Dieting news

Another guest has safely arrived, as we picked up Dragon's mother from the airport today. The poor thing wasn't able to sleep in the plane at all, so she's a bit spaced at the moment - and having slept some hours just know she'll probably suffer quite a lot from the jetlag.

Everything is peaceful - we went to the shops and got food while showing the mother in law a bit of West End. My current diet food at the moment seems to be a stir fry: chicken, lot of vegetables and noodles. Easy to make, easy to eat in small portions. And talking of the diet, everything is going to plan - I've lost (probaby) couple of kilos so far and the trousers do indeed feel more comfortable now. Just couple of more, and I'll be at my ideal weight.

However I think I just have to acknowledge that the days of eating whatever I feel like are over. Couple of weeks ago we were watching "The Fat week" on National Geographic channel, and they were saying that if you eat only 40-50 extra calories a day, you gain weight about 0.5 kilos a year. Doesn't sound much, but lets put this into the context: think of something that contains about 100 calories, like an orange or a banana, or handful of M&M's or crisps, and that would gain you 10 kilos in ten years. Again, ten years sounds like quite a long time - but it's quite common that people my age have been doing exactly this since teenage years and the extra weight suddenly comes to them as a surprise. And once those extra kilos are in, and your eating habits have been locked in - changing them is very difficult, to some people impossible.

And that's what I'm trying to do. I think it requires a mental shift, more than anything, and that's still work in progress for me. When I was a kid we always had a "candy day" every Saturday when we could eat sweets, and every other day they were forbidden. That really used to annoy me as a kid, and when I found the free will as a teenager my diet went really unhealthy. And continued until pretty much until couple of years ago when I started exercising. First I was under the impression that I could eat anything I wanted - a teenager with fast metabolism and suffering from anxiety that caused me to eat very little real food, I really could eat several doghnuts a day without seeing any change. Now, years later I'm happy and eating normal amounts - and suddenly all the extra treats show up as too small clothes.

So I'm getting back to the idea of "candy day". Eat healthy, normal amounts of food every day with no treats, and once a week have something sweet to treat the hungry soul. This is the essence of Dragon's diet, and it seems to work very well for me.