Lately I have not been feeling good about myself. I could nearly say the black dog has been trying to make a comeback and I've been struggling to stop it jumping the fence. It's a constant struggle, and the way my life is at the moment probably isn't helping. At the start of 2016 I was doing so well with getting myself back on track. Then I was made redundant and my life turned into an organised chaos. I neglected myself and let myself fall back into bad habits as I tried to cope with the major change of going from full time $40K+ per annum work to casual 'am I going to make enough to pay the bills this week' work. It's a scary thought, and at the end of the day I believe I am happier being able to do the work I really want to do, and having more variety - but the stress of ensuring I still made enough to cover bills and food is always there. Initially I had a redundancy package to fall back on, but that soon ran out (it wasn't a lot), and then I resorted to selling some assets to try and reduce some debt, but I'm not in the clear yet. Needless to say, as always my way of coping with stress is eating. I know it should be exercise, and I know I always feel better after I exercise, but some days I just want to stay in bed all day and not do anything.
When I made the decision in Oct 2016 to have a hysterectomy, the added stress of upcoming surgery didn't help. I was happy I made the decision, and thrilled to have the surgery done with no complications, but I had never had any sort of major surgery before other than having my wisdom teeth out. Not to mention there were a lot more risks with having a hysterectomy. Thankfully it went well but it meant two months of little to no exercise - which only fuelled my desire to stay in bed. The body adapts very quickly - and it certainly did in my case in being lazy. What didn't help was that I had stopped dancing as well, so what was once regular exercise became occasional.
For a while I tried losing weight doing 16:8 fasting - where you only eat during an 8 hour window, but like any weight loss, you need to eat less calories. I was fine fasting for 16 hours, but for some reason I would still eat too much during the 8 hour window, and as a result didn't lose any weight (possibly even put some on). It made me realise that I needed to go back to doing 5:2 as I know this worked for me - only having 500-600 calories 2 days per week.
So today is back on the wagon for Day 1. I didn't weigh myself but my last weight was around 81kg. It's time for me to get back down to a healthy weight again. No food restrictions are being set as yet, but I will aim to cut down on sugar. My first attempt is to just get back into the habit of fasting again. And exercise. So here we go.. you can view my vlog for today here:
