Losing Weight in the Land of Chocolate and Cheese!

:iagree: You look gorgeous, I love your hair.

Well done on the poker! I can't believe you won two times in a row, thats great!

And i'm getting all soppy about your baby chat with your husband and your beautiful description of your pregnant friend.:)

I think I will put swimming in a lake surrounded by snow covered mountains on my list of things too do before i die, it sounds incredible. I swam in a lake in england lol, and that was nice, till a few days after my feet and legs were completely covered in huge massive painful blisters which left pits whn they were burst and got infected urgh. So, nope, won't be doing that in a lake filled with duck shit again!

Do you never stay in or sit still woman?!

Hows your ankle doing? x
 
Thanks gals! :)

Rainbow, you make me smile like an idiot. NO, it seems I am NEVER staying still at the moment! I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that my husband, the bright spark that he is, managed to nab himself a dream job at Google. The google community here in Zurich is really big, so they are always putting on events and such. And seeing as we are new and still trying to 'integrate', we're trying to throw ourselves into as much stuff as possible. :)

Meanwhile, my pregnant friend (her name's iida) is a friend I made all by myself, with no help from google! Ha. That's quite a feat. She is a writer too... FINALLY someone I can rabbit on about books with! We spend a lot of time laughing, and she's great for my mental health. :) It's so nice to have a proper friend when I'm so far away from all my oldies...

My ankle is GRRRRRRRRR. Funny how I haven't mentioned it in forever... I'm struggling with it a bit actually. It has massively reduced mobility, so I can't even bend my foot properly to stretch my calf muscle or hold it up behind my to stretch my quad, or put it on its side on the ground to stretch my inner leg, or just to cross my legs... So I'm worried I'll injure myself in other ways too. Today I'll make an appointment for the doctor and then get a referral to a physio... I've had enough. BOO. I've had to stop my running too... it always ends up crazily swollen and stiff...

So yesterday was a housewarming for one of our new friends. He's from Sydney - the only other Aussie we've found here actually. It's funny how we always manage to find each other somehow...

food
So do I REALY have to write everything I ate yesterday? Can't I just write it off as a bad bad day and leave it at that? If I grow some balls between now (post-German lesson) and after, I'll write it all in. But if I do, feel free to go ballistic at me.

xx Hope it's sunshine where you all are!
 
decisionmaker said:
So yesterday was a housewarming for one of our new friends. He's from Sydney - the only other Aussie we've found here actually. It's funny how we always manage to find each other somehow...
Click to expand...

It's incredible, isn't it? I'm not in an area with a heap of Australians compared to the rest of the UK, but in my course (total intake in my year of less than 10), one of the other girls who started with me is from Sydney (as I am), but went to the same university as I did as an undergraduate.
 
I'm embarrassed about my food, but I'm not going to run away. If I write it down, and write about my weird-arse mind-set, then I might actually change. Today was like an anti-diet day. I don't know why I do that to myself. It's like I figure that one bad thing yesterday means I might as well go the whole way, and screw myself over for a few days. STUPID. I know that I'm doing it, though, and I am so aware that I'm just making excuses to myself as I'm trying to justify it... oh the games we play.

I'm really failing in the organisation thing at the moment. Really need to go shopping but have no time. There's barely anything in the house.... need to get myself some healthy snacks and stuff... Tomorrow it will happen. And I WON'T go when I'm hungry!

Time to face the music. I know i told you all to get mad at me, but I was lying. Please don't. I know how bad I am. Of course. At least I had a healthy dinner tonight.

YESTERDAY
- thin crepe with ham and mushroom (no sauce or anything, just that)
- milk coffee
- cheese balls (totally crap. Gave in. Shouldn't have bought them, duh)
- freeze dried apple chips
- 1x grilled bratwurst and (later) 1x small nurnberger sausage with green salad, pasta salad, potato salad.
- 2 glass red wine

Exercise:
-30 min fast walk


TODAY
- 200g low fat cottage cheese (150Cal)
- Soy coffee
- Thai red chicken curry with rice (too much)
- chocolate ice cream (WHY? I have my sorbet for this purpose!)
- starbucks vanilla frappaccino with lite milk and no cream
- Mediterranean chicken casserole (totally healthy with stacks of veg thrown in), served with cauliflower instead of pasta.

Exercise:
-20 min cycling
- at least 40 000 sneezes
- 1 glass white wine

There you are. That's it. :nopity:
 
Hey, DM, I just spotted your diary over here, whilst looking for someone else's. I had fun catching up. You & I have these "other" lives where we share more than we do in our 'public' ones. I am really glad that we do. I'll make a point of visiting you regularly now over here. Thanks for your message today xo Cate
 
Don't feel bad about your bad days, you've been doing so well!

I've got the same problem with no food in the house. my shopping is being delivered on thursday, so I have two whole days of no healthy food to snack on. My bf has just bought a roast dinner for tonight, and i have no idea how I'm going to resist the roast potatoes.

We need to get organised like the boy scouts- be prepared.
 
Cate - hi! Thanks for stopping by! Yup, it is weird how we can be so much more 'public' about some very private things here... Maybe it's because my family isn't on here (I know they would think they had seriously failed if they knew some of those things I said earlier), and my MIL certainly isn't here! She'd just tell me again that she has a huge pair of pants I can have, and that she'd just kill herself if she was ever that size again... So it's safe here. No one (but you!) knows who I am...

Rainbow - TODAY is my getting organised day! I have a day off my German lessons, so I can go and sort it all out. Ridiculous that I'm excited about going grocery shopping! :)

My Day
Well it was a big day, that's for sure. I had my final exam for my German Course and I haven't been that stressed about soemthing like that since Uni exams. It was such an incredibly difficult two weeks of lessons, and I often felt like I was about to cry in the middle of class because I simply didn't understand anything.:banghead: I finally admitted to my hubby that I was feeling completely out of depth, and he spent a solid 4 hours with me helping me to understand. :Angel_anim: After that, and a lot of cramming, I got 87%. :D I know, absolutely certainly, that without my man's help, I would barely have passed. Legend! When I got home, I had no chance to relax - I had to submit my next two chapters for my writing circle group next week. Which was difficult, to say the least! It took about six hours to get that ready...

THEN to celebrate, there were a bunch of people going to the final KARAOKE FROM HELL concert. It's in the only English speaking venue here, and every Tuesday they have frickin awesome live heavy rock band, and a list of 50 songs you can pick from to really have your 5 minutes in the spotlight. A lot of heavy metal (not my thing) but some great classic rock too. It was absolutely hilarious, actually, and because you have to get on stage with major lighting and be a REAL rockstar, it kind of attracts real quality singers. :) a great night! The people we went with know that I sing, and they got together and secretly put my name in, so up I got and sang Gossip's Heavy Cross. It was awesome! I hadn't quite had enough whiskey, and hence I had a bit of a self-image crisis once I realised I'd have to stand up there, but DAMN I think I did a great job! And I had a whole lot of people afterwards say it was good :) :) :)

FOOD TODAY:
Black coffee x 3, milk coffee x 1 (that's a lot of coffee for me...)
Small Bircher Muesli
Cheese, spinach and onion frittata (small)
Veal cutlet, mixed steamed veggies, 1/2 roast potato
Lemon sorbet
2 x Whiskey on the rocks

EXERCISE:
30min fast walk
3 hours dancing like a maniac:party:
 
MY WEIGH IN DAY
I've been trying not to pay too much attention to my daily wiifit weigh ins... I know they fluctuate like mad (for the past 3 months I am pretty much the same, no matter how much things fluctuate day to day).

SO this week, despite my two bad days, I have lost a total of 1.0kg (2.2 pounds). Which is good! Like I keep trying to remind myself, it's not about how fast you do it... and I'm not doing anything drastic, so it's OKAY to go slow.
 
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Haha Rainbow, there's no getting away! :) It's been crazy busy here (as usual) because it's a FOUR DAY long weekend - Hells yeah - so our days are filled with barbecues by the lake with friends, usually with a lot of drinking too...

Not good for the diet. Anyhow, here goes:

Wednesday Food:
- 3 wholewheat crackers with low fat cottage cheese 150Cal
- Low-fat (yeah right) potato gratin - 500Cal
- lindt dark chocolate ball - 100Cal
- spinach tortellini - ? Estimate 700Cal
- 2 mojito - 350cal
- edamame - 120cal

Wednesday Exercise:
2x 15 min hard cycling- 200cal
2 hours REALLLLLY tough netball training. Lots of sprints and evil stuff - 400cal

Yesterday:
- 2x Latte and a low fat chocolate muffin
- 100g grilled lean lamb fillet and 1 chipolata sausage with 2 slices bread
- green salad - no dressing - with 3 mini mozzarella balls
- handful of salt and vinegar crisps
- 3 pints kilkenny beer
- small bowl of vegetarian chilli with no cheese, no bread, no guacamole.

Exercise:
2 hours of hard hiking up a mountain (yes really) - 400cal
20minutes of solid step climbing- ?
lots of walking around - 100Cal
 
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Don't worry about the booze :) You only live once, and fun drunken/semi drunken times are all good memories. Which are far more important than the cals! And you did eat only a small bit of healthy dfark chocolate, and your muffin was low fat, so its not like you thought "sod it" and went mad with it.

I don't know how you are still standing (or sitting) upright after all that exercise! It seems quite surreal to me, sorta like.... "what have you been up to for the past couple of days", and the reply being "oh, i just climbed a mountain and did 2 hours hard training in my swiss netball team. Plus loads of walking and some cycling and two barbeques". And this is all on your weekend off lol.

I haven't had vegetarian chilli for ages, will have to do it soon...
 
Rainbow :) You are SO funny about me and my exercise! People here in Switzerland often comment on the fact that the population, on the whole, is very healthy, and there tends to be very few overweight people. I reckon this is because people here are SOOO active! If it's sunny, they are jogging, swimming, hiking, cycling, rollerblading... if it's cold, they head straight to the mountains, above the cloud line, for more exercise... there's no darn excuse. It's great for me to be surrounded by people that do all of this incidental exercise all the time and don't even recognise it. Very few people own a car, which also helps a lot, I think.

I'm not so worried about the booze. I'm not a huge drinker anyway, and it's pretty rare that I'll have three pints of beer in a couple of hours. So I've just decided to enjoy it. Like I keep saying to myself, I'm not doing anything drastic this time. Just making healthier choices and being more conscious about my food. BUT I can't burp. Never have. Ever. So beer is a problem in this respect.... can get quite painful. I'm usually a wine or whiskey girl.

Now speaking of exercise, my man and I just slobbed around today, which was quite heavenly really. We haven't just hung out with each other in this way for a while... it's nice :) Haven't been paying enough attention to my calories though. That will change as of RIGHT NOW.

Breakfast
- one pancake with maple syrup (yup. My man took me out to this little new brunch place near us... it just had to happen)
- milk coffee

Lunch
- one slice rye bread with Gruyere cheese
- 5 grapes

Snack
- 2 pieces lindt 70% dark chocolate

Dinner
- homemade beef madras curry (very low fat actually... tiny bit of oil to fry the spices and the beef, then only onions, ginger and tinned tomatoes...)
- spiced spinach with green peas
- basmati rice

Snack
- lemon sorbet

Exercise
- 4x 10 min cycling
 
I know what you mean about the incidental exercise. It's not something I notice so much with the English, but the (continental) Europeans who live here just sort of shrug and say "this weekend I'm going hiking across Hadrian's wall. No, not for fitness, it's fun". A lot of people ride bikes around here but I think that's suicidal in this part of the world! (I'm in a biggish city... and yeah... no). Not having a car is great for fitness though, I thoroughly recommend it :)
 
Ha, Amy, it's funny how you say 'continental Europeans'. In my netball team there is this running joke that you can always tell an Aussie or NZer because we always say we are 'in Europe'. The UKers think this is hilarious, and always talk intead about being 'on the continent', which, of course, us Aussies and NZers think is hilariously unspecific.

But YES, people are always linking 'fun things' to exercise, without even thiinking about the fact that it's 'exercise. Which makes this a great place for me to be in for a while I think!

So today I decided I would try this calorie counting phenomena. So I've weighed my breakfast and... well, I can't find any website specific enough. I find sites that, sure, I can find porridge on, but they don't let you input your exact weights. So my only option is 1/2 cup, 100g, or a packet (?). I've had this with about 4 sites...

Any advice / suggestions?

Breakfast:
- 42g oats, coooked in water, with 32g of 1.5%milk, 6g linseeds, 7g sunflower seeds, 45g stewed apple (no added sugar), 2g cinnamon.

Right now I'm sitting here eating edamame. LOOOVE THEM! Found a frozen packet at one of the Asian supermarkets near me, and I think this will definitely be a staple snack for me! They are SOOO tasty, and SO healthy! I just boiled them for three minutes in salted water, and HUZZAH they are ready! YUM
 
We're having some friends over for inner tonight - the first time they've seen our cute little apartment. They're vegetarian, which is not a problem for us at the moment - we seem to be becoming more and more vegetarian as the time goes on. Last night, for instance, I made a beef madras curry. I would have been much happier, I think, to have chunks of potato and cauliflower and maybe carrot... The meat is just not sitting well with me. I'm not enjoying it. But I do eat it, largely for its iron. I'm not sure it's necessary though, with all the beans and spinach and dark greens I eat.

Tonight I'm planning to cook my very famous dish. All my friends and family in Aus know me for this, and it is a lot of work but it is EXCEPTIONALLY good! Definitely not diet food, but it is incredible. And I've never cooked for these friends before, so I have to show them what I'm made of! It's Bengali saffron studded wedding rice (takes hours and hours to make... so many fancy things in there!) with paneer kofta (I'm making my own paneer) in a garam marsala sauce, and spiced beans. HELLS YEAH!

I better get my wriggle on - they'll be here in five hours! :)
 
Just googled the wedding rice and it looks to die for.... mmmmmmmmmm.

Don't log in on myplate! When you do that you can't change the amounts of food, you can only do the portions. Which I hate too! This will probably be long winded...... One the home page there is "What did you eat", and below it is the typing box. So you write what you ate (!), then in the two boxes to the right of It it will come up "1" and serving. But you can change the "serving" bit on the drop down menu, to grams cups tbsps mls etc... and change the "1" to whatever weight you had. Then, you choose which time of day you ate it, and voila! Its there.

I was completely mystified that that option had disappeared after I'd joined too....

If swiss people are so healthy how come swiss roll is named after them lol.
 
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