My Relationship To Food, Part 2

I'm guessing my last post was a bit boring. Don't worry, this one should be a bit more relevant and the next one is about a dress, so we're back to the sewing.

Recently new (or new to me) research confirmed what most people know, that dieting may work for a little while but your chances of putting the weight back on and more besides is very high. It turns out that your body seriously resists loosing weight, which makes sense if you live in a hunter gatherer society and not having enough calories to maintain yourself is a very bad thing, but humans weren't designed to live in a world where food was abundant and eating too much was more of a threat than eating too little.

Dieting makes you obsessed with food. Your brain telling you louder and louder that you NEED food and no amount of mental strength can hold up to that onslaught. To make it worse, your body has an idea of what your normal size is, and it's much easier for it to go up then down. Once it's gone up it gets even harder to get healthy.

Currently some scientists believe our best option is to develop better appetite suppression drugs and combat our cultures obesity problem, but that's a long way off for most of us. Until then I need another plan.

My plan? Vegetables. I'm thinking I'll pack the fridge at home with bags of carrots and celery and when I feel just a little bit hungry and I get tempted I'll grab some and munch away to my hearts content. I have absolutely no idea if it'll work but it's worth a try and even if it doesn't it'll be much more fun that eating pizza and hating myself for it.

My Relationship To Food, Part 1

I'll be the first to admit that I have issues with my weight. I was one of the big kids at school, or at least I felt like one. I wasn't huge but I hung around with skinny girls and small girls and that kinda skewed my sample.

I ate for emotional reasons mostly. I didn't know how to ask for attention or connect with people emotionally so I always felt left out and neglected. It wasn't the fault of my parents or friends, I just didn't know how to ask for what I needed.

I thought about dieting, but I had very little control over what I ate. Mum made breakfast, packed lunches and big dinners. We were told 'you won't get your dessert until you've cleared your plate'. School dinners were even worse, because we had to take a certain amount and got in trouble for not taking the amount they thought we needed.

I can't leave food on my plate, but I don't know if that's nature or nurture. When I was young I would fight for what I thought was rightfully mine because I always felt short changed. Give me the option and I will choose more. Give me a buffet and I will eat until I puke. Literally.

When I moved away from home things got a little better. My first flat was in a village with no food shops. Restaurants? By the bucket! Need a bridal shop? Have three! But it was a mile bicycle ride to the supermarket for food I could take home. My dinner was a chicken breast and a serving of rice, cooked with a carton of chopped tomatoes and at least two kinds of frozen veg. Breakfast was a simple bowl of cereal and I barely ever found myself going back for more. It was paradise! I don't know what I weighed but I had a healthy relationship with food.

In my second flat it was harder. The shop around the corner sold biscuits quite cheaply and it was easier to binge than to cook. Plus my bike was falling apart so going to get a weeks shop usually involved walking. Frozen food defrosted and fresh was expensive. I turned back to junk food.

I can't pretend that boredom and loneliness wasn't partly to blame as well. I wasn't seeing family as often or getting out as much and was feeling depressed watching my brother go down hill. The highlight of my week was going to roleplaying games where sweets and fizzy pop were the norm. I deluded myself into thinking I was being healthy if I hardly ate the rest of the week.

When I was loosing weight through the beginning of 2013 I attributed it to slimfast powders and force of will, but I think I was partly wrong there. Sure, it helped, but I think what really got me through was my snacking. You see, I love carrots. I love them, and you could get a 1kg bag of ugly and weirdly shaped carrots at the local supermarket for £1. Whenever I snacked, I started to snack on vegetables and I could eat whenever I was hungry. I think that was the key. If I tried to hold back through willpower then I just got hungrier and hungrier until I went and bought a bag of cookies with that same one pound.

As the year continued, however, I got depressed again. I stopped leaving the house and the boyfriend moved in. He couldn't live on salad. We agreed to try and get healthy together, him being quite overweight, but every time he went and spent £20 he didn't have on junk food or bought a footlong subway I gave up a little. It was like he was saying he didn't care as much as me. I don't take it personally now, I see it for what it was, but when he complained about the healthy food I made it hurt.

I want to get my love of healthy, yummy food back, but moving into my parents house means I'm going to have to think long and hard about how I'm going to move forward. I'll talk more about that in part 2.

The Hawthorn Toile And A Question About Trousers

I finally got all the pieces cut out and drew over the pencil lines in pen so that they were easier to see but they still don't look like much. I am starting to feel intimidated by the amount of buttons though. I'm doing version two which has the most, clocking in at a whopping 15! Add to that the fact that I don't know how well my machine copes with doing button holes and we may be heading for a disaster.

At least I'll be able to say I tried, if nothing else.

As a side note, this is what I had to do so you didn't get a flash of my undies in the picture above. These trousers have a whole 5 extra inches of fabric which means I can't go outside in them without tying them up and that just makes me look like a slob.

The problem is, I'm still a bit nervous about getting rid of them. Not only do I not have a whole lot of money at the moment for buying more, I'm terrified I'm going to put all the weight back on and feel even worse. Over the last six months I've lost about two and a half stone (35 pounds), and most of my trousers don't fit. I'm in a bit of a bind really.

How long would you guys wait before getting rid of clothes that no longer fit? Do you hang on to them just in case or are you an out with the old, in with the new kind of person?

First Steps Of Stash Busting

 It was the first day of the Stash Busting Challenge yesterday and I got off to an okay start. I didn't cut any fabric but since I'm a tracer instead of a cutter when it comes to patterns, even ones I bought new instead of vintage ones, new patterns take a bit longer to get started.

I spent yesterday copying the Cravat Dress from Silver Needles. I've never heard of this pattern company before so I'm looking forward to it and it looks like a dress I'll make a couple of times in this challenge and then again afterwards. If I start trying to sew with silk then this might be the one I start with.

One thing that did make me pause. I was copying out this pattern and got to the bottom, about 10cm from the edge of the tracing paper, when I noticed the little line of writing at the bottom. That's right, it says extend 48.5cm.

I'm used to that kind of thing from pattern cutting but I've never seen it in a printed sewing pattern before. It kind of makes sense.

I traced the other main piece along the long side of the paper instead of the short one and was left with about 40 cm of room to extend my dress. I made it 35 cm because I'm short and not exactly the most modest of people. The other one I just extended with another strip of paper.

I went over the lines with a black pen so I could see them better and cut out everything so when I get to cutting fabric it's all ready.

I'm posting this a little late today because I went to a car boot sale then a coffee shop with my boyfriend this morning. I hate to say it in a place this public but I'm scared if I don't I won't say it at all, I sometimes think we have a different understanding of goals. I've talked about my weight loss before and I've got about a stone to go but every time I talk to my boyfriend about it he talks about the 6 stone (84 lbs) he needs to loose and maybe we should do it together. That sounds great until you take into account our differing motivations. I'm quite happy to subsist on salad and determination if it works and I really want this, but ten minutes after bemoaning his ballooning waistline my boyfriend suggests making a cake 'just because'.

Don't get me wrong, I want my boyfriend to succeed and have shared goals but if he just ends up dragging me back then I'm not going to be too happy. It's the same with blogging. My boyfriend has a letsplay profile on Youtube that he hasn't updated for a month and keeps talking about but when I say 'I should probably update my blog for today' he tells me it's not that urgent. I'm starting to get fed up with it because I'm a rather lazy person and sometimes I need a cheerleader. I'm happy to be a cheerleader for him because he needs it, but I need the same in return.

Maybe I'm putting too much on his shoulders. Maybe I'm trying to stick to an agreement that hasn't even been made. Maybe I should look inside me for a cheerleader and stop looking to other people. What do you guys think? Do you find being in a group helps you or holds you back? Does it depend on the group?