Don’t you just love the first of the month? A fresh start, a new beginning, new resolutions and in my case, a new diet. It’s also the month that has thousands of Australians taking up the FEB FAST Challenge. Which usually means giving up alcohol. (although you can choose to give up coffee, sugar, caffeine or even digital screens as alternatives.)
Fletch and a few of his Neighbours mates are taking up the alcohol option. He’s already had some generous donations pledged from some lovely friends. If you’d also like to show your support, here’s the link.
I’m not quite so brave. I am doing a pathetic half-arsed version of the challenge by ‘saying’ I’m doing Feb Fast without signing up… There’s a good reason for this but I don’t want to go into details. Suffice to say I might have to head overseas soon and if that happens, well, yes OF COURSE I’d be drinking! And I want a practice run before fully committing next year.
I’m curious to see how I’ll go. And Fletch. I’ve heard lots of good things, so I’m actually looking forward to it.
Apparently you lose weight (YES!) and generally achieve a bucket load more in life, so I’ll keep you posted and let you know.
God knows I need to kick start the diet thing again after falling off the wagon MASSIVELY over the Christmas break. Getting on the scales right now is downright scary.
Some of you might remember me banging on last year about a diet I put together myself because I wanted something that was realistic to manage, simple to implement and easy to stick to. I called it the FIT FIX Diet, and yep, it really worked. If you’d like an overview, you can refer back to this blog to see the food plan for the first three weeks.
This time I’m still going to stick to the FIT FIX Diet Plan rules with the extra kicker – NO ALCOHOL. Plus some strategies from a book I mentioned in the last Blog, called Willpower.
It’s worth a read. Although I do think there are some contradictions in the chapter about dieting. Basically, the authors say there’s no point attempting to take up special diets because they never work. But at the same time, they say certain ‘rules’ can be effective. Like no sugar. If sugar isn’t an option at all, then you don’t waste time and energy deciding whether to eat the stuff, you just say ‘no’ and be done with it.
But if you implement a new ‘rule’, then you are in effect, creating a new diet anyway, aren’t you? Hmmm…
The best tip though, is the ‘not now, but later’ theory. The idea is that you never say to yourself, ‘I can’t eat that yummy chocolate ice-cream tempting me from the freezer.’ What you are meant to say to yourself is, ‘I won’t eat that yummy chocolate ice-cream now, but I will have it in two hours.’ Or tomorrow.
And you probably never will eat it, but psychologically, you feel less deprived. Those who do this lose more weight and keep it off.
There are lots of fascinating stories about case studies and psychological tests on groups of people to support this theory, so I’m going to give it a go.
So there you have it. The new diet means no alcohol, sticking to the FIT FIX Diet Plan and using tips from the Willpower book. All sounds good, doesn’t it? But damn, I’m going to miss my chardonnay…
Are you giving up anything for February? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments section too.
So now I’m into DAY THREE of my Juice Cleanse and I’ve stuck to it solidly. Here’s how yesterday panned out and what’s happening today:
DAY TWO
Day Two started off swimmingly, but my enthusiasm started to wane by late afternoon. It wasn’t that I was getting tired of juice – I was starting to feel rag-doll tired.
I really should have listened to the advice from the Pressed Juices staff who recommend taking it easy on the days you’re ‘cleansing’. I thought I was doing well skipping a spin class at the gym and going for a power walk instead, but in the afternoon, I had quite a bit of running around to do with appointments and errands in the city and Chadstone shopping centre, so by day’s end, I felt completely drained.
I still enjoyed the juices with a fantastic selection of flavours. My favourite was the Zest Juice in the afternoon made up of pineapple, ginger, mint and pear – yum.
Challenges included watching my daughter eat sushi at Chadstone from our favourite store and suddenly missing the action of ‘chewing’ myself. Then she baked some delicious smelling biscuits when we got home which was horribly tempting, but I stuck to my guns.
DAY THREE SO FAR…
You might think I’m a piker, but I’ve decided to eat a ‘proper’ meal tonight, cutting back my 3-day JUICE CLEANSE to two and three-quarter days. I can justify this quite admirably though. You see, I REALLY want to get back to the gym tomorrow morning and without a bit of protein in the tummy tonight, that just won’t be possible.
Plus we’re going to a family dinner tonight and how can you say NO to your Mum’s home-cooked roast??? I won’t have potatoes though. Or dessert. And maybe I’ll have to ditch the gravy as well. NOOoooo. I’ve changed my mind. I’m having gravy.
But I have stuck to the Juice Cleanse for all of today so far and I’m feeling fine. In fact, most of the time (apart from yesterday, late afternoon) you feel fabulous! For exercise, I put in a good forty minutes on the treadmill, walking at a fast pace, so I can tick my exercise box too.
Now it’s time to get down to the RULES of the diet I’m going to design for myself. Let’s call it the FIT FIX DIET for the sake of having a reference name.
FIT FIX DIET RULES:
1. Things you can’t eat: potato, rice, bread and products with more than 5% sugar content. (the sugar rule doesn’t apply to wine or the one day you are allowed chocolate!)
2. You must write down everything you eat and count calories. (sounds boring but I have an easy solution for this!)
3. You must exercise every day for a minimum of between 45 minutes and an hour. I am going to aim for spin classes four days a week, plus two lots of abdominal classes and two sessions of body toning or weights workouts. If you don’t go to a gym, you can ride a bike, run and do toning exercises at home.
4. You must weigh yourself every day.
5. You must have three alcohol-free days a week. I calculate my week starting on a Sunday.
6. You can have one day off the regime per week where you eat what you like and ditch the calorie counting.
3. An I-phone or device that can use the My Net Diary App. This is my secret weapon in the fight against flab!
It means you can easily put in all your measurements and target weight and it will calculate how much you should safely eat per day in order to lose weight.
You might think it sounds terribly boring to type in everything you eat, but the bonus here is that once you pop the food item into the system, the App will recall all the details and the information will come up automatically. Given I don’t vary my food intake THAT much, it isn’t too hard. And believe me, I’m no tech-genius, so if I can do it, you can!
I start with My Net Diary tomorrow and eating a regime of more regular food. Which I’ll detail in a food plan later.
The other aspect of this App I love is that by storing your weight every day, it produces a little chart to show how you’re progressing. It’s great when you finally see the line on the graph start to head south!
