A Maintenance Milestone

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It took me 20 months to lose my 63kg, and since then I have been maintaining for - 20 months! You don't need to be able to see any detail on the graph, but just the big picture...

1. Those tiny blue squares are my daily weighings - all 1,202 of them. Every point on the black line is the average of the 30 days before; that smooths out the crazy daily blips.
2. The line when I was losing weight was surprisingly smooth. But since I've been maintaining it has wobbled quite a lot - the difference between my highest maintenance weight and my lowest has been nearly a stone, and it regularly wobbles by half a stone.
3. These wobbles are one of the reasons that I continue to weigh myself every day - I gain weight so quickly that I want to know about it immediately, so I can do something about it immediately.
4. Maintenance is not easy for me. Apart from when we eat away from home, my diet seems severe - so severe that people are always asking me "are you still on that diet?" and "are you trying to lose even more weight?" And my exercise is pretty good (for an oldie), because I have averaged 10,260 steps a day for the last two years.

All of this might seem like a major pain, and that I seem to have forgotten that 'life is for living'. But not a bit of it. I have changed what I eat and drink completely, as I wrote about in last month's blog Treats, and how I handled them. In fact we have just returned from three days away, having eaten out in a steakhouse, Jamie Oliver's Italian place and a curry house. Although we did enjoy them, on the way home we both agreed that we were looking forward to a pile of vegetables, much less fat, and unlimited no-alcohol beer. Maybe this will not 'stick' forever, but the signs are good so far.

Finally, a recent thread on the forum was about fitting into tights, and unfortunately I mentioned that I used to be in pantomime, and going into Evans Outsize to look for tights to fit me (6'1", 23 stones) was quite an experience. Nothing I've written in my 68 blogs has created such interest, especially when I said that I thought that I could find a photo of when I was Posh Spice in a dance routine we did in 1996. The photo had me in my leopard-skin dress, before I dramatically tore it off to start the song - sorry you missed the tight miniskirt girls! Incidentally I was always in sulky Posh Spice character, as you see.