…within 36 hours of returning, my weight was the same as when I went away!!
A whole week without access to scales and being surrounded by temptation.
So happy. So proud. So hopeful, about what this means for the future.
Let me tell you a bit about my holiday. We went to a lovely hotel in the Alps in Austria. We didn’t know what to expect, the weather looked really changeable from sun to torrential rain and thunderstorms, and I had done very little planning.
The hotel was amazing. Every night is served 6 course dinners!
Appetizers, soup, salad buffet, main course, dessert, and cheese.
And the cheese board was immense!
One night there was a ‘surprise’ extra course, a pasta course, cooked to order. Because that’s what you need to add to a 6 course dinner, pasta!
So how did I do?
I ate whatever I wanted. Some days that was 4 of the 6 courses. Some days it was adding a glass of wine, sometimes it was an ice-cream or some cake in a café. But other days I ordered my meal, it arrived, and I looked at it with no interest and could not even have a fork full.
The first day I had an omelette for breakfast, and while I was eating, with no interest, I thought ‘what am I doing? I never eat breakfast’. I realised I had to apply the same approach as I do at home. Be selective, just because the breakfast buffet was amazing, I’m talking champagne, salmon, cheese, meats, fruit, pastries, whole honeycomb… but I never eat breakfast at home. So, I had some fruit, which really helped in the bathroom dept, and drank my tea, not feeling deprived or that I was ‘wasting’ the opportunity to eat all of this selection.
I still worried sometimes, that I was ‘eating too much’ and that I would be undoing all the work I had done, but thankfully the other voice in my head reminded me that I really couldn’t undo a 40lb weight loss in a week.
Putting my trousers on for the trip home I was relieved they still seemed to fit ok.
The morning after I landed back, I got on the scales and my weight had gone up 2.4lbs, I was still very grateful that this did not put me over the stone bracket, I really did not want to see 15 stone again. And by the very next morning, it was back to my pre-holiday weight.
And as for the holiday Non-Scale Victories? I wore shorts, every day. I walked from my sunbed to the pool without feeling horribly self-conscious in my swimsuit.
I also had a big haircut 3 days before I went, so my hair is now very short again. I am starting to feel like a new me.
In just 6 weeks I have a 2-week holiday in Egypt with my Mum. This will be an easier holiday to eat well on. Every meal is a buffet, the food isn’t that great(!) and the desserts never that tempting. So, I am confident that I can trust my body to make the right choices.
17 weeks in and I really do not feel like I am on a diet. I am just eating what I fancy, it is just a strange adjustment for that to not be everything!!