Hi All!
I’m aussie determined to do a good fast today as my godson’s wedding is just two weeks away and I really want to look and feel my best – it should be a good old knees up! 🙂
SJ – sending you lots of hugs (((( )))). It’s hard to stay upbeat and positive all the time and you have been doing so well. I hope you find the gardening therapeutic and restorative. Take care, pal xx
Gyps – thank you for the kind words xx. I can’t wait to see the poetic results of the WTF tour! The world is such an interesting place with you and your various personalities in it!!! 😉 Brilliant idea to start a WTF spare change jar, so that, in the end, when you count up the contents you can say “WTF…how much?!!” 🙂 🙂 Well done on your fasting and exercise regime and the start of the weight loss again, good on ya!
CG – how kind of you to be organising a surprise for the reunion. I don’t think I got an official title, but maybe I could be the overseas correspondent or the foreign secretary!! Unfortunately, my OH is going off the idea of travelling next year as he thinks we have overdone the spending on the home improvements. Also, his godson, who lives in Sydney and was one of the big reasons for making the trip, has decided to come to Ireland next June, so the need to visit him is now gone. Oh well, it was a nice dream while it lasted 🙁 Sounds like you had a lovely relax out on your deck, well deserved xxxx
Doggy – delighted to hear that there is light at the end of the tunnel, but you are right to go slowly and to take things easy.
LD – you have made a great start, so don’t stress about how hard some days are; it’s up and down all the time but in general it does get easier, so hang on in there.
CQ – glad you found FD easy and wishing you the best of luck with the food project.
I’m looking forward to the christening of my grand-nephew (the one home from Sydney) on Sunday; it will be a great family occasion. FD going well so far, just had black coffee and water. Aussie determination is working well today…..BRING IT ON!!

CG, happy with being tagged by you. ‘Matron’ sounds like a promotion coming from a nurse! Time for z’s. Nite all xx gyps

PPS I know I’m madam secretary but……..I haven’t kept each of the previous lists of the team as they change so often. So was the email we got from DIIP – was that Yvonne? Anyone got a better memory than me (that’s NOT hard to do folks!!!). Hoping someone will remember. sj XX

It’s Tacofox, suejen. May she return. Her title is truly “WTF!”. A true Battler. I’ll light a candle.

Glad you are coming to the reunion. Don’t forget the Minutes! And may we beat the flab together!

Fit. sob. Hope you make it next time…..

Buildings shelter, buildings last,
Buildings hold our mem’ries past
Buildings rise from dreams of men
Thus dreaming is important then…
To nail and mortar give its due
But ne’er forget the dreams… of you!

Stay upright all! definitely going to bed now (got waylaid by the extra posts) will post the Northern reunion venue possibility tomorrow.

Nite CG. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz gyps

Hi Milena – what a nice idea….I’m sure we could plan something; maybe even with some of the people from the other threads that I’ve seen you post on; even though I don’t know them, I’m sure there are lovely like-minded people scattered all over these pages. If it’s just us two, you could come to Dublin and I’ll show you the sights 🙂
Had very long fast – a bit unintentional due to waiting for the builder to leave; but he got delayed when his welding machine blew a fuse. He couldn’t fix it, so now my pump is out of action and I have no cold water!! Bummer! 🙁 This day just keeps getting better and better. So, portion control went out the window and I had chips with my dinner, followed by a huge scone with jam – double bummer! 🙁 🙁
Oh well, back to the drawing board tomorrow xxxx. Have a great weekend, everyone!

Morning everyone! Logging in after a few months and can’t catch up…. So just joining you lovely people from this point on. 🙂
I have been fasting the last few months still and not losing any weight, so determined to lose the next ten kilos by March reunion…
I think not having the thread support has made a difference so hoping to log in every day.
Have a lovely, shiny day team!

Xxx
Lotus
Current Weight 73.5
Goal Weight 63.0

Hi Lotus! How lovely to have you back here, old friend!! 🙂 🙂 Yes, we all need the regular check-ins here for the support and inspiration to keep on track….not to mention the laughs! 😆 I’m hovering about one kg over my goal…haven’t quite managed to undo the damage of four weeks in France and some hard partying after I got home!! 😉 I’m hoping to lose that kg and maybe one more in the next two weeks, but after today, I think it’s going to be a bit of an uphill struggle!

Dead right, GG! I’ve gained and lost the same one or two kg for the last two months, but hey….I’ve had some wonderful days and nights out with meals, treats and chocolate – so what’s not to love about that? 🙂 20kg down, back surgery and months of pain, meds etc….you’re the clever one! XXX

GG . Fancy missing sending best wishes to my nearest neighbour. So sorry. Hope the weather is just as great today for you as it is here in my neighbourhood. So looking forward to meeting you and perhaps talking to you by phone beforehand once UP sends me your contact. ???????

‘Skuse all the typos. This autocorrect gives me the mutters.

HI Dawg well……any of your WTF interpretations could be true! We hadn’t even thought of the willowy tall figure one….though I think a few of us are shorties like me so can’t really stretch to that one (pun intended)! It was posted by PH as WTF ie Wed Thurs Fri then our clever Fit said our reunion should be the What the #$@* reunion & we all loved the idea!! So WTF it is. So glad for you that you reckon you’ll be good to go as of Thursday next week – you made it Doggie! And here’s to those kilos coming off.
Lotus wonderful to see you back here. Have missed your inspiring posts. Welcome back & yes hang around for the motivation. Can you come to the reunion next March??
Thanks PH. Yes I went to a counsellor for quite a while with our daughter. Very helpful & have a psychotherapist friend who’s helpful too. Generally coping well except when we miss another birthday & of course Christmas coming up too. This daughter lives not far away – only 1 1/4 hours away physically but might as well be on the moon. But we have more to do with our son in San Francisco & have very regular skype calls. He’s never coming back either but he’s very happily settled where he is & I love my DIL to bits!
Going to stop replies there as I have pies to make for the footy. Yeah GO West Coast Eagles!!! If you don’t have a team you can barrack for mine. OH will probably be hoarse by the end of it – whichever way it goes. If the umpiring is bad he’ll be even worse! Must put that bottle of champers in the fridge too just in case we have a win.

Have a great day all doing whatever you enjoy. And keep in mind all that weight that many of us want to lose over the summer. BRING IT ON!!! suejen XXX

Morning All. Nearly as windy as us gassbags in the North today! Such a vibe of anticipation running through the thread! I am finding the tour an excellent focus. It IS great to have a timeline and something to look forward to!
But what a lot of activity! Ladies! So lovely to be getting to know you all better, but please be warned, my Email account is a nightmare of millions of unanswered messages, mostly spam from my internet mistakes! You all are not in that category, by any means, but GG’s got lost in there. So it’s good she told me it was there, on here. And I will go fish for you shortly, now I know PH. Just don’t anyone misinterpret a lack of reply via that medium if it isn’t timely. Likewise the phone. (and I have said that before).

My hut is not equipped for all this space age communication technology! (well, it is, potentially, but I am not up to scratch with it all! And really don’t want to be, truthfully. I won’t hold a mobile phone to my ear for more than a minute, nursed too many brain tumours, from clerical types for that)

I keep diligent to only this forum (and then have periodic gaps you may have all noticed!) and I only suss out my family on facebook every so often. So get messages from the kids there (and lined up on my phone when I remember to check it.) I communicate on my own terms, never on demand. It’s therapeutic in essence. So best I explain it to you all on open forum. Because I am already forgetting what I said to whom in the background buzz and want us all to be equal.

Too many pieces of me used to be stretched to cover the responsibilities I used to take on, for too many. (what with my multi hats!) and maybe boiled to ‘Synesthesia’,for mirroring people’s never ending pain! (love that ‘nutshell’ term for my scattered bits!) So, in a nutshell, I retired from the rat race. That’s been my road to peace and recovery, here in my nature retreat (which used to be our family holiday shack). I exited the merry go round when I decided to return to my feral roots and, as I have warned before, Don’t usually bother with looking at Emails and usually only charge the phone up when I want to use it. Which isn’t often and then only for minimally functional purposes. Other than as a camera.

I like being a hermit and slowing the world down to my terms. Having died once from it myself (cardiac arrest) and losing a son to the stress’s of a similar nature and origin (Hats galore – my right arm, clone and best friend)
– I refuse to get serious- ever again!

Apart from all that, I’m trying to write straight, in book form, nothing serious, maybe “Mills and Boon” standard. Ha! so far it all comes out in parody so may give up and switch to “Bills ‘n’ Doooom!”. So unless one of you teachers wanna finally teach me proper English and the dratted ‘punctuation’, Don’t expect much improvement! It’s a werk in progress! And requires long periods of staring into space, talking to the little people in my head, ignoring the outside world and occasional housework! You are all guilty already of distracting me from the pursuit of fiction , back to reality. Haarr, har, ha! Because you’re much stranger! and very Moorish.

Phew! mates, I really need a holiday from my brain’s drain, so please let us make it to this mystery tour without waking the monster! I don’t want to start multi strands of communication and lose the magic of our forum. Or lose any of you in a spam jungle!

PH, you poor love, thanks for being patient. A ‘moticon’ is ‘an electronic generation of a visible image depicting a mood or personality’. it’s the merry little smileys and motivational images you post. It’s you. You could change the title to ‘Merry motivator’ if you prefer. xxxx

So have to switch to facebook and wish my Grandson happy birthday (16) . will get back to post next yr’s possible venue up North eventually. xx gyps

Hi all, I to have had a wonderful morning, emails from UP and a lovely phone call from GG followed by pics of CG, Lotus and of course GG. So great to put faces to names. GG and CG don’t look anything like I imagined them. Talk about a couple of great looking gals. You certainly look great if that’s what weight loss makes you look like…bring it on…lotus my image in my mind was close to your beautiful picture. When i get the courage I will send you my pic. I will probably have to get hubbie to take one as I do not do photos. I am the one taking them, for a very good reason, however may have a recent one if I look closely.

GG I have had visitors ever since you rang and we are going out for the night at 3.30 so no chance of looking into anything till tomorrow at this stage. So much support offered for me to consider. What an amazing group…???

gyps. “Merry Moticon”sounds perfect now you have told me what it means…and good on you for dropping out of the rat race! Don’t worry about the email I sent you. Just let it waft off into cyber space and go wherever unanswered emails go…love it..

so CG that is my official title for AD.and my name is Carmel..is that all you require? You have lost so much weight. I hope to follow in your footsteps. My starting weight was 107kgs. So am hoping to lose 20 kgs which will take me to 87kgs. I was never under 11stone when I was young and had a perfect 36..24..36 figure. Mind you most of the top 36 has dropped considerably so don’t imagine the hourglass will be there this time WHEN, not if, Imake it. I CAN DO THIS TOO??? I am 1/4 of the way there already. Expect this to slow considerably from now on but great to get this start.

Sorry you are all having such bad weather. Perfect here on the North Coast of NSW. Well better go and have a shower and get gussied up to go out for happy hour and dinner. Talk to you tomorrow.

Afraid they’re not even in the race CG and Dawg. Yes watching but pretty frustrated. Xx

CG How do your boys cope with the wind? Pepper seems quite spooked by it. He didn’t bat an eyelid when we had a huge thunderstorm but doesn’t like this very windy weather.

Hi All!
Well, Gyps – I don’t know what vibes you were sending out over the ether, but I dreamt about you last night and it seems that you worked some magic and I found out at the very last second that I would be able to go to the reunion. So I threw a few clothes into a case and raced outside where a taxi was waiting to take me to the airport…that’s where the dream ended; but who knows, maybe it will come true!!!
Apologies, CG – how could I get that wrong!! I’m amused at you talking about your ‘lily whites’….you should see mine!! Blue white is more like it with more than a tinge of corpse-like!!!
PH – delighted you are in such good form and will be able to make the reunion. You should rejoice in your title ‘Merry Moticon’ as you really liven up the thread with your posts and little images. 🙂 I will have a terrific time at the wedding; my godson is a lovely young man and I am very proud of him and he is marrying a wonderful girl. The wedding will be held at a beautiful stately home that has been turned into a wedding venue. A big gang of us will stay overnight and the ‘craic’, as we say in Ireland, will go on into the next day.
Doggy – love your version of WTF – we can all dream!! I agree with you about cutting back on carbs so try that and I’m sure you feel and see the difference.
SJ – sorry your team didn’t play so well in the final but hoped you managed to enjoy the excitement anyway.
GL – congrats on the great weight loss, keep up the good work 🙂
GG – wonderful, sunny, positive post….very uplifting! Yes, I think Milena and I will try to hook up next March and we can have fun together as well as skyping you lot xx
Ireland will be playing Italy in the rugby world cup later, so hope to cheer on the team for that. Better get some chores done first…check in later xxxxxxxx

Oh, Gyps, I’m receiving you alright!! 😉 What a hoot you are, I just love your sense of humour 😆 Very glamorous pyjamas too!!
Well, as I suspected, my FD yesterday didn’t really produce results because I was so hungry by the time I got to eat, I totally overdid it. I had a fun evening with my sister watching Strictly Come Dancing and drinking peach schnapps…lots of it!! A friend came over this morning and got my pump working again, so at least I have water now….thank God, or you might have been able to smell me all the way from Ireland!! 😉 I decided to do some upcycling of old furniture that was in my old shed, so I got some chalk paint (which gives and antique/distressed type finish) and painted an old table a lovely sage green….very pleased with the result. It will look lovely in my newly built outdoor area. I’m going to do some shelves and a corner unit next….having fun experimenting and enjoying life xxxxxx

Hi all, apologies for the gruesome pics, They were just meant to encourage anyone who might be feeling self conscious about their weight. Or think it’s impossible to turn it around. If you’re on this thread than YOU’RE DOING IT! AND NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE WITH AD! It just may help others to share what we have gone through to get to that immutable belief. That’s the mission of this thread as I see it. Heh, heh, I look better now and thanks for your commiserations, Fit, Suejen , Dawg and CG, but I don’t need ’em. I scared the boogie man away! (my fat ass, that is… )

And yes, CG they were staggered shots of my resurrection process once I finally called a halt to the rising scales and set about fixing me. The first shot was nearly 3 years ago (at 99kg) and the other a year later (at 94kg) It was the restoration of a healthy sleep pattern alone that dropped 5 kgs over a year. I can’t stress enough how important it is to sleep properly (are you listening, Milena?) and I thought I was on a roll, but I plateaued at 94kg’s and despite joining a gym and exercising my butt off, it never reduced it!

The point is, the lack of deep, relaxing sleep, messes up our blood gasses and electrolyte balance as well as maintains a high level of cortisol(fight, flight, fright adrenalin booster) this maintains a state of internal stress leading to internal exhaustion. If you find yourself feeling constantly drained and tend to have sighing intakes of breath after a prolonged cycle of shallow respirations, then be aware of the lack of effective down time. Your systems need to rest and reboot. Prolonged sleep deprivation (from any cause) plays havoc with the nervous system, immune system, digestion, muscle tension and is a direct cause of depression, anxiety and insulin resistance. Which equals packed on abdominal fat around organs, (thus hindering their function) and fluid retention. Onto the inflammatory diseases like joint pain (arthritis) Diabetes and ultimately, heart attacks and cancer.

I’ll take the gas mask any day. And have proved it all by eliminating most of the above complaints. I now know that one can’t lose weight without healthy amounts of sleep and exercise alone won’t do it either. “You are what you eat” true, but it’s also the way you eat it that matters.

I made the new year’s resolution and started on the 5:2 path on Jan 1st, into the 10th month now. I did get down to 83 and even saw the 82’s flashing, but got the winter slacks, went back up to 87 and now am down to 85 again. It’s a yo yo all the way, but it does give us control and will respond to the effort we put into the basic aspects. 2 x 500 cal days, and portion control MOST of the time, with the occasional feast. Highly doable. Just keep it simple. And if we add moderate exercise the benefits double, both fitness and wt, loss-wise. That’s my plan. I am back to basics. So the old girl in the gas mask is in pretty good shape these days. Don’t be afraid to try one if you need help to sleep. It saved my life, I think.

Happy to enlarge on the subject if anyone needs to know how to go about getting tested for sleep apnoea. If you snore badly and wake up often you probably have. My best advice is, fix it or you’ll ultimately die from it.

Sorry to be so dire, but I’d rather you all had gas masks than insulin resistance and immovable lard! Mine is moving ladies. Wahooooo! I have seen a flash of the 84’s!

Grand final night. GOOOOO! COWBOYS! XXX GYPS

So That brings me to the subject of your swollen knee, Dawg. Spontaneous bursitis (inflammation of a joint capsule) has to have a systemic cause if it’s not the result of physical injury. Are you getting adequate sleep? Did you get viral bloods done? Consider the causes of joint inflammation. RA, OA, Gout, rheumatic fever, Q fever and various other flue-like viruses. Thyroid function can come into it. Remember the Obs for thyrotoxicosis and some fevers include a degree of tachycardia at rest, have your sleeping pulse checked. And watch out for secondary kidney involvement. Basically, you need bloods done and I wouldn’t take no for an answer.

as a matter of interest, Google this site , Pure Horizon IOPlus, and check out their blurb on Iodine deficiency. It may seem a typical hard sell supplement site, but I had most of their list of symptom (gravel voice, hair loss, tired, panic attacks, etc) even tho my thyroid function tests were not showing high or low according to the standard parameters for oz, but we don’t all fit the norms, iodine is not much looked at. And race, climate and origins can be varying factors. I now know it was a combination of things, including diabetes and sleep apnoea, but that was my first step to improvement and it really helped. We store iodine, but it depletes with age and replace ment isn’t always effective from diet alone. So I sent for the iodine tabs (which you can’t buy in oz). I took them for 6 months and they made a difference. especially to the voice timbre, falling hair and my panic attacks stopped. Hope you feel better sooooon Doggy! Luck xx Gyps… will try another candle..