Nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag. Please.

I have a friend, we'll call her Harridan, and she is nagging me. I don't like being nagged, but this is why she is a good friend. She knows, as I do, that the fact that I have updated neither blog nor food diary is not a good thing. She knows, as I do, that I've been slacking. I let myself get discouraged and gave up. And then I felt bad for giving up so I gave up some more. I'm not related to Spock that's for sure.

I dug out some old photos recently and was struck by the fact that right up until the age of about 25 I was a skinny little thing. A bit too skinny sometimes. But I never worried about food. I never iced a cake and worried that a nibble of marzipan would botch the scales. I never considered it a disaster if two days before my period started I ate enough chocolate, bread and pasta to feed three cows. Not that cows eat chocolate.....

I started to put on weight when I was living in America. All that food! In those mahoosive portions! But at that point, I was still active enough with swimming and daily gym sessions, plus a lorra lorra walking that it wasn't that much of an issue. It was when we came back to Scotland that the problems started. I went back to a desk job. At home. No walking anywhere, no free gym membership, no Californian sunshine to swim under, no motivation and a huge dollop of depression. And then I had a baby. Or three.

All this time, I was getting progressively bigger. After each baby, I lost the weight, but then gained more with the next one. And I thought, really thought, after losing all of it four years ago that I'd done it for good. I wasn't going to have any more babies, I was a slim, trim size 8-10 and life was good. Then dad died. And mum, having nobody else nearby, turned to me. Not just for grieving purposes - that would have been hard, but bearable. No, she wanted me to be dad, be her buffer against the world, save her from having to deal with it. And I am finding that job the hardest of all, because, frankly, I don't want it.

I know I can lose weight. I've done it before. And I know that the diet plan I'm (trying to) follow will work for me. But I have to find strategies for keeping myself on track when real life hits the fan. I'm great at sticking to stuff when it's going well. Aren't we all? And it's not that the diet wasn't going well, it was more that I had a psychological set back, when my new scales were reading heavier than the old ones. I had still lost over a stone in weight. I should have been pleased!

So, Harridan is nagging, and with good reason. She wanted me to update this blog and I have. Hopefully she's right, and my return to these little meanderings will also indicate a return to the straight and narrow path of the righteous and thinning.

Today I'm wearing:

Dark blue wide legged jeans, size 16

White tent-shaped blouse, size 16

Suede pointy boots with tassels

Earrings that Pat Butcher probably wouldn't wear