Round 2 day 4

Well by the taste in my mouth and the increase in energy i'd say i was defo in ketosis! Feel great and i've lost 8lbs already! i'm meant to be working but keep doing wedding stuff instead - naughty munch. check out the wedding blog here

The Beach Hut in November

we're staying the night in a B&B in Holyhead so that we are already in anglesey ready for our big day touring round tomorrow looking for a reception venue. The best bit is that its add a meal week so we have been able to go out for a meal - hurrah! we had a gorge chicken and brie salad yum! tomorrow we are having a cooked breakfast - well its a B&B - we can't just do the 1 B! this is where we are staying.

Week 13 Wi

Hurrah I've lost 9lbs this week. I've really tried hard to get enough fluid because last week i really struggled. Its just to cold to be drinking loads of water - it made me feel all freezing inside. So i got us both a smallish thermos flask and we are having brews or warm weak juice instead. It seems to have worked anyway. I'm now 4 lbs off a total of 6 stone! My Bmi is 41 and I'm in another stone marker, god 19 something sounds good to me, well much better than 25 something! we've been doing lots of wedding planning and haven't spent anytime this week thinking about the diet at all. That's feels really good because it means that food or lack of isnt my main focus and that's how i want it to be when i stop this crazy diet. I want to just think about food when its the time to like making shopping lists and making tea - not all day every day like i had been. Unfortunately it means i have stayed away from minimins and that's probably not a great thing to do to my team - think I'll head over there now and explain.

week 12 wi

Hurrah - I've officially lost 5 stone! I started at 25st 2 and my bmi was 53 and 3 months later i am now 20st and my bmi is 42! Obviously there is still a way to go - i'm still obese but i feel fantastic, and i know i can and will get to goal. Been having a much better time this week already. I have not been going on the minimins forum for the last couple of days and i have stopped thinking about this diet so much. All i could think about was the Cambridge Diet - i felt suffocated by it. So I'm having a break from thinking about it and I'm just doing it!
I have set up a wedding blog because Kel was filling the pc with pictures and ideas i thought it would be nice for her to have one place to keep it all and be able to find it again. In doing it I've found some fantastic wedding sites out there really inspirational. Check out our blog at http://munchieswedding.blogspot.com/

oh and i finally stopped smoking on Saturday so that makes a grand total of 4 days so far. The Champix have really helped and they don't make me feel sick anymore. bonus!

day 80! by munch

Well i cant say that I've enjoyed this last couple of days! working on yourself 'therapy' style is bloody emotional and draining. I've felt withdrawn and miserable and not really a useful member of society. Kel hasn't exactly been a barrel of laughs either as you can see from her post lol! I have been functioning on autopilot almost - like I'm present but not really with it lol. Anyway today is another day and i feel a damn site more 'normal'. Kel and I have been doing lots of talking about our issues with the world and food. we are so different, even though we both deal with problems and bad feelings by stuffing them down with food, our issues are completely different and so we need to talk to understand each other.

This week i went to aerobics, we both went for the 1st time last week but Kel couldn't come coz of work so i went on my own! yea me! I really enjoyed it, the only thing that bothers me is leaving mini munch home alone. Anyway there was a young girl there doing the class with her mum so i asked the instructor and Lew can come and do it next week! when i got home i was still really energised so i taught him the routine. - to be told it was 'well easy' and i should try doing p.e at school as that's much harder lol

On Sunday just gone we went to a gay wedding fayre! Despite the trauma of navigating the stupid one way and pedestrian only streets of Manchester city centre and the 'too close for comfort tram incident' - a lovely time was had by all 3 of us! Kel enjoyed it because, well it was a gay wedding fayre and that's like her all consuming passion at the mo. Lew enjoyed all the free nibbles - (we didn't enjoy the sugar induced annoyance on the way home). I enjoyed meeting an amazing photographer Damian Hall and whilst we were telling him our basic wedding plan i realised 2 things:
1. OMG we are getting married.
2. Our wedding sounds brilliant - i really want to go lol

The other great find for me was a woman called Sue who lives nearby and runs a Reiki circle in our village - small world eh! Anyway it seemed like too much of a coincidence and a bit 'guided' so i went to the 'circle' last night. I had no idea what to expect having only had Reiki on a 1 to 1 basis before. I was really nervous - mostly about finding the right place lol so i made kel take me!! Anyway it was lovely and i'll definitely go every week. We started with the healing circle which is distant healing to yourself and anyone else you place in the circle. Kel had no idea what i would do there and yet she said while i was there (and placing her in the circle lol) she went for a lie down and felt a great sense of calmness weird huh? After that we had some dowsing - never done it before, really enjoyed it! We did a great colour meditation that works on your aura and then the session was finished by giving and receiving healing. I just received - no where near ready to give yet - lol total performance anxiety!

day 60!

who'd have thunk it! Us two foodies (that's me being polite - what i mean is fatties) have done a vlcd for 60 days! I'm very proud of us both, yes we have had struggles when our food addict gremlins have shown up and maybe the odd bit of chicken has been eaten when it shouldn't but on the whole we have been bloomin fantastic. Yea us!

I'm getting excited now about add a meal next week. We've worked out the menu and imagined each meal (A LOT!) I feel much better this time round. The run up to the last aam i was in a state of pure panic! I know now though that i will be able to eat what we have planned and not overeat, not pick after the meal has gone and even better i know that once the week is over i will be totally able to stop and continue with another 4 weeks of ss-ing. I guess the fear i had last time was due to my feeling of ss being rehab - total abstinence is safe, ketosis means hunger is a very brief and fleeting thing and the lack of food choices means the lack of food 'issues'. But reintroducing food however limited surely would bring all the negative stuff with it? I was as surprised as anyone that at the end of each meal i felt full, satisfied and elated that i had some control over food. And come the sunday night and time to get ready for ss-ing for another 4 weeks i was fine and had no need to read the lecture I'd written myself the week before anticipating mega tantrums.

I'm starting to miss our little man a bit today - he's in Tunisia with my mum. He's told me to tell everyone he's in North Africa - apparently that's way more impressive! I don't know - any foreign destination sounds good to me, i haven't been abroad for 5 years! Funnily enough thats how long we have had the shop! in fact except for my illness last year I've never had more than 3 consecutive days off work lol
Mum and i had a chat before she went away and she has committed to letting me take a whole week off next year either the may hols or Easter. I am determined that we should get a last minute cheapo holiday abroad. Kel isn't as sold on the idea - she sees every penny spent as a lost opportunity to save for the wedding!

Talking of saving money I still haven't stopped smoking, kel and mum have been non smokers ages now - very naughty Munch. Made an appt with smoking cessation woman at the village chemist (for some bloody stupid reason my doctors don't do it) when i got there she had gone home ill. Tried to rebook it yesterday, took me a day or so to stop fuming, and was told she has now gone on holiday till November - honest to god! that is a well good enough reason to puff away in my opinon! No i am going to stop - spending an £5 a day on cancer sticks is ridiculous. I've got an appt with the doc on Monday anyway (i want to show him i've lost 4 stone so that when i go having lost 14 stone and need a tummy tuck he wont be too surprised lol) so I'm going to ask him if he'll prescribe champix coz its worked on mum and kel. We'll see what he says - i didn't think much of him but I've only seen him once so I'll give it a go.
wow that was a bit of a long post - sorry!

day 14 - exhausting trip to the seaside

What an amazing day we had! We've decided that after much debate we will get married in 2010 - seems long enough away to be able to save and be at a happy weight - there is no way I'm getting married fat! Since we are a non traditional family we wanted to do something a bit different and anyway we aren't allowed to get married in a church - (I'm not going to get started on how I feel about that) Last year we checked out Chester Zoo as a wedding venue and it was amazing for the ceremony and the reception but just way out of our budget unless something drastic happens like the lotto or Mum meeting a millionaire. Since Kel's favourite place in the world is Anglesey we went on a day trip checking out all the locations licensed for civil partnership on the island.

Plas Newydd came out on top by a mile. Its only available for the ceremony which means finding somewhere else for the reception but its gorgeous and was Kels late Mum's favourite spot on the island. We went everywhere and except for Treysgawen Hall everywhere else is just a normal hotel/restaurant which could be anywhere really.

As we were walking out of the last hotel a car pulled up to us and beeped - it was our closest friend M who lives in London and 2 other really good mates LB and N - incredible! No-one even knew we were on Anglesey - it was just a total extremely happy co-incidence! They we're going to N's house which happened to be right next door the hotel we were standing outside of to eat a chippy takeaway. By this point we'd been on our day out for about 10 hours with just a breakfast shake in Plas Newydd car park so we bravely sat and 'enjoyed' our second shake while they polished off fish chips and peas lol I've got to say I was mightily impressed with myself for not having any problem at all.

On the way home though we both started to have a headache and feel a bit queasy. We had only had 2 shakes and about 2 litres of water all day. We stopped off at a services along the way coz Kel was bushed - hardly surprising since she'd been driving all the way there, all round Anglesey and all the way back home! We had a black coffee each and looked through the food menu imaging what kind of food we will eat when were out of 'rehab'! It wasn't as torturous as it sounds - I really enjoyed it actually!

We finally made it home feeling really exhausted and lightheaded. Its by far the busiest day we have had whilst on the Cambridge diet and its difficult to 'eat' when you need to when you are on the road. It would have been lovely when we stopped off at the services to have been able to have a soup but I don't know how you would do that. Anyway we polished off our soup immediately then stayed up for far too long discussing how the hell you work out who goes up the aisle and in what order when there are 2 brides, only 1 parent each and a son between them!!! mind boggling stuff!