the roof. Well, that's something else for today, then!

Hasta luego.

So, lots of things happening - the local elections, the first referendum I've ever voted for, the continuing dry, hot, sunny weather ... the fact that I messed up at work on Friday and that I cycled 10 miles (5 each way) to a wine tasting that evening and somehow forgot all about it ;)
The cats have caught 3 baby birdies now; two died before I could rescue them and the third wasn't claimed by its parents so I let it go on the local common. It won't survive, but it's better for it to die quietly than be mauled to death by a predator. Poor little things. I actually shut the cats in the house all morning on Friday to give the baby bird a chance to get away; by the time I came home at lunchtime, the bird had vanished and the cats were desperate to get out into the garden. I let them out and within 5 minutes they'd found the baby bird again ... it hadn't gone, it was just hiding, so I rescued it again and let it go on the common land.
This is the one thing I don't like about cats. My two are very sweet natured, cuddly, put up with no end of mauling and carrying around, they come running to meet us when we come home and follow us down the road if we go out on foot. But they are monsters when it comes to baby birdies.
Anyway, tis exercise time - kettlebells and stretches - I was doing the kettlebells without the stretches, but my muscles were getting so tight that when I had a whole body massage just after Christmas, it was AGONY! The masseuse said I needed to stretch after exercise, so I started up again. I'd given it up because it added another 10 mins on to my exercise time, which may not sound like much, but it made quite a difference to how long I needed to set aside for exercising.

Various things that are bothering me at the moment

Quite a lot of things are rattling round my brain so if I 'spill' them here, maybe they'll stop rattling and feel they've been dealt with ...
Thing 1: I would LOVE to go to Aus and visit my oldest friend ... how can I achieve this? Financially I can do it, but time-wise it's tricky for a number of reasons.
Thing 2: I'm aware that time is running out - I'm running a Beyond Chocolate Get Started course in 2 Saturday's time and I've only just got the Protocol and the formatting is so weird that I'm having to re-type it.
Thing 3: Him Indoors has recently been bereaved and is not coping well with having to clear the house.
Thing 4: Number Two Daughter (NTD)is about to leave school and is unhappy about having to face the hysteria of the final few days ...
Thing 5: I find work frustrating but it is improving - it's a small office and I do wonder how long I can dissumulate.
Thing 6: I am about to start marking GCSE exam I've been marking for a while, but I lack confidence in my ability and every year worry about it terribly.
Thing 7: I'm about to sit my AS level in Ancient History and I really haven't done very much work for it at all ... I do want to get a good mark.
I don't expect solutions for this, but it may help to get it out of my head and onto my blog.

Something happened over this last Bank Holiday weekend which helped me to realise quite how far I’ve come since I started working on my relationship with food and my body with Beyond Chocolate. I spent the weekend in London; I went to The Globe with my parents and saw ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’, which was excellent. I went to visit my sister and small nephew and niece. Then, exhausted, I made my way to the hotel I’d booked for the night. (In case you were wondering, my parents were staying with my sister, and I decided one more would be too many).
When I arrived at the hotel, the receptionist was unwelcoming and uninformative, but I have stayed in many a hotel in my time and thought I’d find all the information I needed in my room. Unfortunately, this hotel wasn’t as organised as some of the others I’ve stayed in ... there was a room service menu, but no indication of which number to ring to access it. So I rang Reception – answer machine. I rang the Concierge – answer machine. I left a message on both to ring me back – no-one did.
Room service ended at 9pm, so at that point I decided to give up and eat the complementary fruit and biscuits and drink the complementary soft drinks and tea. It was perfectly sufficient. I don’t think you can possibly understand how significant those words are. I wasn’t able to access any food so I ate fruit and biscuits and it was fine. I’m still not sure I’m getting my point across here – maybe I can’t in cold print, maybe you’d need to see the incredulity on my face and the incredulous body language.
You see, I am the sort of person that would worry in advance about the provision and availability of food during any outing. The sort of person who would go into every cafe possible and would never pass a fast food outlet or newsagent without stocking up in case of future famine. The sort of person who would eat at cafes because they were there rather than because I was actually hungry. The sort of person who would have rushed out of the hotel to find a restaurant, even though (with hindsight) I wasn’t actually very hungry.
And that, I think, was the key this time. In the past I would have eaten an evening meal by hook or by crook, but now I am happier to go with the flow and, on occasion, eat what’s available and be all right with that. It’s a huge step forward for me. I feel good!

Stand by for FURY!

I have just spent 3/4 hour waiting first in the queue at the Post Office (25 minutes) and then in a queue at the Halifax (20 minutes) ... neither establishment had enough staff working to cope with the numbers of people wanting to use their service. I am especially angry because that was 3/4 of my precious lunch-break and it wasn't a relaxing and re-invigorating experience. In the case of the Post Office it is even more annoying because they recently shut down 2 sub-Post Offices which would have absorbed at least some of the people in the queue this lunch-time and made the whole experience less lengthy for me.
Of course, it's all me, me, me - but everyone else was also stuck in that queue for the same amount of time and everyone's time is equally precious for different reasons. There were elderly people in the queue worried about being out in time to catch their bus. There were parents with young children who find it very hard having to stand still and be 'good' for all that time. Having one Post Office for a town of over 15,000 people is absurd, particularly when the Post Office has also closed down many of the sub-Post Offices in the surrounding villages, forcing people to come in to the town to use their main Office.
I got back to work thoroughly irritated and unrested and that's not what lunch-breaks are for in my opinion. HUMPH!
Rant Over.

Eating Out - Luxury or Burden?!

I never thought it would come to this ... but I am becoming bored with eating out. For the record, I have been a person who loved to eat out, who ate out at every opportunity, who never passed a cafe or a fast food shop without buying something. Eating out has always been a big treat for me - I suspect it stems from the fact that when I was a child we almost never ate out (my parents couldn't afford it) and I remember long car journeys where my long-suffering mother passed round the cheese and marmite sandwiches she'd been up early preparing. Also, when I was a child, there were fewer opportunities and options when it came to eating out. There have always been cafes but the proliferation of cafes of all shapes and sizes has been a relatively recent phenomenon; particularly the outbreak of coffee vendors (often branches of huge companies - you know who I mean!). Now there is a bewildering array of food outlets and constant opportunities to eat at all times of the day and night, even in the small market town where I live.
So what has happened? Why am I feeling this ennui about eating out?
Several things have changed for me recently;
1. I've moved jobs from a position a mile away from shops to one in the centre of town.
2. I've moved from being part-time (3 days a week) to full-time.
3. I've had to re-organise myself so that I'm using time in the mornings to do a bit of housework and some preparation towards the evening meal, to save me time in the evenings and to prevent the housework all piling up for the weekend, so I have less time to prepare packed lunches.
4. I don't much like packed lunches.
5. I've been working with Beyond Chocolate for 3 years now and there have been a number of significant shifts in my attitude to and relationship with food.
All of these have combined to make me feel less enthusiastic about eating out - which is most unexpected.
So now I have to think what I want to do about this .... I guess the options are:
1. rotate my lunch-hours round the various cafes and eating places available to me
2. rotate packed lunches with eating out
3. go back to packed lunches
4. take it a day at a time and decide which I want to do today
5. stop eating at lunch time.
All, apart from number 5, are reasonable options and I'll have to experiment and see what works best for me. Today I haven't brought any lunch, so I'll see what I fancy come my lunch-break and act accordingly.

Well, it's been a few days, but that's what I expected to happen. I can't commit to blogging every day - some days it's not possible, other days I have nothing to say and there's no point in saying something about nothing ;)
Today I want to talk about Easter. I don't really remember Easter as a child - I have dim recollections of making Easter cards at school or decorating hats to wear in a parade, but I don't remember if we had Easter Eggs. I suspect not, but will check with parents at some point - my parents weren't keen on us having sweets and chocolate - they were trying to save our teeth - so, of course, we sneaked out and obtained as much as possible, and I ended up with four fillings by the age of 12 ... sigh.
Anyway, since becoming grown-up and in charge of my own food, Easter became another source of food-related angst for me. It started with the arrival in the shops of Cadbury's Creme Eggs and went on via Cadbury's mini eggs (are you detecting a pattern here?!) and through as many Easter Eggs as possible until all the madness was over and I was casting about for my pre-bikini diet. (btw I haven't worn a bikini since I was 18 - but the idea was always there).
This Easter just gone I bought Easter Eggs for daughter and husband and nieces and nephews and one for myself. My parents bought me one as well, so I ended up with 2. On Easter Sunday I sat down with my Easter Egg and a cup of tea and started eating chocolate. I got about 2/3 of the way through the Egg when my 'enough thank you' signal kicked in and I wrapped the rest up for another occasion.
I think this proves that I have finally 'grown-up' when it comes to Easter Eggs and chocolate in general. It's taken over 25 years, but I'm finally there and I'm happy with where I am.
You know I used to envy those people who could have a box of chocolates open in their living room and not eat their way through every single one in one go ... now I find I am one of those people and it feels gooood!
If you want to know how I done it, check out www.beyondchocolate.co.uk it has all the answers.
And so Easter is over and the summer approaches and I will be on the beach in my cossie (not a bikini) whatever shape or size I am, this is me and I will enjoy it - after all, this is the only chance I'll get.

First Blog

Hello
I tried a number of names and styles for this blog, but the only one it would let me have was 'recovering dieter' and so I will succumb to the heavy hand of fate and accept, head bowed, that this was MEANT TO BE.
I am, after all, a recovering dieter. That's not the first description I would have used of myself, but it is true and maybe it's time for me to really face up to this fact - I am a recovering dieter.
I don't intend or expect my every blog to be on this theme, but certainly there will be some food and diet related blogs because it is a huge part of my life.
So, to get the history out of the way first ... I was a skinny child, I remember having a large appetite and was also very active. I remained skinny until well into puberty where I suspect the activity decreased and the appetite increased. Just before I got married, age 21, I put myself on my first diet for reasons I cannot remember 25 years later. I certainly wasn't over-weight. As I didn't know anything about dieting at the time, I just cut down on what I was eating rather drastically - I was at college and I don't remember doing any exercise at all. From what I can recall I had porridge for breakfast, one sandwich for lunch and ate an evening meal, no pudding. I lost weight but was miserable and starving by the time the wedding came.
As a result (I can see cause and effect now, but I couldn't then), I compensated for the pre-wedding starvation by eating huge amounts as often as I could. I gained a lot of weight and then gained more through my first pregnancy.
By the time my daughter was coming up for her 2nd birthday, I was the largest I had ever been. At that point my younger sister told me I couldn't be a bridesmaid at her wedding unless I lost weight.
And so it started ... Over the next 20 odd years I yo-yo dieted and binged. My weight went up and down as I successfully lost weight on a diet and just as successfully put it all back on again once I finished the diet.
I was a very good dieter - I stuck absolutely to the letter of the diet and they always worked. But what they didn't seem able to tell me was how to maintain my newly achieved lower weight. They would talk vaguely about 'maintenance diets' about eating a little bit more and monitoring it and eating a bit less if necessary - but after the rigidity of the diet, I couldn't cope with such vagueness and would return to my former eating patterns with inevitable consequences.
When I'd had enough of dieting, I sent off for diet pills, detox solutions, diet patches, diet teas ... and guess what? Yes! They didn't shift an ounce. Not one of them, not one ounce of weight was shifted by any of them. I am emphasizing this because they are still out there - these envelopes that arrive full of 'before' and 'after' photos, often endorsed by doctors, nearly all claiming that anyone taking this product could eat as much cake as they wanted and still lose weight. It's all absolute rubbish, but I was desperate to lose weight and kept spending out and hoping.
Then one day in September 2007, I went to the amazon.co.uk website looking for a new diet. I couldn't return to any of the ones I'd done previously, no matter how successful they'd been. There had to be something new out there that I hadn't tried.
Amazon, bless its little cotton socks, came up with 'Beyond Chocolate' in response to my plea for a new diet.
A chocolate diet sounded like heaven to me and, inspired by the positive reviews, I ordered the book. I didn't know, but what I had just done was to set myself free.
Beyond Chocolate is NOT a chocolate diet. Beyond Chocolate is a way of guiding the disillusioned dieter towards a life after dieting - back towards what could be compared with the way small children eat - intuitively, in tune with their body's needs.
Since the book arrived back in 2007, I have been working with Beyond Chocolate to sort out the 20 odd years of food abuse, body loathing and dependence on dieting that I had subjected myself to entirely voluntarily.
It hasn't been easy, but then the diets certainly weren't.
It hasn't always been pleasant, but if you've ever detoxed using those foul tasting liquids, you'll know the meaning of unpleasant.
What Beyond Chocolate has overwhelmingly been is liberational (is that a word?!).
Beyond Chocolate set me free from 20 years of dieting hell and is helping me to find my own way through the world of food, one that suits me, one that fits with my lifestyle, one that I can do for the rest of my life.
If that sounds like what the latest diets promise, it's because they've jumped on the intuitive eating bandwagon and are using catch-phrases and slogans that deceive the desperate dieter into thinking that what the diets are offering is freedom and choice, when it's the exact opposite.
I think I will save my rants against the diet industry for another blog.
Suffice it to say that I am now free from the destructive influences of dieting and much happier than I've been for 2 decades.
I'm not sure how often I will get to write on this blog - but we'll take it one blog at a time and see where we go (if that's all right with you, of course!)