c'est la vie

7kgs that is my number. On Monday I moved into week 3 of the #brainsurgeonsdiet #16weekchallenge with a whopping 7kg loss in the first 2 weeks.  Seven kilograms ..... damn that is almost a bag of dog food ... and you know how you lug that around the supermarket ... which means that my spine, legs and feet are now lugging around a bag of dog food less.  Hear that sound?  It is my spine applauding in gratitude. Now given that I would like to lose 21kgs (even if it means I have to finally reach this after the challenge ends) .. the amazing thing is that I am a third of the way there and that is a huge mind motivator.  Every other diet had me losing 0.3kg and then 0.1kg per week which made the 21kgs look like Mount Everest. Perhaps that is the thing .... the word DIET.  That is where it went wrong.  A long list of may and may not eats which sometimes had me feeling so deprived and sorry for myself that when I crashed ... I crashed big.  This was usua...

Lent is right here.  So around me there are many sentences starting with “I am giving up ……..” and there are many things – wine, social media, chocolates, movies, meat, fizzy colddrinks, cigarettes ….. the list is endless. I too give up something tangible like that ….. it differs from year to year, but as I get older, I find that “thing” that I give up to be less and less of what is important to me about Lent. When it comes to my prayer life I try and see if there is not an additional hour I can spend in Adoration, even during a slot of someone else, I make a commitment to the 6am Mass at least once a week, I try and up my prayer life and time and when it comes to Almsgiving – I concentrate even more on those that struggle.  We often are blinded into thinking that people at robots holding signs or those in the streets are the only ones battling.  However around us, at all times, are people that are battling due to unemployment, rising costs and many other cha...

So I read The Brain Surgeon's Diet book twice before I started the challenge.  I re-read a great deal of it yesterday and again today. I carry it with me 24/7 and bound to it with an elastic is my new friend, the notebook, in which I strictly follow the little verse "if you bite it, you write it".  By keeping it with me I ensure that I don't forget because it is so easy to slip a sweet into your mouth or eat an apple and forget. Even after only 2 days I already know the exact kj when I have a coffee with frothed milk, I know what a spoon of sugar counts as, I even found out something today - pumpkin seeds ..... yo .... that 50g came at  quite a high price.  So you think when you chew on seeds all day it is ok?  Can you see me .... I am shaking my head ..... not ok! I started over-keen yesterday and so found myself at 4pm nauseous as hell (too little food) and when I got home and updated my booklet I found that I had so many kj's left that no normal person ...

So, here is the thing ....... Penguin Books SA (now becoming PenguinRandomHouse) is one of my favourite webpages and Facebook pages.  I enter all their book competitions and have been quite lucky which is great for an avid reader like me. Dr Adriaan Liebenberg, a SA neurosurgeon, wrote a book called "The Brain Surgeon's Diet" in which he explains that your brain can also be trained to assist in whipping your body into shape.  There is a semi-complicated sum of working out, based on height and weight (ok that did make me nervous), how many kj you should eat in a day.  The sum is simply to indicate that you need to eat less that that to lose weight and you need to include exercise which will help you lose faster by speeding up your Metabolic Base Rate ...... I also learned that you need to cut down 32 000 kj for every kg of weight you lose.  Similarly the lower the carbs the better. So they launched the #brainsurgeonsdiet #16weekchallenge and I jumped at the chance...