Half way there!

Yesterday I got my "two stone award" and "gold body magic" award at Slimming World! For me personally, there was a statistic of far more significance: I have now crossed the "half way" point towards my target weight of 12 stone.
I'm starting to notice things about my body shape, my shorts have been falling down for a while now and I need a belt with all my trousers. I can see my whole belly now instead of having to pull it in or crane my neck. I often sleep right through the night without waking up to go to the loo. My daily run is enjoyable! I don't need an afternoon nap anymore. All good things!
Last week was the first time when my recorded weight went up, by half a pound. I put this down to the fact that I had an operation to remove the metalwork from my arm but I don't think this was the true cause. I didn't take a break from my "regime", I still ran every day and stuck to my diet. The reason for my weight loss was simple but I needed my wife to point it out to me. In slimming world speak, I was having to many syns!
After a few weeks of losing weight, and getting into the habit of running daily, I allowed myself a glass of milk every day thinking that the 700+ calories that I burn when I run 4.78 miles would cover the extra. Soon, it was a small glass of orange juice as well and then I read that chocolate nesquik was a good recovery drink after exercise so that was added to my milk. If you add the spoonful of honey that I have with my muesli, then suddenly you find that I was having over 16 syns in a meal that I always considered to be a "small meal"
All this week, I changed that to just a half cup of muesli with a spoonful of honey. The result I have lost 3lb this week!

I make up ten or more portions of chilli or curry and freeze them. Sometimes they are meat free, but if I add meat its usually one pack to the ten portions - you could quite easily quadruple the quantity of meat and it still wouldn't be excessive. To the curry, I add finely chopped onions, tinned chopped tomatoes, mushrooms, finely diced celery and carrots, fresh garlic and spices (turmeric, and curry powder, sometimes a bit more).
The chilli has a tin of baked beans, red kidney beans, chilli powder and a couple of chunks of dark (70% cocoa+) chocolate, with chili powder.
I make up two platefuls of salad every day, one for my mid-day meal and the other for the evening. I have chopped lettuce, spring onions, peppers, olives, cherry tomatoes, beetroot etc - all the usual and mostly syn free apart from the olives.
I serve this with rice (make lots of portion at once and freeze in philidelphia cheese containers). As you can see its a full plate and tastes delicious. I suppose I will get bored of it eventually but for the time being its working!

Getting myself fit.

Its been a very difficult time since I broke my elbow! Looking at data for Olecranon fractures on the web shows that most people suffer pain afterwards and that the torsion bands are usually taken out to help combat this pain.
For me, the pain has been quite bad, at times almost unbearable. I've had several strong pain killers but most only dull the pain and I have found it difficult to sleep. Probably worse is the effect it has had on my fitness The only exercise I was getting was the bike to and from work and I was constantly tired. The weight piled on, at least it seemed like it. The truth is probably that I was already overweight. When they weighed me at A&E, I was 103kg and this rose to 104kg before I decided to do something about it. I joined weight watchers and prepared myself for a long hall.
I set myself the goal of getting down to 12 stone, which is a 4 stone 6lb loss. This is 76kg.
At the start of the Summer holiday, I started to run again. I had attempted this before but the sheer effort involved as well as the pain afterwards always stopped me.
I knew that this would be hard, but I also have the time to devote to it during the Summer.
Day 1 was a very sedate 1 mile run, day 2 was 2 miles, then 3 miles, 4 miles until on day 5 I was doing a nice local circuit of 4.83 miles. I found that by running every day, the pain was actually less!
The next stage was to switch to barefoot running, or at least minimalist running. I bought a pair of Vibram Five Fingers and use them for my daily circuit.
Initially, this ripped my feet quite badly! I had blisters on the back of my heels and also on the instep where the strap rubs.
The effect on my legs has been interesting. I seem to be getting much more definition in my lower legs with several new "bumps" on my calves as the new muscles develop.
The running is going well, I've got the time down from 66 minutes to 55 minutes and have started to do intervals etc. with the aim of increasing the pace. My first goal is to get to sub 45 minutes.
Weight wise is also quite good news. I am now 92kg and coping with the regime quite well.
The operation to remove the torsion bands is scheduled for this Friday, and I am hoping this will have a minimal effect on my current regime.