My weight loss has ground to a halt over the past few weeks. I dunno if you can call it a plateau, to me a plateau is when you are eating the same and exercising the same but aren't losing whereas I think I've started to slip into bad habits. Damn those bad habits. People say it takes 21 days to create a new habit. I say phooey to that. I reckon it takes about a decade to create a new good habit and about 2 days to create a bad one. Anyway, I need to make some changes around here and these are my current thoughts:

Food - back to tracking. Without the food diary and the weighing and measuring, it's too easy to have just a little bit extra or that teeny snack you forget about. I'm never one to deny myself treats but treats have to be earned, otherwise an occasional treat becomes a daily treat, becomes a twice daily treat, becomes a gutload of lard.

Exercise - I've been good on the exercise, going to the gym six times a week and really pushing myself. The trouble is that I have been branching out into weights and pilates and all sorts of things. I need to get back into the cardio. Cardio burns fat. The other things should be on top of that, not instead. Today I've been thinking I need to vary my cardio. I am going insane on the treadmill. Possible options include Spinning class (it killed me last time but I'm fitter now), swimming which bores me stupid, deep water running (except the only class around here is at 6.05 am - yikes!) and ... mmm can't think of anything else. Oh that was it, circuit class. I like circuit class but don't know if it counts as cardio. I want to do cardio every day. Well at least 4-5 times a week.

Habits - I've got to stop the bad habits. Even when I'm losing weight, it's more through changing what I eat than how I ate. Binging on carrot sticks with low-fat yoghurt and sweet chilli sauce is still a binge. I'm never going to learn to eat properly if I don't change the "how".

That's enough changes for me for the time being. Anyway I think I need to add some positives now so this post isn't just a berating of myself for the things I do wrong. These are some of the good habits I've learnt, in less than a decade to boot:

Exercise: I'm going to the gym every day... well except today and Wednesday but I have good excuses for those days. Well, goodish. Shut up. And I have sore knees and a sore back. And I'm going to workout hard this weekend. So there. But for the past three months I've been doing six days a week. That is tops. Woohoo! Go me. The staff at the gym all know me by name and stop and chat. I'm like a permanent fixture there.

Habits: I have kicked that "all or nothing" attitude in the arse. I can binge and recover now. Not that it's necessarily a good thing, if you use that as an excuse to binge but even my binges are less binge-y now. I couldn't eat a Family sized block of Black Forest chocolate in one sitting (or could I? mmmm) whereas I used to eat one nearly every night.

Have you noticed how after you stop eating truckloads of fat then you have a fatty treat like say a sausage in battter cos you have been at class and it's late and you haven't had dinner and it's another half hour until the train comes, fat is really filling. Incredibly filling. I can't work out how I ate so much fat once. I must have been overflowing. Oh yeah. I was, overflowing my pants that is.

But I'm heading more to a 80/20 attitude now, with the 80 being healthy whereas once it was 20/80.

Food: Most of my food choices are healthy now. I have reduced the amount of meat and carbs I eat and bulked up the vegies. Once I'd cook up a big pot of rice to have with dinner (or pasta or whatever) because it's cheap and filling. That would be the main component of the meal. Last night I was making rice and cooked 1/3 cup to have with dinner then because I was freezing a portion for later, put half the rice with that. That is a big change.

So I guess the main focus is fine tuning and there's always fine tuning to be done. Oh yeah, and the other bad habit to break - weighing myself all the time. Got to stop that one.