Hello Audrich

I’ve been meaning to respond to one of your posts for the longest time but never seem to fit one in; it wouldn’t be a short one.
I don’t do short….

(I don’t think we have ever ’spoken’ directly to each other but once I found a lovely post from you to me on Cathyork’s thread but it was months after the event and I felt a bit of a berk responding so late in the day; I do apologise though for not responding. It always seems rude to me to not respond to someone who has taken their time to acknowledge your post. I also can’t remember you posting on THE LOACA thread because if I was ‘around’ I most certainly would have engaged with you………
anyways. Moving on)

I do read much more than I post on though and I have really sympathised with all the trauma and stress in your life and your perfectly natural and understandable struggles with your weight loss.
I think you were really wise to just give yourself (and hubby) a break from the forum and the FD for a bit; it can be seriously derailing and demoralising to read how ‘easy’ some other folk can find losing weight on this WOE (they do tend to be a lot younger than us however in the main….).

When you think about it logically; you generally have to be ‘in the right frame of mind’ to go on any ‘diet’ and your frame of mind has just been off the radar. You have had to contend with losing a beloved friend and another one very ill….you have had to support your FIL through his operation….
You sound as if you have a very stressful job….you have a family and husband to care for and keep ‘together’….
Lordy, who wouldn’t crack under all that stress and reach for the wine and chocolate?

Someone posted the other day that stress increases cortisone and cortisone blocks fat metabolism…..so all your good work can easily have come to nothing because of this proven fact. Look at what you posted on the 17..04.14.….
You stated the obvious yourself just recently; one of the only good things to come out of all this effort is the FACT THAT YOU HAVEN’T GAINED WEIGHT THROUGOUT! You could have been gaining all during this traumatic time and you haven‘t; so well done you.

And I also remember reading you saying that you ‘were worried about putting newbies off the FD if they read about how hard is has been for you’….
Well you aren’t responsible for every other person on this forum; they have to try it for themselves and see how they do.
With your thread and some others, including THE LOACA; I think we see how difficult it can be to stick to anything in life when life has seriously high levels of stress in it. Awful things in life that befall us all at some point don‘t just magically stop because we are on a ‘diet’.

Your account of the FD is a ‘warts and all’ kind of story and, in my opinion, all the more valuable for it. I hope things in your life calm right down and you are able to focus on the relatively trivial objective of losing weight.

With very best wishes
PreciousBooBoo

Good to hear you are back in the game and feeling good, aud, I agree with Precious Boo-boo’s wise words. You were entitled to get derailed with the grief, the stress and no doubt a lot of those mundane problems that simply mount up. And despite all of it you haven’t put any on. Brilliant. Of course you think of Jill, but hopefully over time you’ll start to think of her not only with the sadness of loss but also with joy at having had such a great friendship with such a lovely woman.

I’m fine, having to work hard. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, as a translator I go through periods of feast and famine. It’s definitely feast time at the moment, as I juggle two big projects. But I’m not about to complain. Moan I might, but I have the great good fortune to do a job I love and which, so I’m told by people who know about such things, I’m actually rather good at. Then there’s a dissertation sitting on the back burner. I have until end September to deliver, but I still have to stay on track.

Of course, I could toddle off down the day centre for a nice game of bingo and a singalong to Vera Lynn (as some would have me do at my great age) but I shan’t be doing that any time soon – or ever!

On the 5:2 front, the plateau began to crumble at the edges in early Feb and somewhere between 2.5 and 3 kilos have slowly but surely slipped away. Still sticking around the middle, though. But I do have very nice shoulders!

Hi
Thanks simcoeluv for your advice – much appreciated.
Day 2 today & I’m finding it much easier than last time – I have started having breakfast later on a fast day (9.30 instead of 7.00) & lunch too (1.30 instead of 12). Weigh-in is going to be a Thursday so hopefully I’ll have some good news by the end of the week.
That’s all for now as need to crack on with work.
Lou

Hi Aud,

Thought I might find you here. Our paths haven’t crossed for a while, so I thought I’d track you down, just to say hello. Hope all is well with you. I’m now in the final straight of the MA, working on my dissertation at a time when the day job has also picked up speed, so I’m a busy bunny.

However, I did have the time to go with my gorgeous great-nephew – the one you thought your daughter might like – to see War Horse. We both loved it and he was great company, so easy and so interesting to talk to. Thankfully, he’s not a paragon of virtue. There are still moments when he sits scowling in a corner, hoody up, as if to say ‘I’m 15 and I hate everybody’. Kids. What are they like!

Hi aud,

Thanks for your good wishes. I should have got back to you much sooner. Like all the other would-be MAs embarking on their dissertations I had to do a work-in-progress presentation, which went down amazingly well. It’s weird, I can’t handle parties or other social gatherings, but I can stand up in front of a bunch of people and speak at some length and feel really good about it.

Am I right in thinking you are in uni admin? At UEA by any chance? Do you fancy moving to London and showing some of our admin staff – in Registry to be precise – how to do their job? While the academic and library staff and one excellent departmental administrator at Birkbeck have been amazing, the whole of Registry should be sent to bed with no dinner for at least 6 months. Since 2010 when I started the conversion course which preceeded the MA they have:

Lost my degree certificate and my PGCE and tried to accuse me of never having sent them in in the first place – forgetting that without them I wouldn’t have been admitted to a post-grad course. The above-mentioned departmental admin lady fought like a tiger on my behalf and eventually got Registry to a)admit they’d lost them and b)pay for replacements.

Told me in September 2012 that I only had a conditional offer for the MA, because I hadn’t provided references. In fact I had, both of them from Birkbeck staff, way back in January 2012! Fortunately I’d kept all the relevant emails telling me that they had been submitted. Then they claimed I hadn’t paid the first installment of my fee, without which I couldn’t be admitted, when it already showed as paid on my credit card a week or so before.

Finally – and I’m not sure who got this one wrong – some other bunch of admin twits claimed in January 2014 that I hadn’t found myself an MA dissertation supervisor (which I had way back in the autumn of 2013)or submitted my proposal (which I had in December 2013). The prof in charge of the MA programme, who knows and likes me – she gave me my best-ever grade – was kind enough to email me that she had been pretty sure that it wasn’t me who had to screwed things up, the problem must have occurred at their end.

As you can imagine, all this palaver had me feeling paranoid and wondering if someone up there was trying to tell me that I should toddle down to the day centre for a nice game of bingo rather than try to pretend I had a brain. Fortunately, the feeling didn’t last very long. In any case, being dyscalculic (number dyslexic) I wouldn’t be much cop at bingo!

What a lovely surprise, aud! Such a long email when you must have so much other stuff to deal with.

Thanks for your sympathy. Hearing things from your point of view as a uni administrator is salutary. Clearly reductions in funding are leading to all sorts of foul-ups, as people are overworked and probably having to meet all sorts of impossible targets. No wonder you are stressed out.

What really got up my nose was the way in which the admin people kept trying to tell me it was my fault that all these things went wrong – that I’d forgotten to do this, or I hadn’t paid that yadayada… Oh BTW, since we were last in touch I realised that I never received my Graduate Certificate in History of Art and Architecture, i.e. the qualification at the end of the pre-MA conversion course. Fortunately, I got a sensible person on to the case and got an immediate replacement free of charge.

I’ve since learned from a translator friend who ran a workshop at Birkbeck during the vacation period, that the admin people denied that they owed her a sum that ran into thousands, i.e. payments made by attendees at the workshop – B’beck were just providing the venue. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing when they refused to budge, she set the Society of Authors (of which the Translators’ Association is part) on to them and they paid up double quick.

Yes, I’m in the middle of writing my dissertation, on French cinema in the 1930s and the British New Wave of the late 50s and early 60s. Fortunately, this has been a good year for translation so I can just about afford to duck under the radar and not take on any paid work until the beginning of October. I’m feeling positive as I’ve done most of the necessary research. It’s now a question of cobbling it all together in a coherent and readable way.

Finally, progress report on gorgeous great-nephew – the one you thought might suit your daughter, so that together they can hoover up all the food and still remain whippet-thin. He’s now nearly 6 ft, seriously dishy and basically a very nice young guy.

It’s GCSE time, folks, and he does seem to be getting his act together and the forecasts from his teachers are excellent. Once the mocks are over, he’s going to apply to various sixth-form colleges to do his A-levels. That way he’ll have to raise his game and not carry on being like great-aunt Hermaj was, slobbing around but still getting annoyingly good grades. He’s dead keen on going to uni, but as a good all-rounder he’s not sure which way to go although the word “architecture” has cropped up a few times, but it’s still early days yet.

Lovely to be in touch again. Look after yourself,

Hermaj xx

Hi aud,

Very, very quick hello. Lovely to hear from you. I’ll read your post nice and slowly and then reply at length on Tuesday or Wednesday. The dissertation is due by 6 p.m. tomorrow so the hatches are well battened down.
Happy fasting tomorrow.
Hermaj x