A few years ago around this time, I decided to go sugar-free to see if it would help with my health and weight loss, it was one of the best things I've ever done, I lost approximately 2lb a week, a ton of body fat (not literally but it felt like it) and my skin was amazing, I looked younger, healthier, and my hormones seemed to settle so I didn't have mood swings or 3pm tiredness, I had boundless amounts of energy and I walked the legs off Holly Bobbins.

Alas, that was 2015 and from late 2016 until late 2017 I had issues with my HRT and my Bipolar meds for various reasons and so I gained 2 stone from my thinner happiest weight and basically, I'm miserable with it all, I want to regain my health, my waistline and my good skin because with 44 just around the corner I have to stack the anti-aging odds in my favour and I'd quite like to live for another few years if I'm honest!!

I happened upon a post on Facebook announcing Cancer Research's Sugar-Free February and it piqued my interest.  Now I must state that I am not doing this for charity, I'm doing it for my own health, I've assembled a few friends and because a lot of other people are out there on the internet taking part in the initiative it seems like the best time to do it.

It's not even that hard, it's about swapping white rice, bread, potatoes and having brown rice, brown pasta, sweet potatoes, no crap (snacks, takeaways, ready-meals) and cooking as much as possible by scratch, perfect time to join a cooking box club if you're short on time and don't want to have to come up with the meals on your own.

I don't have sugar in drinks so that's not a problem and big bonus you can still have cheese and nuts something I feel particularly happy about.  All alcohol is off the table though as you have to give your body time to relearn the signals which help your brain know when you are hungry again, these signals can switch themselves off if you eat too much sugar and I want to give my body time to get to its optimum health again.  Once your body has readjusted, the odd glass of decent red wine with some dark chocolate is not going to hurt.

There are so many more resources out there on the internet now than the last time I did it but I love Davina's sugar free and you'll also find people like Joe Wicks eat in the same kind of way, oh and don't forget Doctor Michael Mosely and his blood sugar diet, they all follow similar kinds of rules.

I'm going to blog about this during February and I'll provide updates, I'd love you all to join me because there's definitely strength in numbers, let's all go into March being fit, fabulous and totally fantastic.

Who's with me?

Slimming World, an Indoctrinated Cult, part 227

Sunday morning and I've just climbed back into bed, the first day of October has brought with it rain, low light and all around bad photography conditions, especially when my day was supposed to be on the beach, many of my clients must have realised this yesterday as a lot of them had already rescheduled leaving me to break the not so unexpected bad news to the other couple.  I do hope that October gets its act together for the remainder of the month.

October is a funny one, it's nearing Christmas but it's too early to start seriously thinking about, it's the month of Halloween but if you're not a big fan of ghosties and ghouls then it's not got that much significance although I have promised Looby that it's going to be one of our home ed topics this month.

What October does give us though is usually the most splendid photography of the year, it's my busiest period and my favourite for the light (today excepted) which will only continue to get warmer and golden before sometime in November when it starts to get, well a little gloomy as the light levels fall, no matter then though as that's when the world starts to get twinkly, no with light and seasons and magic, the only ones I really worry about are January and February, dark forboding months, hopefully this year with all of that Hygge research they might be a little more bearable.

I read an article the other day which suggested that this is the busiest time of year on dating sites, it seems as we approach the cosier months of the year we all seek companionship a little more and I can understand that, I was just saying to Harriet the other day that it's been ages since I threw a dinner party, it's trickier now that I only have a table for four bottoms but I guess we could do teas on knees and a big bowl of slow cooker stew, maybe with a glass of warm dark red, for those who aren't so allergic!

One thing I am definitely treating myself to is a soup maker, there's that first autumnal day every year when I make the inaugural pot of soup, it's like a welcome to the warmth season, if you're making it, you get 10 bonus points if it's made with butternut squash or pumpkin.  It's funny that a couple of weeks ago I sorted out all of my cookery books, clearly, I was already preparing myself without knowing it. This leads me to my next point, that of dieting, I hate dieting, I love cake, it's been a battle ever since my HRT shenanigans and now I must do something, I briefly tried returning to Slimming World but it's more of indoctrinated cult than it is a supportive club, all of my issues were not only still there but heightened even more than they had been previously, I just can't be part of a club in which avocados are the enemy and also, whilst we're on this subject, I don't want to be clapped every week out of praise or sympathy, especially on the weeks where I already feel the world is too loud.  I've read many books over the last few years about nutrition and I have lost weight without the need of a club before so I've come up with a plan I'm calling "The Very Hungry Mandypillar" except I don't intend to starve, I just quite liked the name.  I'll let you know how I get on but I'm on a bit of a mission to be able to wear ballgowns for the formal nights on our forthcoming cruise to Norway  and not look like a beached whale, every time I look in the mirror at the moment I see Brian and Brian has got fat!

And so, I'll end this multi-paragraphed ramble in the hopes that someone, somewhere has at least enjoyed the emptying of my brain, I'm off to the shops to buy soup ingredients, squashes and avocados, just call me a Slimming World anarchist, go on, I dare you!

New Year, New Diet, New Me!

For the last week or so I've been feeling really tired and sluggish, the Christmas excess has truly hit me and last week when we went for our first 10k walk of the year I knew I had to get back to living much more healthily again.

Although I have no regrets about leaving Slimming World because I managed to maintain most of my 3.5 stone weight loss, I have now put on around a stone just basically because I love cake too much and the weather has been rubbish, at least I'm honest!

At my thinnest, I was still curvy and that's all I want to be so here and now it's time to get back to being healthy Mandy, it still irks me a little that I completed Couch to 5K and then promptly stopped but that's me, I like a challenge and when I've completed something I move on, plus if I'm honest I think I can burn just as many calories from a good dog walk.

Harriet also feels she wants to get back onto a healthy lifestyle program and I find that these things work better when you have support, she says Slimming World worked for her and so we're going to try a new group on a new day and I'll just adapt it by cutting down on sugar without replacing it with artificial sweeteners something I feel quite strongly about.

There's also the fact that the enzyme I lack which makes me alcohol intolerant is also affected by too much sugar so I'll be turning to books like Lean in 15, Davina's Smart Carbs and her new book, Sugar Free in a hurry which I've just ordered, when I was sugar free I can't tell you how well I felt, I could partake of the occasional glass of wine without worry, I had super skinny legs and I was ten levels above bouncy, yes it's probably time to go and break out the Agave Nectar, it's the only sugar substitute I actually love and it tastes great when you make a baked rice pudding with almond or coconut milk.

Look, I'm going, to be honest, I doubt I'll be giving up cake in all of its glory but if I can get it down to once a week and then maybe my own cake made with brown flour and honey or maple syrup then that can't be such a bad thing can it?!

What I won't be doing is swapping to skimmed milk and sunflower spread or Frylight, if you have ever looked at the ingredients in some of those things, well let's just say I believe you're far better having butter from grass fed cows, whole organic milk and cooking with olive oil if you can't dry fry.

With regards to exercise it's simply going to be a matter of getting out there for more 10k walks with Holly Bobbins and maybe the occasional 5k run a couple of times a month, I'm going to start again with the running and see when I find my boredom level, I think it's possibly somewhere around the 4k but if I can run from my house to Jesmond Dene, across Armstrong Bridge and back it's around 4-5k and with headphones in listening to bouncy music which makes your stride a little wider then that's not a bad thing.  If I can drag Harriet on some epic walkies with me too, well then that's half of the battle as you don't notice how far you are walking when you are with your best friend having a good chinwag!

And so, my plan to get back to happier, fitter, slinkier, bouncier me is underway and with a trip to London at the end of the month to visit Mr France, well that's just a little extra in the motivation station, if you are undertaking any kind of lifestyle changes then do comment and we can all supoort one another, lets all get fabulous in time for spring!

Run, Mandy, Run, Couch to 5K week 4

So it's week 4 of Couch to 5K and it's still going extremely well, last night I went out for my longest run to date, it was 16 whole minutes of running interspersed with just a couple of minutes of walking to recover and yet again I felt that I could have continued to run when I'd finished my session, Jo Wiley is definitely proud of me this week.

My scales say I've put on 1lb again but I think that might be more to do with Le Petit Chateau, Hawthorns (more on that one in the next post) and a girls night on Saturday.  I took 3 nights off in between my last run of week 3 and my first run of week 4 so i'm not exactly feeling sprightly, fit and I think if I'm honest I still feel more rotund than I hoped I would at this stage.

I have a plan though, this arrived last week from Nutribuddy, now I know what you're thinking and yes it does look suspiciously like one of those meal replacement things.  I'll me honest, my reaction to meal replacement is a sad, unhappy, crying face but wait, before you get all maudlin and start sending sympathy...

I have a plan, Nutribuddy sent me their kit in the hope that I'd give it a go for 2 weeks and I don't even have to use it like a meal replacement, all I plan to do is replace cakes with shakes, yes that's right, chocolate sculpting whey shake instead of gooey chocolate fudge cake, I'm not going to use the vitamins because I'm already totally vitamin'd up to the max with my daily Vitl which is my monthly vitamin subscription, an indulgence for my body if it were.  There's a suggested diet book and lots of lovely yummy recipes which are things I'd cook anyway, lots of Quinoa and salads and healthy yummy tasty things.  One thing I definitely haven't tried before though are their hunger fix capsules, so what you do is take them an hour before your lunch or dinner and then apparently some kind of miracle happens and you just eat less.

So here's the thing, I'm a size 14 and I've been this way, pretty happy for a couple of years now but just for 1 whole week I would like to be a size 12, I'm not looking further ahead because it's never happened yet but combined with running I want to give my legs and my knees a little extra incentive to be super bouncy and maybe I can get my 11 and a half stone of me to get down to 11 stone and that really would be a miracle.

It's a 2 week plan and Rome was not built in a day but if this gives me a little bit of a leg up in the continuing adventure that is me respecting my body in the way I should have done in my twenties it's got to be a good thing.

I'm not replacing meals with shakes though, you can do meal replacements if you want to but Mandy cries when Mandy gets hungry or "hangry".  I think I was supposed to do one of those in the mirror look at my lardy tummy photos but believe me when I say that no one needs to see that and I don't even own a full length mirror, be sure if I suddenly end up with a paddle flat tummy I will be lording it about though, or lets just take a moment to think about that, i'm 42, I've delivered 3 big babies, had 2 C-Sections, and had a radical hysterectomy, no one ever needs to see my tummy, I don't even look at it myself if I can help it! So here's me with lovely Elanor, I have lots of squidgy bits which need improvement and that's all you need to know.

Things I'm loving this week, running in the rain, it's empowering, I feel like I'm in a running movie, that is until someone fast goes past me and I feel like I'm standing on a slow conveyor belt, in fact I'm so slow that when someone fast ran past me last night I had a momentary wander if I was actually running in reverse.  I'm also loving running to the Hamilton soundtrack, get it in your ears, it's a musical, I suspect Rent was the momma and Eminem was the papa, it's part rap, part camp, part awesome, I never thought I would like it and by some strange parallel Abigail discovered it on the same day and we both love it just as much as each other!

A 14 day weight loss kit with Nutribudy costs £34.99 and they sent me one of those in exchange for following my progress, as ever the words are mine, the views are honest and the hunger pangs wouldn't be very much fun on one of those actual diets, this is just a helping hand people, I repeat, just a helping hand.