Magnificent Obsession

No, not the fantastic Douglas Sirk film with Jane Wyman going blind and Rock Hudson training as a surgeon to restore her sight - my obsession with weighing myself. It's getting ridiculous; I eve weighed myself three times the other day, not to see if I'd lost any more weight, but because my body has been playing silly buggers and going haywire again. I've lost and put on 12 pounds this week and finally come in officially at a 4lb loss for the week. Which I'm very happy with considering the massive amount I ate and drank on New Year's Eve. Going to the pub at 3pm and necking seven pints was not a good start! So when I weighed myself on 2nd January, I'd unsurprisingly put on 1.5lb. Which means I've lost 5.5lb since Wednesday but only 4lb since last Sunday. I really have to start only weighing myself once a week as previously promised. Jim said he's going to hide the scales to stop me jumping on every morning. It might be for the best!

I managed to go for a lovely hour-long walk to Clifton Village this afternoon and really enjoyed myself so I'm going to try and go for a walk every day this week, weather permitting. It helps that there are nice shops to look in when I get there but I need to take more exercise as I'm woefully unfit. I walk very slowly and still get out of breath going up a hill. But I'm going to aim for an hour a day at least five days a week if not every day. And I'm not even doing it for the extra calories as I don't really need to eat them yet. I've gone down to 1661 a day but that's absolutely doable and I'm not desperate for the extra 230 the walk gives me. But I will be soon. I don't reckon I could eat less than about 1400 calories a day, if not 1500 so I need to build up an exercise habit for when my calories drop that low so I can still eat a goodly amount of food and not feel as though I'm about to die of hunger. I know WLR won't let me drop below 1100 a day but that means that I'll have to be earning 300-400 calories a day through exercise by then. Which is manageable while I'm unemployed but I have no idea how I'll manage when I get a job. It'll just have to be.

I'm watching an episode of Jamie at Home on More4 about tomatoes and it's making me want to eat a lot more of them. Ideally with a large lump of buffalo mozzarella and some basil and olive oil. I'm going to try expanding my culinary repertoire this week as I have so many recipe books that I read but never cook from. So I'm aiming to make one new dish a week. This week is Pork, Chorizo and Spinach Paella from Tamasin's Kitchen Bible which i got for Christmas. But I'm going to go through my cookery books while I'm at home and mark the pages that I want to cook from. The English Onion Soup from the new Jamie Oliver book might be next but the cheesy toasts on the top look a bit lardy. But delicious! Jim's in the mood for stews so a carbonnade or beef bourguignon is also on the cards. Or maybe a coq au vin. Although after New Years Eve I'm trying to lay of the booze. I drank an astonishing 113 units of alcohol in December despite not drinking most days and trying to be restrained over Christmas. I'm still not quite sure how. Jamie's just done a sausage and tomato bake-type-thing which was, quite frankly, porn. God, I love food!