abunaimah's Journal

Damage limitation
Oct 08 2008 09:46

The weight has gone up. This is due to a combination of things. Prior to September I started to eat closer to my maintenance level and sometimes exceeding it. It was almost as though I was kind of rebelling against the previous six months of constant dieting.

Easy to fall back to old ways of thinking and old habits if you let it. I didn't let myself go completely or the weight would have crept up faster. My lowest weight was 135lbs back in June 2008. Now its gone up to 141lbs again.

The reasons are:

1. A minor rebellion against the regime I had been following for a while (Although I was curious as to what would happen if I returned to eating at maintenance level)

2. A family trip to Paris and Disneyland Paris at the end of August. Ate without restriction there, although there was quite a lot of walking around to burn most of it off - gained about 2lbs.

3. Ramadan - normally this is a good period of weight loss for me as it is a month of fasting. And it started off that way by my losing weight the first week. Then the next 3 weeks we started buying some desserts to have in the evening and I let myself indulge a bit. I didn't eat much food otherwise.

Since Ramdan until last weekend, I have been eating far too much. But have now reined it in.

4. No exercise since before going away to France. During Ramadan I don't do any exercise as there is no time to fit it in and I don't want to jeopardise my fast during the day by exercising. So that is now approximately 2 months of being mostly sedentary.

It explains why the weight gain has occured. At least now I've had a bit of a break and despite picking up 7lbs, I'm now ready to tackle the weight again. I've been eating sensibly since Saturday and have now managed to drop a 1lb.

I'm playing 5-a-side soccer for the first time in 8 weeks and looking forward to it. I need to get to a gym and get this weight shifted and reach my current target weight of 133lbs. I would like to do this by the end of November 2008. That would mean that I would have lost all the weight I wanted in 1 year.

The target is achievable and I have 7 weeks to go - just have to be extra disciplined and get my backside moving :)