Lose Weight with Agility Bits

It's lovely having a young dog to train but one thing that held Sasha back was that she had a big, fat mama waddling along behind her all the time.  Every photo seemed to show an enormous bum. Sadly it was all mine, and so I decided to lose weight and join the "people who can run" brigade.  
 

This is what I hoped my before and after pictures would look like and I really have achieved it. 

(You too can have a small bum if you manipulate pictures on your computer.)

Trial and error
The first thing I did was to cut down on cakes and chocolate biscuits.  It seemed to me that if I just ate a bit less the pounds would drop off and this slim sylph-like thing would emerge.  My friend assured me that I was too fat because I ate too much and Bernie agreed with her. 

And so I went on my first ever diet and I was quite pleased at first.  A little bit of weight came off and eating less seemed to be working, but then one day I realised it had got stuck.  The weight just wouldn't shift.  My wellies were still hard to put on and my clothes were still too tight.  My friend assured me that if I just ate a bit less again I'd lose weight but it just didn't happen.  Then the girls at work got interested and they told me the opposite.  I wasn't eating enough and I was leaving it too long between meals.  Thoroughly confused I went to the doctor.

Is it an ailment?
At the surgery the nurse took a whole armful of blood.  It was bit worrying with Halloween coming up but the doctor assured me it would only be tested for diseases. They tested my blood pressure and heart rate and the oxygen levels in my blood and they also did an ECG.   All this revealed that there was absolutely no medical reason why I couldn't run after Sasha except for my weight.
    "So how do I lose it?" I wailed.
The doctor then did that thing that all doctors do when they don't have the problem themselves. 
    "Walk faster," she said.

And so to Weightwatchers
There was only one thing for it.  The thing I'd resisted for so long now looked like a possible solution.  I joined Weighwatchers online.  Once I'd forked out the forty quid for three months membership I had access to all that they could throw at me.  I was given a choice of an eating plan or a points plan and I opted for points.  This seemed to me to be a little like the old fashioned calorie counting diets that ultimately fail everyone, but still, I thought I'd give it a go. 

I have to be honest.  I was starving.  I couldn't stick to the points that they'd allocated me.  It was far too spartan.  All the nice things like toast and marmalade had lots of points.  I don't know if you've ever actually tried grilling a mushroom but I did and it was horrible.  I just had to fry mushrooms in a bit of fat.  Then I discovered that the fat might add a point but if I used a bit less and put some tomatoes in with the mushies it was quite tasty.  Also I could eat as many mushrooms and tomatoes as I liked because they had zero points.  It was only the fat that made them fattening. 

You have to exercise:
The main thing I discovered is that there is a direct correlation between the amount of exercise you do and the amount you can eat.  Do a bit more exercise and you can eat a bit more food.  This may seem blindingly obvious but in fact you don't need to exercise all that much in order to be able to eat some of your favourite things.  I followed Weightwatchers for about a month and used their points plan to work out how much exercise I should do.  One morning, for instance, I really wanted a digestive biscuit and so I did step ups for three minutes and earned half a biccy.  This was followed later by an hour's agility and a walk and before I knew it I'd earned enough points to eats some nuts and another biccy.  I was also able to eat the quantity of food I'd eaten before Weighwatchers.  The difference in my meals is that I would have less potatoes as these have quite few points, but I eat lots more carrots which don't have any points.   

The biggest discovery of all though was that the doctor was right.  I hadn't been walking fast enough.  A bit of speeding up really helps with the weight and in the first week I've lost three pounds.  With any luck the picture below will one day contain a sylph like thing racing through the meadow after the dogs and that will be me.

After four weeks with Weightwatchers I was somewhat disillusioned.  Although I continued to lose weight I had to do it without their help.  What they were advising seemed all wrong to me and it didn't help in my particular case.  I know lots of other people have lost lots of weight with Slimming World and Weightwatchers etc. but some of us need a bit more help or a different approach.

It's now well over a year since I started and I have lost four stone.  Everyone's asking me how I've done it and I no longer have to fake the before and after pictures.  If you've failed with various weight loss organisations it might be useful to do something similar to me.  Here's my own weight loss plan