We'll talk about this once. Eat vegetables, Lose weight.

It's just the worst. It's January, we're broke, it's disgusting outside and the food in the shops is definitely becoming a bit sad. And this is when we decide to really re-evaluate our diets and exercise regimes. It's the wrong time of the year, a punishing month, a stupid trap. And I would like to say that I am so, so above it all, but that would be a lie.

I absolutely never used to think about this seasonal bulge-shifting but then I moved to Scotland and put on an absolutely alarming amount of weight in a very short time. Some combination of lack of exercise, 65 pints a week, too many chips/fries, mild depression and I think the very dark winter. I think it made me hungry all of the time. My hunger just moved in and nothing I ingested could persuade it to budge. And this made me phenomenally uncomfortable. I felt like shit, I looked like someone else, people treated me differently.

So not for vanity's sake alone, but because I felt so alien in my body, over the course of 2.5 years, I lost it all. I think somewhere close to 45 pounds. I'm not sure because when I first weighed myself after the year of binge, I thought the scale was wrong/broken so I blocked the number from my mind. But definitely 30 in the last two years.

And I never dieted. Sure I changed what I ate, I started to exercise again, I got pretty severely ill and lost about 9 pounds in four days (I had stretch marks on my stomach, horrifying), but I never dieted. I never followed weird portion-controlled plans or complex regimes. I made a lot of little adjustments to my life and my body just went back to its more normal state over a long period of time.

So that's all super and wonderful for me and my renewed confidence. And how great is it that I accept my body more now than I used to before the ballooning? But I'm still at the stage where it feels pretty tentative and fragile. I feel like a few too many deviations from my normal routine and I'll be back to thigh-chaffing. This made the holiday period a bit tricky. On one hand I was surrounded by phenomenal food all of the time including many items that are unavailable to me most of the year and I wasn't going to let anything stop me from putting them into my mouth. On the other hand, I just don't really want things to get out of control again. I found the situation stressful; I hope I don't feel that way over future festive periods. What a stupid thing to think about during a family meal.

Upon my return home, a trip to the scale revealed that nothing much had changed, but still I feel the January urge to be fit and healthy. So to get back to a normal, totally in the middle of my recommended BMI, feeling good, clothes fitting state, the main thing I'm going to do is eat my vegetables.  That's my number one tip for losing weight or maintaining where you are. Don't cut things out, don't stop eating. Just eat the stuff you're meant to and you won't be so hungry for crap*.  I'm talking like 5 servings of vegetables a day. Fruit doesn't count, that's additional. Just eat more vegetables than you normally would, but you can still have meat, sugar, cheese, alcohol, whatever.  I've had to seriously restrict and monitor my diet before for non-weight lose reasons and I found it so depressing and soul-destroying. But this really works for me. It takes a bit of thought, but there's still loads of flexibility.

This post is getting a bit long, so tomorrow I'll talk about strategies for getting all of those vegetables in your mouth. In the meantime here are some other things I can recommend:

• Weigh yourself. I know this is counter to conventional wisdom, but it works for me. I weigh myself first thing in the morning almost every day. I like knowing the number. I don't like relying on how my clothes feel. It's too subjective. My feelings about my body are already verging on the irrational at times, I don't need to start thinking about how I feel about how my clothes feel that day. I need a solid number. If things are tipping out of my comfort zone I just try to eat more vegetables. It's actually a pretty sane system.
• Don't bring everything home.I had a habit of bringing things home with me my first year in Scotland: Nutella, biscuits, strangers. I don't really do that anymore. I still eat  a bunch of crap, but there are some items that are banned from my weekly shop. Even though Nutella comes in those little glass jars that I love, I would smear it on bacon if given the chance. It's not a force for good in my life. And I eat biscuits/cookies like normal people eat crisps/chips. Some snacks are just not allowed through the door anymore. 
• Don't drink sometimes. Drinking too much everyday makes you profoundly fat. I try to avoid it a some days during the week now. I still binge on some/all weekends which I know is very, very bad for me but I'm not yet ready to tackle that yet. I've just exorcised the random drinks that I didn't care about very much anyway.
• Do some exercise that you will actually do. I join gyms now and then and they work for me; I like swimming first thing in the morning. But I think the thing that works the best is cycling around the city. Or walking a lot to do errands. Finding a way to exercise in a way that's integrated into your daily life. I think you just do more than if you're watching the clock on an exercise machine.
• Get a debilitating intestinal disorder.Ha! Just kidding. OMG if you have a normally healthy gut please don't ever do anything to jeopardize that. You are a lucky, lucky person and no silhouette is worth the kind of agony that fucking with your intestines will produce. 

None of this content is new. It's just a testimonial. The boring stuff works. Healthy changes make you feel more powerful. It's a revelation to see that you have a bit of control. I had to keep a food diary for a couple of years and the tedium made my eyes bleed so I promise this blog will never become that. I will never post about serving sizes or what I've eaten in a week. It's boring. But I wanted to get this one post up, because I'd been thinking about this stuff and maybe you have to and you know, it's a weight off my mind. HAAAAHAAAHAAAA. hilarious. shut up. eat your peas.

*Crap is essential. I eat treats every day. I lost at least 45 pounds eating chocolate. Totally tabloid. Totally true. 

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[MBT Shoes]

It's so nice to have you do all of the research for us. It makes our decision making so much easier!! Thanks.