Still Alive!

Hi!


(This is a pretty long one. If you want to take away anything of this and just skip the junk, start reading at "So?" :) )


It's been a while since my last post but rest assured, I'm still here :)


Been somewhat busy lately, but wanted to take some time to tell you about a couple of my anxieties the last couple of weeks. 


Usually when I go on a vacation, with my food addiction and all, I come back a couple of kg's heavier. When there is a buffet for example, I've always felt the urge to taste everything, every evening. A 3kg heavier return trip from a 2 weeks vacation? Very plausible.


So yeah, queue a week to Turkey followed by a week in Romania for work. Since I have been doing so well lately I was pretty scared about both weeks. Didn't wanna break the flow ya'know?


New mindset?
Luckily it turned out that my need for all these things is not really there anymore. Somehow I managed to change my thinking process into a realistic one. Lately, when I look at something sweet that I used to be very fond of I'm always thinking: This is probably about X calories. To get rid of that many calories I have to abuse my treadmill about this long. Is it worth it? And somehow the answer is "naah!" most of the time. 


The cool thing is that when I decide it is, I consciously will take a much smaller portion than I used to. I just eat it a lot slower. This way the enjoyment lasts a lot longer than the bigger portion (which usually got swallowed in one piece).  


Turkey
The week in Turkey went pretty well food wise. Ate a lot of vegetables from the buffet and tasted a lot of the local dishes, but in moderation. I checked out the dessertbuffet every day but couldn't usually find something that I liked very much so most of the time I returned without anything. And of course I made a ton of pictures (take a look if you are interested).


Not having my treadmill wasn't so bad since we were walking around all the time. 
The netto result of our trip to Turkey? -900gr after 8 days. So despite of the different food with lots and lots of olive oil still managed to lose almost my average loss in a week. Moderation works!


Romania
The week to Romania was a bit worse, as I've been working there the entire week. Not much movement there. I really don't like to run outside. In Belgium this is mainly because of my bad knees. But the idea of running around in Romania, hmm no I'd rather not. 


Unfortunately the food there is not nearly as good as Turkey and because we usually order out it's hard form me to try to get something healthy every time. I ate a pizza while we were there, albeit a small one and so on. 


On the flights to and from they seduced me with one thing I still really like: Snickers! Both meals included a little one (like 1/4th of the regular size). I ate them both but by choice, not by "forced behavior".


So?
I'm starting to realize that I feel less and less "obliged" to eat something just because it's there. In my entire history with weight problems this is something I never managed before. In my opinion this is the single most important thing that everyone who wants to loose weight needs to accomplish first.  


But how?
The reason for this is twofold:
First, I'm extremely lucky to have someone who is in the same situation and who fully supports me. I don't think I would been able to get here without the support of my girlfriend in all this. 


Secondly: Because I gave myself a frame of reference to compare against! I know how hard I have to workout to get rid of 100kcals. Before all this I never even cared. Knowing this helps you think about something you are about to put in your mouth. That in turn gives you the power to say no.


So what about diets then? 
Pfuh, away with them as far as I'm concerned. They do way more damage than good. My girlfriend has been in that situation. She tried a lot of the diets out there. The end result was that the weight she gained back after the diet stopped was all fat and nearly no muscle. That really sucks, because she did lose a lot of muscle mass during. 


The end result of all that is that she has had a way harder time than I did to hang in there. She needed to gain more muscle first before she could burn enough energy to lose weight. Of course all the medication she was getting during did no good either. 


Luckily we have one of those scales that measures the muscle-% versus the fat-%. This is by no means an exact science, but it showed enough difference every weigh-in for her to continue. I'm happy to be able to say that she's now at a point were she is also starting to lose weight.


But if you take everything into consideration you realize there is no such thing as a quick-fix-diet to lose weight permanently. Anything that involves food supplements, pills, whatever is bound to fail in the long run. 


The only thing that works is changing your eating habits and to make sure you get plenty of workout. 


Will this last for me? I don't know, I guess time will tell. But I'm doing it like this since about September and so far I've lost 14kg! Since we're not dieting, we also don't feel that we need to indulge once in a while and the cravings have almost absent (or perfectly manageable) as well.


Before/After(during) picture. Ignore the pink in the before picture (it was taken at "Race for the Cure", a breast cancer awareness event) and for the during picture, the just-out-of-bed-head: