19th April 2008

Changing my posting date to a Friday has given me a bit more time to get my head around what has gone wrong with my weight-loss programme. Although writing this at 03.42am on a Saturday seems to say a lot about keeping my own word!

Having been in London all week and leaving for Dubai in the next hour I have come to realise that it is almost impossible to eat sensible food ‘on the road’. Firstly it is very difficult to find anywhere that sells ‘ready-to-eat’/cold healthy food. A shop on the concourse at the Excel Exhibition Centre must have had over half its shelf space devoted to every kind of make or flavour of potato crisps. The rest was chocolate sandwiches and carbonated drinks.

When you are away from home for a few days at a time, ‘comfort food’ takes on a huge appeal. One one night, the hotel restaurant had a problem with the ‘fryer’ so most of its menu was ‘off’ – this in itself was so incredibly telling of how much food gets fried. Appalling. There was a time (not too long ago) when a pizza and a beer had distinct appeal – well, that night there was little choice! It was horrible. I didn’t even eat it all. But it was wheat and fat (cheese). And neither wheat or fat is part of my diet.

For the past month I have lost motivation and success on my diet. In fact, it fell apart completely. It’s almost as though if you break your resolve once, it is SO much easier to do it again and again. That’s what has happened. And I feel bad about a) not losing weight – or worse, putting it back on and b) for demonstrating to myself that I have been unable to stick with what works. Avoiding wheat, fat, salt and sugar WORKS for goodness sake – so why haven’t I kept to it?

Going away again today and staying at yet another convention centre will be a trial. But I will do my very best to avoid any foods (and more importantly, drinks that may appeal to me in the short term but contribute to my excess weight staying on!
Having said all that, I have lost 20 pounds – and have only 10 more to go before reaching my target weight – it can’t be that difficult – can it?