For the last two years, I’ve been trying to get closer to the ideal weight for my age, height and gender. For vanity but also health reasons.

So I got fanatical and watched what I eat and worked out – a lot! During moments of frustration/madness, I also tried a few extreme diets. One involved drinking this crazy maple syrupy drink that was sprinkled with cayenne pepper. It was the Beyonce inspired diet.

Now I knew it was crazy, just like all the others, but when you count calories and work out regularly and yet the scale doesn’t budge, you get desperate.

Anyway, not wanting to consider myself a total failure, I began to take comfort in achieving and maintaining a weight which is only twenty pounds from my ideal weight. If I fell off the wagon, I’d fret as I got closer to the number at which I decided, I must take drastic action. Thus, I weigh myself every morning.
This perhaps would be a bit much for most people but I’m not yet at the stage where I have my weight under control and so this is one of the things I must do to make sure I don’t backtrack.

In the middle of last week, I was two pounds away from the must take drastic action weight. As I’d been emotional eating for about ten days, it wasn’t really a surprise. Heck, I eat a 425g tub of Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough Ice Cream on Thursday night all in one sitting.

The frustrating thing about this situation, is that I didn’t have the ice cream at home. I left my house around 9pm after an hour of internal dialogue trying to decide whether or not to go get it.

I felt so guilty about not having enough willpower to resist temptation, that even though I eat it all in sitting, I didn’t really enjoy it. And not surprisingly, when I got on the scale the next morning, I was heavier – by three pound to be exact! Yikes!

Then and there, I decided that starting at the weekend, I was going to recommit to working out. The recent boy drama was a trigger for backsliding but no point in letting things spiral out of control.

Enough with the takeaway meals and oh yeah, being so lazy that I don’t want to get up and out for my morning walk which has always been such a positive start to my day.

So I’ve set myself a new fitness challenge. What exactly? Well for the next twenty one days, I am going to walk for at least an hour a day – roughly three to four miles. Also, I am going to spend about 30minutes each day doing exercises to strength my lower back and knees.

Why twenty one days? Well research has shown it takes roughly twenty one days to successfully introduce/reintroduce a new routine into your life.

How am I going to keep myself honest? Well I’m posting activity to my RunKeeper account which updates my Facebook and Twitter feed. Also, by putting it here on my blog, I know I’ll do everything possible to successfully complete the challenge.

Failure is simply not an option. I can’t afford to relapse. Definitely not over boy drama!

So stay tuned. I hope to lose a stone (fourteen pounds) to get me back squarely in the comfort zone and on way to ideal weight.