Fat free forever - again (sigh!)

Tee hee. Nine kilograms in fifteen weeks. Not the kind of numbers they get in "The Biggest Loser", so woulda been voted off by now, but slow, steady progress.

This is my third - no, fourth - serious go at the diet plan known as "Fat Free Forever" (book by Diane Barker, now Wilson). I have a success letter in the second edition of her book. I sometimes joke that I should write my own version of this book, called "Fat Free for Five Years", since that's about how long it takes to fall off the wagon - and you always end up putting on even more weight that has to come off.

Of course, it also gets worse with age as your metabolism keeps slowing down. First time on this diet plan (early 1990s) I went from 90 kg to 78 kg from one Christmas till the Easter, and it was so easy. Next two times, in about 2005 and 2007, I went from over 101 kg down to about 82 kg. This time I've had to start from a record-high of 105 kg. I really can't afford for there to be a "next time". This time has to be the one that holds. No more "yo-yo" dieting.

The key to Diane's diet is to treat your body like a car. You never wait till your car runs out of fuel, you keep it topped up. So... huge, sensible breakfast, sensible morning tea, medium-sized sensible lunch, sensible afternoon tea, small sensible dinner. No starchy carbohydrates (bread, cereal, pasta, potato, rice) after 3pm in the afternoon. Walking every day. Celebrate with a Junk Food Day meal once a week and, in fact, your body loses weight after that junk food because you've shocked it and your faster metabolism works extra hard to get rid of what you just put in!

If you think about it, it's exactly how we ate as skinny kids in the 1960s. If we were really, really good we got takeaway fish & chips on a Friday night, or a rare dessert on a Sunday after the baked dinner, or a bag of sweets when grandma visited. There were only about six Kentucky Fried Chicken stores (now KFC to hide the "Fried" bit) and one McDonald's to cause us to nag for junk food. Sigh. Life used to be soooo easy.

Nugget of truth

Young woman serving behind counter at KFC, almost closing time this evening, about the five lonely chicken nuggets in the warming cabinet:

"Sorry, I can't sell them to you. We can only sell them in lots of six."

So they have to be thrown into the bin because someone miscounted earlier in the day when they were being cooked?

She considers that a moment and says... "Yes."

Junk Food Day, er Weekend

I'm going to have to do something. Saturday night was a very enjoyable pizza and wine night with friends - Jack was invited too, as there were three, small, excitable dogs looking forward to a reunion. After food, the DVD of "Sweeney Todd" played on, the four canines - all suffering Small Dog Syndrome - jockeyed for prime position on various human laps. It was quite hilarious. Luckily, the only blood spilled was on the screen.

Then this morning it was off to Mash cafe, in Glenbrook in the lower Blue Mountains, for breakfast. My friend Leonie accompanied us, although we left Jack behind. On a warm Sunday morning, it's very pleasant to eat al fresco at Mash, with Jack beside us, but winter in Glenbrook is... usually brisk. Fresh. Bloody cold.

We frittered away the rest of today, exploring the gift shops, garden centres and second hand bookstores of Glenbrook and Springwood, finishing off with a relaxing steak sandwich pub meal at "the Ori" (aka Orient Hotel). Delicious!

Let's not mention the vanilla slice for afternoon tea, eh?

Sunday's magic number: 95.8 - the diet starts anew tomorrow...

Revenge of the mousse

Yesterday afternoon I made a quick dash to the supermarket and, on a whim, decided that I would gather up the ingredients to make the Quick Chocolate Mousse recipe from my school's cook book that was made for, and distributed at, the recent reading picnic. I'd been given a sample of the finished mousse on the big day, and I have been curious to see if it was really as easy to make as it seemed.

I guessed a little enthusiastically on quantities while shopping, and managed to buy twice as much chocolate, cream and marshmallows as necessary, so I simply doubled the amounts. Unwise, on reflection, because the melting marshmallows grew enormous in the microwave oven, and the mid-procedure cleanup was tricky - melted marshmallow mixture is not only very, very hot, but it sticks like the strongest adhesive ever invented. If the mess didn't attract ants, it would make amazing quick-set glue!

The sensible quantities, as described in the actual recipe, required 125g dark chocolate, broken into small squares, 100g marshmallows, 300ml thickened cream and 1 teaspoon vanilla essence. (Oh, I just realised I used ordinary cream last night, and it worked fine!)

You then simply combine the chocolate and marshmallows over a double saucepan, stirring over simmering water until melted, or microwave on "High" for about one and a half minutes. (I microwaved the marshmallows separately, but in a bowl too small for the job, intending to stir in the chocolate squares later, but that was a decision made before I glued a fork, a spoon, my fingers and several other things to the sides of the container, and the inner walls of the microwave oven, when the hot marshmallow overflowed! (You know, I had a latent memory fragment of marshmallows melting into a clear liquid, but these were just white, cumulus fluff.) It was like karmic payback that I ended up with a panicky clean-up job before the housemate arrived home and discovered what I'd done to the kitchen.

Anyway, you then just gradually stir in the cream and vanilla, and pour out into separate serving bowls if liked. (I left mine in the big bowl I'd turned my melted marshmallows into, and it worked.) Refrigerate overnight - and secretly enjoy the huge wad of stickjaw chocolate fudge that may accumulate on the stirring fork, if you're lucky. (Those last few scrapes of hot chocolate/marshmallow hitting the cold cream mixture was a yummy, fortunate mistake of an afterthought.)

Serve with more cream and more chocolate, as mentioned in the recipe's extravagant "serving suggestion". And thank the heavens it's Junk Food Day today.

Sunday's magic number: 94.0. Ooopsie. Mmmm, pass the mousse, but hold the antlers.

Falling off the wagon - deliciously

I expected bad news. Stepping onto the bathroom scales today was never going to be anything else, but it was a worthy experiment. I can now say with confidence that a two-week celebration, with a food frenzy free-for-all can add over a kilogram eeach week. Especially when the weather has been too dismal to do much walking (ie. the dog ducks off under the bed when he suspects there is rain outside).

This is definitely how I reversed last year's dieting efforts so effortlessly! Fifteen weeks of carefree eating leads to fifteen kilograms of ugly fat; I didn't need to really repeat the experiment, but gosh it was fun doing so. Two Krispy Kreme donuts on Thursday - despite walking the length of Pitt Street, Sydney, in the rain - was not the wisest move. But then, neither was today's Big Mac - my first Big Mac in about eight months!

You know, you can really taste the vinegar in Big Mac Special Sauce when you haven't eaten it in eight months.

Sunday's magic number: 93.7. Okay, I detect a pattern here. After the catered morning tea and lunch tomorrow, for the professional development day at school, the diet's back.

Sweet coincidence

My site meter tells me that a recent visitor to my blog had typed into Google "Ian McLean cupcakes" and I was a bit bewildered as to how they knew I'd mentioned them a few times, especially last Midwinter Christmas, even if only briefly, but I followed the Google link and it led to this page... of posters for sale!

They weren't painted by me, no, but they do look delicious. Mmmmm, cupcakes...

Speaking of junk food - gosh I'm so hungry now -

Sunday's magic number: 92.6. No cupcakes for me, he says, eating his fifth Lemon Crisp bikkie. (What? I'm celebrating my big toe's return to full health. Any excuse.)

"Melting, melting, I'm melting..."

Okay, it's the age-old mystery:

"How did the Wicked Witch of the West ever take a bath?"

It was raining in Mittagong today, our last pitstop before arriving home from our Canberra vacation. I just couldn't resist snapping this witch's hat, which was sitting so forlornly on the pavement in the constant drizzle.

It was perfect weather for fish, chips, battered savs and potato scallops. But please don't tell anyone. (Sadly, every day of this holiday has been Junk Food Day. I just hope I did enough walking...)

Good news weekend

Happy Australia Day for yesterday. Hope you spent it suitably.




Sunday's magic number: 90.6 I'm feeling fairly good about this! A loss of almost 2kg! I've been fairly consistent in my resistance of naughty stuff during the last week, and even my Junk Food Day choices were relatively healthy. Mind you, there was also a delicious lamb kebab, and a loaf of pumpkin sourdough bread, I brought home from Katoomba on Wednesday. Last night was a bit of a feast of fine food and drink - including lots of garlic bread/pizza and numerous glasses of Merlot - at Baia San Marco in Cockle Bay to see the Australia Day fireworks in style.

Happy Junk Food Day to me

Yesterday had to be declared an emergency Junk Food Day due to the timing of the staff Christmas luncheon at school - yummo - and my birthday dinner at Victoria's BYO restaurant in Warrimoo in the lower Blue Mountains last night.

At school we do a Good Taste/Bad Taste Kris Kringle gift exchange - two raffle tickets at the door upon entry. I did rather well: a package of body massage creme and other pampering goodies for my Good Taste gift, and a "music of the 70s" Karaoke DVD for Bad Taste. A colleague had no need for her Bad Taste gift of pooper scooper and doggy poo bags, so Jack scored well too.

I've been to Victoria's twice before for staff dinners: once when it was sub-leased as a French restaurant, for a short while and again when it reverted to Italian with the return of the original owners. They run a birthday scheme at Victoria's, whereby on your birthday you're invited to take $25 off your meal. A deal too good to ignore, I reckon. Last night was a cosy group of four friends celebrating my last year in the fourth decade. I had the chicken pancake and the veal, with some BYO Pieroth red. Superb! (I understand they do weekend breakfasts in the summer months. I'm very tempted.)

I hope too much damage hasn't been done to my waistline. I shall know tomorrow. That's when I'm also planning to devour the huge piece of leftover pavlova I was bequeathed from the Christmas luncheon. 'Tis the season to be greedy.

Breaking through

Yes!

I had to move the scales around the bathroom floor a bit this morning, because I was getting some very erroneous readings - the scales were insisting I was heavier than the previous night, and I hadn't eaten anything! However, finally, to my joy there was the magic 89.9 glinting up at me. Now, that's more like it!

It had become very important to me to get past that dreaded 90 kg mark. I just checked back through the old Sunday postings and reminded myself that this diet started on Sunday, August 05, 2007. It really feels longer - much longer - than that, but I'd actually forgotten that, on that day, I was 99 kg. (I'd been telling myself it was 98, so it's actually been nine kilograms lost in four months. The last few weeks I've been quite strict about grazing on wicked things.) Slow progress, but at least it's progress. My body is simply used to all the walking I do, and I really don't want to start doing any other form of exercise. So I guess I'm stuck with slow progress.

The first time I did this diet, way back before "Fat Free Forever" was actually even published (the authors had promoted it at one of Selwa's seminars), I was losing a very comfortable one kilo per week. Wonderfully predictable, highly motivating... and I achieved my goal mass in (seemingly) no time at all! I started at 90.2 kg, at about this time of year, sailed through Christmas 1995 without too much anguish and, by Easter 2006, I was 75 kg and grinning like a Cheshire cat (with just a little bit of chocolate on its lips). I even bought one of those slimline, expensive white T-shirts to celebrate.

I wonder whatever happened to that shirt? I think it became a dust rag, because I only fitted into it as an actual T-Shirt for a few months. Sigh.

Then in late 2005, I needed to try again. This time, I was a hefty 104 kg - I still can't believe I was ever that big - but I managed to shed eighteen kilograms. As soon as I boasted about it online, I ran out of puff and returned to my old eating patterns (and avoided looking at the scales for about a year). Thirteen kilos went straight back on, seemingly in no time at all. It's extremely easy to add a kilogram per month. I know; I've proved it several times now. I can do it standing on my head. (Actually, doing that might stop me from opening chocolate wrappers.)

Ah well, 89.9 is better than 99, just as 99 is much better than 104. It's still a bit disheartening that I'm back at the same mass I was the first time I attempted "Fat Free Forever". That "forever" is the sticking point, you know. Because Junk Food (and its advertisers) cry out for it to be eaten every day! Somehow society is going to have to come up with a solution for that.

I don't think I'll ever be 75 kg again somehow, but even 85 kg is looking pretty great from here. So wish me luck for the next stage of this game/chore/necessity.

Sunday's magic number: 89.9 - Yay!

The art of staying positive

I'm trying to be very positive today, but probably failing miserably.

On Friday, I attended the local/regional teacher-librarians' professional learning seminar. We forfeited our usual half-day meeting last term to enable us to take a full day in Term Four, and it was a great idea. Term Three is always busy with Book Week and related activities. (Shades of TV's "The Librarians", who are having their's now, according to the ABC.)

Anyway, several people were recognising me from my author picture in the latest "Scan" journal - an article about Circle Time in our school library - but, as some colleagues and I were gravitating towards the morning tea urn, one woman introduced herself and said, "Oh, I know your name! You're the one who writes all those posts to the teacher-librarians' listservs."

I sort of froze for a moment. "All those posts..."??? If I counted up "all" my posts for this, my first year back in a school library for a decade, there have probably only been only ten. Some teacher-librarians post ten or more comments per week. Some would post several times every day. (Kind of like me with my posts to the "Star Trek" and action figures listservs and online bulletin boards.)

"There haven't been that many, have there?" I asked, a bit bewildered.

"Well, not really, but they are always so positive. When I read them, I always think to myself, now there is a person with a positive attitude."

Wow. Okay. Yep, that'd me. Wow!

Hopefully, such ego-boo will get me through the next week, after today's big disappointment. I started a new Meetup group, you see, for people interesting in pursuing an improvement in their skills in life drawing and painting, plus an eclectic range of other art projects (such as building on my work with theatrical makeup, plaster casting, mould-making and sculpture, latex appliance work and, I suppose, photography, too). In just six weeks or so the group had grown to twelve people, and today was looking very promising: six people had RSVPed to meet for coffee, but the only one who turned up was the guy I'd already been chatting to by telephone. He seemed very enthusiastic, which is great, but we'd both really been looking forward to meeting all the other artists, models and potential models.

Gee, he and I had kept today free of other appointments for over six weeks, turning down various invitations to do other things so we'd be there for the inaugural meeting today. Now we're at exactly the same point we were six weeks ago, with no one else's input. Or, at least, it seems that way.

So how come no one else kept today free? I fear for this new mobile phone era; more and more I notice people becoming more spontaneous about their leisure time. They often seem to prioritise differently now that their phones bring them new, more interesting distractions. (So why couldn't they just ring us re their new plans? Yeah, us - the two guys taking up a huge table for eight at the coffee shop.)

I guess some of them were suddenly shy. I hope they hadn't gone walking past the coffee shop, checking us out to see if we seemed safe/cool enough to be seen with?

Let's stay positive, though, shall we? At least, even with a group of two, one of us is an artist and the other is the prospective model.

Sunday's magic number: 92.3 - slightly better than last week, thank goodness, but it's looking like I'm going to have to do something drastic. I'm getting in well over an hour of brisk walking every day, and my nightly meals are miniscule. I can't remember the taste of my last Big Mac; yesterday was the annual McHappy Day and it was a case of "Not happy, Ronald!", listening to all those radio ads about supporting the McDonald's charities simply by buying a Big Mac burger. Friday was a catered lunch, prepaid via my attendance at the conference, so those yummy pastries etc had to become the contents of my one Junk Food Day meal for the week.

Walking the dog on weekend early evenings is a killer, of recent times: everyone is in their yards BBQing, and both of us are driven crazy by the delectable smells. I really don't want to have to take out gym membership; I'm really non-sporty and walking is my only sporting pleasure. But obviously the diet is not enough when you've reached stalemate. Sigh. I know, I know; I must burn off more kilojoules than I'm consuming. But I'm really not eating that much. (Let's stay positive: I'm positive that the sneaky midnight candy-snacking has to be next to go, eh?)

Ian and the disappearing waistline

Sunday's magic number: 92.3 - I think. The bathroom scales were going wacky today. I stepped on them late last night, for a sneak preview, but then this morning they gave the same reading. Since I always lose a considerable amount overnight, I kept moving the scales around the bathroom floor, resetting them, and hopping back on and off. 92.3 was an average of the numerous attempts.

I'm noticing that I'm not even yearning Junk Food Day now, which is probably a good sign! I took Jack for a walk on Friday night to buy a kebab (yes, at the scary mozzie-zapper shop!) and I scoffed at friends' suggestions of hot fish 'n' chips 'n' battered savs, both yesterday and today. Okay, I was being very strong. It wouldn't have taken much arm twisting.

The midnight munchies

It's almost midnight and I have the munchies. I recommenced my diet today, having managed to put back in the first half of 2007 almost everything I'd lost by July 2006. Sigh. I've avoided stepping onto the scales ever since February, and half-hearted attempts to get back into the swing of the diet have failed miserably. (I did drag out the scales yesterday, hence the new resolve.)

I actually started the diet yesterday, but I had to call in to see two different elderly women. Stereotypically, the first one plied me with chocolate coated mini Wagon Wheels and fruit cake with morning tea, and the second fed me chocolate Mint Slices and jam tartlets for afternoon tea. "Please have another one. You've hardly eaten anything." That's not to mention the leftover pizza I reheated for dinner - or, now that I think about it, the low-fat "Lean Beef Burger" I bought from McDonald's for lunch! Sigh...

They say that when you get late-night munchies while on a diet, just go to bed. Well, there's no more "Big Brother Uplate" until next year, and going to bed should help me to get to my morning meeting on time... so I guess I should follow that advice.

The diet, Fat Free Forever works extremely well, and I've done it successfully - twice. It's the "forever" bit that's hard. The diet allows for a weekly Junk Food Day! Sadly, though, to keep the "forever' bit true, one must keep the metabolism running fast, and steadily, like a car engine. Meaning Junk Food Day really can happen only once a week, and for the one meal. Self control. Will power. Drat.

At least the refrigerator has been emptied of all those high fat leftovers now. (Yeah, I know, I ate them yesterday.) Burp!