Recap January

This post is only a week later than it should be… but I can be forgiven seeing as I’m working two jobs at work at the moment. Here’s my recap of January 2022.

Work has hit me hard the last few weeks. I moved role last year, but I am now doing my old role as well as my new one – for the moment. The person brought in to replace me in my old role is now leaving – so I’m a man in demand.

I must admit, this has taken a hit on my weight loss. I’ve been so busy I’ve gone back to my old ways of not eating anything all day then binging in the evening. It’s not good at all, especially after starting the month so well.

But even with old habits creeping back in, I still lost half a stone this month. At this rate, that will be 6 stones by the end of the year. Ok, it’s slower than previous attempts to lose weight, but it feels more sustainable.

I’ve not had to think to myself “I can’t have that”. Instead, I’ve been able to change days to suit.

The last week of January I did gain, but that was expected. I can blame my dad for it being his birthday (sorry dad!). That led to a couple of beers and a lot of buffet food. But the gain that week wasn’t as bad as I was expecting.

Exercise

The bike has still only sat in my garage so far this year. I mean these winds of late have been horrid, even if the temperature is milder than normal. I have done a single ride on the turbo so far with Zwift, but that will be getting some use this month. My membership has now been un-paused so if I’m paying for it, I’m using it.

I have found myself walking a bit though. A quick trip to the GP was a nice walk in the morning one day. It’s much nicer than driving – seeing as the GP Surgery is on the estate it makes sense to walk when going there.

Meals

It’s been a nice change to get back into cooking again. The wife has enjoyed it as much as I’ve enjoyed eating what she plates up.

From King Prawn Tagliatelli to Steak, we’ve had an assortment of meals. Bringing in those ever-important veggies again, something we lacked towards the end of last year.

One big change to normal is portion sizing. Slimming World taught us to eat as much potato and pasta as we’d like, as long as 1/3 of the plate was veg or salad. Well, weighing the pasta and the potato to put into our calorie app has made a huge change.

I think one evening, we’ll have to make out cheesy pasta that we loved on Slimming World – just to see how many calories are actually in that “free” meal. I think that may deserve a post on its own.

The Calorie Counting App

I know a lot of people who calorie count use the MyFitnessPal app. But when we’ve used it in the past, we didn’t get on with it. It relies a lot on people entering items into the database, rather than the database is managed by the app owner. It lead to us finding different values for the same thing before – which we hated.

We’ve since moved to NutraCheck. They do have a free version of the app, but we have paid instead. It’s a lot nicer when searching for foods as they maintain their database. They even have Aldi and Lidls own branded foods in the database, not just the bugger supermarket own brands.

It’s certainly worth a try with the free version if you want to give calorie counting a go. It’s so easy to just scan the packets of the foods you’re eating, or just plain searching for a green pepper or something.

We’ve found it a good start, but the premium version also gives all the macros to work towards (something we might be looking into once we’ve lost a bit more weight first).