Battling the Blubber

No matter how determined you might be, when the weather gets too hot, motivation to move goes way down (unless you have a strange fetish for being drenched in your own sweat). Hot weather has thoroughly beaten us here in Cyprus. While we're used to the usual Mediterranean climate, this year has been weird. Winter, winter, (can't be bothered with Spring) mild winter... Crap, it's May already. Here have SUMMER! And BOOM! Straight from low 20s to high 30s (that's degrees Celcius) in just a couple of days. I won't lie, it has drenched me in my own cooling fluid for nearly a week, and my motivation to move has been somewhere subterranean. Just as I had gotten into a routine of walking and quick bursts of high-intensity activity, I now have no desire to move at all. Don't Beat Yourself Up I have a half-baked theory that we shouldn't try to push ourselves too hard in extreme temperatures. I'm heavy, and like many others who struggle with their weight, it

If you're overweight or in one of the next obesity classes up, there must be an imbalance in your eating habits. It's probably crept up over time, not realising that you were putting a little more on your plate, the extra snacks that turned into a habit, even finishing the kids' leftovers after dinner. Maybe you started drinking more, or you stopped exercising. Perhaps you also quit smoking and transferred your oral fixation onto food instead.  When you begin a diet much of the time, you feel some deprivation. You're not just eating what you should be; you're eating  EVEN  less. I'm switching things up this time. I'm eating what would be reasonable for a person of my size, weight and activity - Okay, perhaps I'm  underestimating the activity level  a little. NB  -  Diets that claim you can "eat as much as you want" don't help you get back to what should be standard for your body. They maintain the over-stretched stomach and don

How active are you? Can you answer this honestly, without padding it with extras you assume will constitute a higher activity level than you  actually  achieve?  You might think that being a parent of an energetic pre-schooler would keep you active, but the sad truth is that it doesn't. What about all the washing, cleaning, cooking, laundry, and playtime? It doesn't account for much besides the average daily movement. You need to  ACTIVELY  increase your activity levels for it to make any difference to your estimated calorie intake. Doing active things that are part of your daily routine is normal. Otherwise, we could quantify every trip to the kitchen to make a drink or walk to the bathroom as part of our regular exercise. This is not the case. TDEE vs BMR The  calorie calculator  that I use on my weight loss journey is from the 5:2 Fast diet website. It's one of the better ones for accuracy and tweaking for activity, and weight down to 0.1kg. When I input my

Another Restart - with added health issues Photo by  i yunmai  on  Unsplash It looks like I'm starting again, this time even heavier than before. Nth time, the charm? 107.5kg It's not quite the heaviest I have ever been, but it's not far off. My heaviest was 110kg* I am worried about my health.  Since quitting breastfeeding at nearly two years, no hormonal birth control, and no major changes to my diet, I have gained a significant amount of weight that I can't account for with calories in/out. In addition, it has ALL gone to my belly. I am not joking. I wear the same bra size; I wear the same trousers (the waist won't fasten if there's no elastic) but I have turned into a barrel. Even at my heaviest, I maintained a consistent 1-2 dress-size disparity between hips & waist and 2-3 between bust & waist, i.e. my waist was always around two dress-sizes smaller than my bust and hips. I have a sneaking suspicion (more than a suspici