Penlan's Journal, 30 December 2015

Hello Penlan, don't worry, my weight goes up and down 3 kilos every day, I only weight myself now from week to week, for example, every Monday morning. 

Thanks for your support. When I first started to try and lose weight last year I only weighed once a week. For me that was disastrous. Without the daily weight in nudge it was too easy to kid myself that it was all ok, and then by the end of the week my weight was up too far to be anything other than discouraging. Sure, it works differently for us all. I do need to weigh every day even if I don't record it. I weigh at the same tie every day, as I get up and before I eat. It is useful for me to see the ups as well as the downs so I can see any cause and effect patterns and take action if needed. I'm fine with it. OTOH I have no idea what my fluctuations are within a day, have never looked. I do know if I weigh straight after a cup of tea it adds half a kilo as I have a half litre mug :D Is that your dog? What a beauty. My sheepdog is a blue merle. Well, he's supposed to be, He's still puppy white after 11 1/2 years, on the outside. Blue underneath but we never see that! Grand feathers on his legs and tail too and a lovely tuck.  

I have to update the pic with my dog's one. I always wanted a sheep dog because they are so smart! But they need an open space and my house has an small garden only. I started to keep an eye on my weight last year, since then I went from 105kilos to 86Kilos. At the beginning was easy because I got very good advice at the gym, the trainer told me that drinking beer I will never lose weight independently of the work in gym; I didn't know that the alcohol had so much calories so I stopped drinking beer, wine, etc and I went down quickly. During this year I have had periods where I lost nothing but following there were periods where the numbers in the scale moved quickly. I have got now stocked in 86Kg and it seems very hard to get to 85. I hope that reducing the juices I will get down the 85 barrier. Thanks for your advice Penlan  

Reducing the juices will make a HUGE difference to your weight loss. Even the pure fruit ones are high in natural sugar. Unlike eating the whole fruit it's so easy to consume way more than your body can properly cope with without storing the excess as body fat. A litre of orange juice typically contains the juice from 13 - 15 oranges. 2 kilos of apples are needed for a litre of juice. So, a standard 250ml glass would be like eating 3 or 4 oranges or a pound of apples in one go. Add to that it takes time to eat the whole fruit rather than drink the juice, and the fact that the bioavailability of the juice from chewing rather than the perfect pure juice as drunk, with or without 'bits' is so markedly different, and you have a completely different effect in your body. Excess blood sugar is converted to triglycerides and transported out of the blood to be stored as body fat, so anything which overwhelms that blood sugar will stall weight loss. I found out a little while ago that the amount of glucose we maintain in our blood in total is only between 1-2 teaspoons!! So, if you think of the carbohydrate in beer which will quickly get turned to sugar, and the sugar in juices, you can see why we are easily overwhelmed. My weight loss has been a steady enough kilo a month for the last year. Since I looked into carbs in more detail recently that has rapidly increased without effort and still without hunger. Easy for me as I can't tolerate grain and pulses so I don't have a choice. When I dropped the grains - all grains - I stopped being hungry and had to remind myself to eat. Odd, but true. I suppose I was living off my stored fat, which is, after all, what it's there for :) Hope this helps. What dog do you have? We have 20 acres, and sheep. He was supposed to work, but doesn't as the sheep come when I call :D He does get a tad frustrated at that, and being a very bright alpha male sometimes it's hard for him, but he is contented and oh so very gentle, not a grain of malice in him.