I learned a hard lesson today: be prepared.

It’s not a new lesson; I’ve long been aware that planning and preparing food in advance makes it easier to eat healthy, stick to your plan and lose weight. Where last-minute decisions have a high chance of being bad ones, those made in advance rarely are.

Despite knowing all this, last night I was lazy and didn’t feel up to cooking dinner. That was fine, I just made something small instead. But a flow-on effect was that I didn’t have anything to bring to work for lunch today. And my favourite sandwich shop -where I have a standing order for a chicken and salad sandwich on wholemeal bread -is still closed for the Christmas/New Year holidays. The cafe in my work building is also still closed, leaving only one lunch option on my street. I don’t like a lot of the stuff offered by this last cafe, so I don’t go there often. And when I went there today, I fell back on my usual order: chicken schnitzel on Turkish bread.

In my favour, the sandwich has low-fat mayo and lettuce in it, but the damage was done. The Turkish bread and schnitzel alone made up half my daily calorie allowance, and I’m sure my portion guesstimates were on the conservative side.

I have quickly planned out a low calorie dinner (lean chicken breast and vegies) but there’ll be no after dinner sweets tonight, and only one small snack this afternoon. I suspect I’ll be very hungry by the time I get home.

Learn the lesson, Kris: a little bit of effort last night would have prevented any problem now.

I’m using Calorie King to help me lose weight. I’ve used it before successfully, and no other method I’ve tried has worked as well so I’m happy to go back to it again. Many people there have motivational signatures on their forum posts, and one of them stuck out for me this week: “Losing weight is hard. Maintaining weight is hard. Staying fat is hard. CHOOSE YOUR HARD.”

I liked this. They’re right. The choice to be fat is easy -giving into your desires and cravings is easy -but being fat is not. It’s emotionally hard. It can be physically hard, when you find yourself panting from light exercise. Obviously it’s hard on your health. On the other hand, losing weight and keeping it off is mentally hard, but you’re physically and emotionally better off.

Another one I was reminded of was “Willpower is a muscle.  The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.” I believe this is true. I often struggle with cravings and find myself buying chocolate without even consciously deciding to do so. And yet, I have examples in the past that show I DO have the willpower, if I choose to use it. I once gave up chocolate for 5 months, whilst keeping several hundred grams of it in the bottom of the fridge. I didn’t touch it once. After the first few weeks, I wasn’t even feeling tempted by it, and when the date came that I was allowed to eat it, I was satisfied after only a little. And this from someone who normally describes themselves as having a major chocolate addiction!

I am choosing my hard. I am exercising my willpower muscle. I am losing this weight!

On an ‘up’ note, when I weighed in last Wednesday, I had lost 1.6kg! I expect something small, if anything, this week, but that’s okay. Slow and steady wins the race!