Leads to other inspirational blogs

I found this page with links to other blogs where women discuss weight loss, the challenges and their experiences: http://www.uspharmd.com/blog/2008/top-100-weight-loss-blogs/.

Progress!

First of all, apologies for not having written in a while.  I've been on holiday.  Usually, holidays are challenging times for the health programme - you're always eating out (so it's harder to find and choose low salt, low fat and complex carbs), the exercise routine is interrupted and you don't get as much sleep.  However, I have been really pleased with the results this holiday.  I weighed myself a week before going on holiday and just after coming back (with a total gap of two weeks in between the weigh-ins), and I was tremendously surprised to learn that I lost 1 kg over the two weeks!

This was a big surprise because, although I was controlling what I was eating at the margins, I was pretty much having what I wanted.  In terms of exercise, I went for many walks and used the hotel gym twice (for intense 30-minute sessions).  This really wasn't bad at all, compared to what my usual holidays look like (lots of eating, lots of lying around and vegetating).  So now I'm at 75.6 kg!  This really isn't very far from my goal at all.  I think I should most probably be there by the end of the year.

I'd like to share a tactic I've tried, which I think is helping a lot.  It was inspired by my readings about the law of attraction (there is a popular book out, 'the Secret' by Rhonda Byrne, which is an example of a book that deals with this topic, if you're interested in reading more).  One of the basic points about the law of attraction is that you visualise what it is you want so that you feel that it is coming to you and you, thereby, attract it to yourself.  

Since buying a body composition monitor (a scale which tells you your weight, your body's fat percentage and muscle mass, amongst other things), I have been charting my measurements every two weeks or so on an Excel spreadsheet.  Initially, I felt the measurements weren't moving fast enough in the "down" direction.  This was quite frustrating.  After 5 or so measurements, I felt like it was almost a horizontal line that was being drawn.  After thinking about the law of attraction, I realised that I was focusing too much on what the reading currently was rather than where I wanted it to be going (in law of attraction speak, I was just attracting the status quo, so of course I wasn't budging!).  I then decided to plot on the chart my target weight and fat percentage.  With those data points on the chart, I could see where I was supposed to be going.  And I felt as if I was already on the way to the goal (rather than being stuck far away from it).  And it has worked!  I attribute the latest loss of a whole kilogram to putting the target data points on my chart.