Kath- I read your post yesterday & didn't have enough time to reply properly.
I really admire your strength & honesty. I think you have great courage & feel that you are a very good person. You deserve to have good things happening in your life & some-one special to appreciate who you are & I'm sure this will happen. First you need to learn to love yourself & I think you are taking the right steps towards doing that. Deep & lasting happiness needs to come from within.
I think you are right about it being a positive thing, learning to eat healthily & to nurture ourselves. I too, have had to un-learn about 30 years of bad habits. At the start of the program I was so impatient to lose my weight quickly. If I had, I think I would have learned very little. After the initial 4 wks loss I averaged only(?) 1kg a week until I finished &, at times, I felt quite frustrated about this & was tempted to start exercising to hurry it along. I am sure now that it would have hurt more than it helped.
I am really glad that I plodded along, losing my 1kg a week. When you think about it 1kg a week is fantastic! I just had to take my mind off how many weeks that it was going to take.
At the start I had written in my diary at home when I thought I would finish. After about 3 months I scribbled this out & on each Monday until Christmas I typed "X weeks on Cohen's" & tried to put "finish" out of my mind. I knew I would get there if I stuck to the plan. This week I have scribbled them all out & had a laugh at myself. It took pressure off which was the whole idea.
I think Lauren might be right about the exercise. It was really emphasised to me by my Cohen's consultant, Lisa, in the beginning, that I should not increase my exercise or start anything new until I finished the weight-loss part of the program. Lisa is
very fit & looks absolutely fantastic. She is a Cohen's graduate & I have seen her befores. She was a big inspiration to me.
Cohen's have been right with
everything else so I decided to follow their advice on exercise as well. At times I have felt like an absolute lazy-bones. I had a couple of remedial massages along the way to help with my back. I hope by cutting down one Aqua session a week your weight will shift along but I wouldn't wait a week to get in touch with your consultant & ask their advice. You sometimes remind me of myself. You probably don't want to bother them!
Please know that I care about your welfare & I hope your life changes for the better & that you are feeling much happier soon,

xo Cate.