Anzac, I hope the stuffed kangaroo lasts at least until new year. My aunt has a cairn terrier whose favourite toy is a little teddy bear that it drags all over the place!

Well I got though lunch without eating anything unplanned, although I did finish my meal with quite a few apricots and cherries.

Does anyone esle deal with that thought that a meal must end with something sweet (I think it the moment I finish eating my lunch or dinner). I guess it’s a hangover from growing up, when every main meal finished with dessert. I do my best to steer my gaze to the fruit bowl to meet that need – more easily done at this time of year when there are so many tasty options.

Extra post to LJoyce – yes, my upbringing was the same – the big meal was in the evening and we always finished with dessert. My mother often baked custard puddings or bread and butter puddings, especially in winter. Never hear of those dishes these days. I’m sure they were much healthier for us!

Hey SHs. Just wanted to quickly check in. Thanks for all the congratulations regarding my weight. Today it was 67.1kg because yep I succumbed to Chinese last night. Argh! Well, never mind.
Nice healthy food today and also for the next days leading to Christmas. Actually Christmas will also be healthy, just too many choices and ummmmm, cheese. I love all the cheeses and will be having some and trying to control myself a little bit lol.

Hope you all have a lovely holiday period and I will try to post more tomorrow about my unplanned and very busy (read stressful) day. All is good now and time to make some dinner and relax.

All the best xx

Morning all…

Yay LJ, you are sounding very positive and so glad your controlled NFD went well. Mine did too yesterday and that included saying ‘no thanks’ to three boxes of chocolates being thrust in my face and a large slice of carrot cake. Christmas! We also always had dessert after dinner but I’ve not done that for so many years I don’t miss it. Most of my girlfriends turn to the dessert menu before the rest but I rarely have dessert these days. I am a savoury person…so if there is a bowl of chips (hot or cold) or bread of any sort I find it much harder to resist

Sorry to hear the first day of your holiday was stressful Quacka. What happened?

What a crazy busy day you had Intesha! Hope you enjoyed having the grandkids over.

BetsyLee, you are doing so well and your positiveness is motivating – thankyou. Re hair, my Mum used to tell me that women with older faces look ridiculous with long hair. I don’t agree; and anyway we should be able to do what we like.

LJ – I doubt the kangaroo will make it past Christmas day, even with a controlled playing environment. My last cat Oscar used to have three stuffed monkeys that he dragged everywhere. We still have them as I can’t bring myself to throw them out. Oscar and I were best buddies for 17 years and I still miss him.

Time for Maxx’s walk…way past time according to the stern stare we are getting. Get off your computers Mum and Dad – it’s all about me me me me 🙂 Bless his little furry toes.

Will check in often, have a great day everyone

Good morning everyone

It’s a beautiful morning, even though it’s cool and grey outside and there is a cold southerly blowing. We had a storm early this morning and it absolutely poured down again. Needless to say my garden is now suffering from excess water! Tomatoes are splitting and their leaves have a spot disease all over them. Oh well. We have new ones planted already and some seedlings that we grew ourselves.

Yesterday was a funny day. OH decided to do some more declittering and got rid of our old sound system. It was state of the art when we bought it 20 years ago, being surround sound and all. We have been wanting to buy a new system for a while but last time we were in the shops we got so confused and just left it. So yesterday we went to just buy a sound bar to get better sound from the tv. Well, we ended up leaving with an expensive full sound system with huge speakers and man, does it pump out some sound! It’s awesome. I’m telling people it’s my Christmas present from OH 🙂
So the stress was when we had to set it up (read when OH had to set it up. I am hopeless with those things). There were hardly any instructions. In fact there was double page instructions on using batteries in the remote control (I kid you not) and no real instructions on making the sound come through!
OH was getting very very frustrated. There were lots of naughty words being said. He is actually really good at setting this stuff up and knew that he had it right but we couldn’t get sound! Once the cables were plugged in the receiver came up with ‘use tv to setup’. Well he couldn’t get past there. The tv wouldn’t recognise the receiver. For one and a half hours he tried everything, all the while swearing. A lot. Lol
Anyway we ended up ringing the place we bought it from. They ran through a couple of tips with us. So we had to use a fibre optic cable which is new to us. When we plugged it in, the plug wouldn’t go right in like a normal cable. It was really loose but we thought it was just how it was supposed to be. Well the tech guys asked if we had removed the little rubber caps from the points in the plugs. Omg! No wonder they wouldn’t go in properly! So that was first problem fixed and I thought it would just be right after that. Ummmmm, no.
So he still couldn’t get past that message to use TV set up. He mucked around for another half hour and finally he fixed the problem and, low and behold, we had sound! He said he had tried every button on the remote several times except for this one little one that said ‘back’. He pressed that and it took us out of the ‘use TV set up’ message and I don’t know what else he did but within a couple of seconds we had sound. Unbelievable! He was so stressed and frustrated and I was stressed and feeling hopeless because I could do nothing to help! Anyway it’s all good now. It’s actually awesome 🙂

So my water weight has left me (from being naughty again and eating Chinese). Weight this morning is 66.4kg. A new record for me again. I’m really happy. I don’t expect that trend to continue over the next few weeks as I’m on holidays but I will be happy to stay around the 67kg. Maybe if I stay away from Chinese food……lol

My family arrive today so we are going to have a full house. The kids asked for burgers tonight for dinner. I thought that sounded good as they can be made fairly healthily. Nope. They only have meat cheese and tomato sauce. Lol
I’m going to have meat and salad and stay away from the bread. It will be hard as the smell of fresh bread just attracts me to it so much! I can do this. I am having cheese though. 🙂

Hope everyone has a happy day x

Good morning from mild Melbourne,
Less humid and more blue sky than yesterday, so it feels positively normal.

Anzac, I’m glad you only got the small hail, and hooray for losing 600g this week, smack bang in the middle of Christmas craziness. What an achievement!
Happy holidays!

Thanks for your kind offer to give me a crazy dog that would chew my entire home to pieces and make me vacuum even more often. Just quietly, I’d prefer Thin’s lizards.

LJoyce, can’t believe you don’t want Miso 😉 she’s asleep on her sheepskin at the moment, looking so sweet and innocent.
So glad you got that lovely controlled day yesterday.

We grew up with dessert every night, and while I spent years not worrying about it, as soon as I am feeling a bit tired, or deprived, or not quite full, I want dessert. My current answer is to make a drink of hot all-milk cocoa, which I have found I can enjoy without any sugar in it. On fast days I have a cuppa made of mostly hot water, a couple of drops of vanilla, and a little milk. When I have beetroot kvass, a little wine glass of that makes me feel I have rounded off my eating too.
Fruit is a wonderful end to a meal.

Betsylee, apologies for slopping threads. It doesn’t help that the Silly Season Challenge thread is mostly made up of Southern Hemispherites. On this forum you can always be confident that it is the rest of us being crazy, not you.
The middle of your healthy weight range is the perfect goal. I found that I lost weight quickly at first and then slower and slower, but that was such a good way to do it. I just sort of glided into my new stable weight.
How exciting, seeing your shape start to change. These are special times.

My mum made desserts like your mum did. She was a great cook. We were young and growing and active, and outside all the time, we needed those puddings!

Intesha, wow, is that what it is like when grandchildren get bigger? I adore the toddler years, but imagine them playing in their rooms without needing my constant attention! And all that cooking you manage to do while babysitting. Just wow.

Quacka I do hope today is not a stressful one. Sending good wishes.

It is day before fast day for me. I had a comparatively good sleep. I am planning on getting lots done!

Best wishes to everyone

Good morning SHs

Penguin, now that’s a way to ensure you don’t get too much screen time.

Cinque, I’m sure I’ll weaken soon and adopt a cat. It will probably only take one visit to the RSPCA shelter – what I’m worried about is deciding they all need homes and taking more than one!

Quacka, enjoy the family arriving.
If you have any fussy eaters you can do a “build your own burger”. I’ve done that at a family dinner – laid all the components out in a line so they could add just what what they wanted. (Less work for you too.)
Glad you finally got the sound system sorted – you know you need to ask a teenager to set up any new technology don’t you.

Thin, I’m hoping the graduation day all went very well.

Anzac, you really have found your groove now, refusing all those sweet treats.

My scales tell me I gained almost a kilo in a single day yesterday. I ate carefully, no sweet treats, no binging, in fact I worked out it was about 6500kj (1550cal) for the day, which should be less than my TDEE as I went for a walk yesterday. I hate my scales and as soon as christmas is over they are going to the back of the cupboard for a very long time out.
I am planning another careful NFD today.

I put my head down on the sofa “for just a few minutes” a few hours ago and slept soundly for a couple hours. So now it’s almost 2am! So many posts here to catch up on. LJ, I love the link with the sweater Christmas cookies. What pretty colors and designs! Intesha, using fondant to frost the cookies sounds like a great idea. Having to wait for the royal icing to set for a few hours before continuing would make it a long project. Do you make your own fondant? I’ve never used it since I don’t bake or decorate cakes much, but it looks like it would be fun to use it on a cake. I have never seen it in a regular grocery store around here though. I guess a cake decorating shop would carry it. Or Amazon 😁 I have seen recipes on the internet though.

We almost always had dessert after the evening meal when I was growing up. It was a way to bribe us into finishing the regular meal. (That, and the starving children in China.) Pudding was one that we had quite often, probably because it was easy to make. But there were pies and cakes as well. In the summer it was often fruit. We often have fruit at the end of a meal now, but from the fruit bowl, not served with the meal. We have a big fruit bowl on the kitchen bench that we keep filled with fruit. This time of year it’s mostly apples, oranges and mandarins, but in the summer there’s a bigger variety. And we eat a lot of bananas year round.

LJ, if you weighed each day you’d be used to the unexplained fluctuations that seem to occur for no good reason. (Also a good reason not to weigh every day!) If you’re eating mindfully your weight might still be up for a couple of days, only to take a big drop a few days later, even though you haven’t changed the way you’re eating. I see that happen often. FDs usually take care of it, but not always. That said, I let the numbers on a scale get to me too sometimes. Maybe a time out for those scales is a better solution.

Thin, thank you for the complement on my picture. I think losing weight makes a big difference in how old a person looks. You look much younger in your “after” picture as well. Extra weight is hard on a person’s body. What I thought was aging knees when climbing the stairs in our home turned out to be mostly knees having to carry too many extra kilos up those steps! I would have complained loudly if I had to carry a big bag of potatoes up those stairs every day,

Quacka, I can sympathize with frustration of setting up a sound system. OH will put off doing it until he’s ready, which often means that I take on the job. It’s hard for me to not want to try something new as soon as we get home from the store, so I always rip into the boxes as soon as they’re in the door. I also have more patience with things like that. It seems like there is always at least one thing that seems not to work right or some little obscure part that you have to run out to buy to make it connect. (Google and YouTube can often be great resources.) I think it’s because technology changes so quickly and it’s also not something you do that often. OH gets involved when things start going together or I get frustrated and the old system is all disconnected. 😗

Penguin I love hearing that you would carry a toy for your dog’s on a 12 hour flight across continents. And I love the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We’re about a 3 – 4 hour drive from there now, but used to be about an hour and a half when we lived in the Bay Area so we visited several times.
Cinque, our op shops have a lot of good quality stuffed toys too. I never thought of that for dog toys. But our dog likes toys that squeak. He doesn’t damage most toys very quickly, but he does manage to break the squeakers. I order squeaker parts by the bagful from Amazon to replace them.

Well, time to get some sleep. Hope everyone has a great day.

Lest it should be thought that I cleared off and left OH to do the chores, it should be said that in the afternoon we walked in the woods – we both had things to do when we got back so it was a short one, three miles. This is such a regular event that I forgot to mention it, and I cooked the beef.

Good morning SHs

Cinque, that’s a very good choice of fridge for a small space, excellent sized freezer. I suspect you have the same problem I do when cooking for one, there are leftovers that need to be frozen for another day – I think large families rarely have that problem!

Penguin, a bracing walk on a cool day sounds lovely – I’m dodging heat to get my exercise at present. Enjoy the last of the mince pies.

Cali, I did used to weigh every day. When I first lost weight it was part of my maintenance strategy and it drove me nuts then too. I’ve decided after listening to advice that I’ll retire the scales and just weigh again at the end of December.

I’m just about to go and collect my aunt and uncle for a drive up to the Keynton Valley cherry farm. They sell 1kg, 2kg and 5kg boxes and I get 2kg boxes of the large (28mm+ diameter) export grade cherries as christmas presents. I check with the family each year to see if they still want that as part of their gift – there’s always a definite yes on that one. I’ll also treat myself to a 1kg box. Because they pick early each morning these cherries are really fresh and easily last 2-3 weeks in the fridge.

Have a good day everyone.
We will also go out to morning tea, but as it’s a FD for me I’ll just have a cup of tea today.

“….. a brace of pheasants hanging on the garage door.” It doesn’t get much more Christmassy than that Penguin. And my OH would love to visit your local aviation museum.

Thank you LJ, it was a stellar night. The proud parents danced the night away until we were thrown out. As it was really just a meal with few hors d’oeuvres reaching our crowd, there was no scales damage and I’ve remained constant at 59.7kg for several days in a row. I’d rather be closer to 59kg but I’m happy to have stayed below 60kg throughout the silly season thus far so no complaints. And, today’s a FD!

CalifD, thanks for your comments. I am one whose face gets ‘drawn’ when I have less weight so I always think I actually look older than I did before (well, OK I AM older than I was before). But it was really great to be able to get up and dance and not feel self-conscious about how I looked. (I can’t sing but I am a pretty good dancer if I do say so myself!).

Utterly revolting weather and the forecast 33C for Xmas Day has been revised to 35C. I had already told everyone that they can expect upwards of 35C because it’s my turn to host. Never fails.

Anzac, sounds like you are in for some hot days too. I’m taking heart from your post that perhaps our neighbours might consider staying inside with their air-con. They’ve been particularly obnoxious in the pool since the school hols started and have now added outdoor speakers to the mix. We have totally forfeited our outdoor amenity, have not enjoyed a meal outside in over a year (whereas we used to eat all meals outside in the warmer weather), cannot entertain outside and even pottering in the garden is now unpleasant. My hammock is collecting dust and there’s not a chance of reading a book. That’s outdoors. Inside, we can nearly drown them out if we have all the doors and windows closed, the air-con and the range hood both going and some music of our own playing. When I mentioned all this to a woman at bridge (who was having a moan about her own neighbours), she called me a killjoy. Looking forward to winter. And moving to the country, Penguin.

Betsy, thanks for the bridge encouragement. I’ve put that awful performance behind me. Well done on your fasting success. Sorry for the confusion regarding the second thread. In the past, it’s brought people together from various threads but, as someone pointed out, it is mostly people from the SH thread this year. And it is hard to keep up with more than thread.

Cinque and Minka, have a lovely chat! Wish I were joining you.

Time for some housework in preparation for our guests.

Gday, great to hear from you. Those are really high temps for the Christmas week. Even though I’ve been cold all week, once it gets over about 35 in the summer, I prefer indoors too. That’s just too hot. I’ve been feeling overloaded with food and sugar lately too. I would have a really tough time cutting outsugar completely like Cinque does, but I feel almost hung over from it many mornings. I clearly need to cut way back.

FD have been changed to Wednesday and Friday this week. OH, DS and I always go out to dinner on Christmas Eve, but for the past several years our neice has been having a noon to evening open house on the day before Christmas so we’ve moved it to dinner the night prior. Then we are having them here for Christmas Day, so lotsof eating in the next few days. I’m going to try fasting up until the actual meals to minimize some of the scale shock afterward. I love the holidays, but will be glad to see things get back to normal again.

Thin, sorry you’re having to deal with noisy neighbors again. Maybe you need outdoor speakers of your own along with some obnoxious music. 😁 That would be hard to deal with.

Hope everyone is having a nice day.

A controlled day today almost OMAD, so that’s pleasing.

Cinque, Unlike many of you, I have a real sweet tooth, so it would be challenging to omit that sweet taste. However, I’m finding that a single boiled sweet is enough to satisfy the expectation of “sweet” after some meals, and that helps. 82.7kg on the scales yesterday a.m., so down 2.3 kgs so far for December – much easier for me, being at my high weight rather than close to maintenance, where most everyone else is.

Penguin, you mention avoiding daily weighing, and LJoyce, you’re hating your scales – years ago “they” always said not to weigh more than once a week; more recent research has suggested that even with the ups and downs, the daily weighers tend to lose more weight. I have 2 sets of scales; the cheap bathroom scales, which weigh 2kg light so I make allowance for that, then once a week I weigh with my “good” scales, which also give me body fat %, BMI, muscle mass%, total body H2O% and BMR. I think weighing daily can catch any slips before they go too far. Frustrating though when you know you’ve been eating properly and there appears to be an increase.

Quacka, Great your sound system was finally up and working! How frustrating trying to set it up. Congrats on the new low weight!

Cinque, yes, I’m trying to get to my mid-weight range. I’ve often lost weight, but have always seemed to sabotage myself at around 70 kgs. That’s when people start commenting about how much weight I’ve lost, etc. It seems to trigger me back into eating badly and on the weight goes again; I wish I knew why I do it. I’m hoping that with support, I can get past that hurdle.

Anzac65, Re hair, I always thought that longer hair on older ladies was “not done” because the gray hair shows more easily. Can’t see any other reason – does it look more scraggly? Who cares. If you want longer hair, enjoy it!!!!

CalifDreamer, I was interested with your comment about always having to finish the food on your plate because of “all the starving children in China” – in our family it was those in Africa. My logical mind always asked myself, how could my eating have any effect on them??? We were also told to eat our bread crusts as “it will make your hair curl”. My response was always that my hair was already too curly, so why would I want it curlier?

This is turning into another good day. No breakfast. I saw my youngest grand daughter this morning and spent a couple of hours with my grandson. A very light lunch and then OH and I walked a couple of miles in the woods. At this time of the year the afternoons are usually quiet – very few birds and the large mammals are asleep, sometimes we hear the wild boar snoring. This afternoon there must have been someone else in there because a herd of fallow deer, about a dozen, ran across in front of us. With the leaves off the trees and the undergrowth all brown we wouldn’t have seen them if they had stood still, but something had obviously spooked them.

A leisurely cup of tea will be followed in due time by a light meal and then I might play my guitar or do an on-line language lesson.

Good morning everyone

Betsy you are doing great with your weight loss! Well done.

I have managed to stay in the 66s all weekend with yesterday’s weight at 66.6 kg and today’s at exactly the same. Yes, I did step off and back on just to check that the scales weren’t broken!

thin, my neighbours are really nice people but I think I have mentioned before how stupid they are. Did I tell you about the neighbour that always seems to whipper snip or start mowing when we are having lunch on our deck on a weekend? He is retired and has all week to do this but somehow manages to always do it on a weekend at lunch time. So yesterday, I was telling my mum about this before lunch. Half an hour later we had just served lunch and went out on the deck to eat and yep, he started whippper snipping! I was so cranky. If he does this on Christmas Day I am going to be telling him! Oh and do you see now why I wanted a loud sound system? I will repay his thoughtfulness 😉

It’s been lovely having my family here although very busy at the same time. We took the kids to the beach yesterday and then to the lighthouse and I had my first swim of the season. The water was beautiful.

Today mum and I will start preparing a few things for the big lunch tomorrow. I love cooking with mum, she’s just awesome. Tomorrow morning we will be up and at it first thing.

Penguin, your walk in the woods sounds lovely. You have a way of describing things that form very clear images in my mind and are like reading a book. It’s a great gift you have.

I was going to mention the hot temps coming our way but then I read GDays post above and our forecast of 37 degrees seems like nothing compared to those temps! Hope you and LJ can manage to stay cool enough.
I always think of the poor animals too in that kind of heat.

I hope everyone has a lovely Christmas Eve and a special Christmas Day. Enjoy whatever you are doing and all the best to you and your families.

Just wanted to say it now as I may not catch up with you all until Christmas night or Boxing Day.

Take care and have fun xxx

Hi everyone, still manic here preparing for tomorrow so no time to reply to everyone.

I’m hoping lots of housework will help with weight loss. Not eating badly but not overly well either but once Christmas day is over we can relax and have more time.

I hope everyone has a lovely Christmas day and those down here stay cool and Penguin and Cali please stay warm!

LJoyce, I think whatever happens over the next few days stays there. The fact that we aware of what we are doing and can put the brakes on must mean we are accountable for our actions. We do not have the iron willpower of Thin but we all approach this WOL from different angles.

Life is way too short and should be enjoyable. Enjoy. They were a gift 😉😉

Iron willpower of Thin? You haven’t been keeping up with my posts, Intesha! And BTW, LJ didn’t eat those truffles on a FD.

FD today – went okay; could have been better, but under 1000 cals, maybe 900 cals. Now I’ll enjoy dinner tomorrow evening at my friends’ place. No family in Melbourne, so after church I generally have a quiet day, but usually out for dinner or have folk to my place. Out this year. Might make it an OMAD????

Penguin, I sighed in envy at your walk description – fallow deer right in front of you. How wonderful! Thanks for clarifying the scales weighing. I guess I mis-read your post. I also weigh daily, and agree, provided the overall trend is downward, I’m happy.

LJoyce – Haigh’s lemon truffles? Yum, yum and yum again. They wouldn’t have lasted long in my fridge either. I’d probably omit something else to make up the calories. Still it’s not too bad – about 60-65 calories each is less than 200 cals for three, really not so bad.

Merry Christmas to everyone, and I’ll catch up again in the evening on Boxing day.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3c/01/36/3c0136940087782258b16b7cc8eccbfc.jpg

We couldn’t do this without each other. Merry Christmas everyone!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nrFeHEbeVqM&feature=youtu.be

7am Christmas morning in Australia
Hi fellow 5:2’s

Wishing each and every one of you, and your families,
a very 🎶🎅Merry Christmas🤶🎶 and a 🎊Happy New Year 🎉
filled with much love, laughter and happy times, and best wishes for 2019, as we head into a new year.

Catch up with you all from 1 January when I get back into this great WOL again – thank you all for just being here in 2018 xx 💝

Merry Christmas!
Welcome here TigerAnne!
Lovely to see your post Arelkade! And Penguin, Cali. and Quacka!

I’m just doing the quickest post inbetween making finger food for lunch.
I had the loveliest catch up with Minka and Mr M yesterday!

I’ll have a lovely proper catch up next time
Best wishes all!

Merry Christmas SHs

I hope everyone is on time with their many preparations and not in a mad panic. If you’ve forgotten something it doesn’t matter, there will be plenty of food and cheer without it.

Have a lovely day with people you care about. I hope your feast day food brings you the pleasure it should, then none of us will resent the next FD.

I’m heading out to drop off gifts and then to my niece’s for the rest of the day – she apparently is in a mad panic, if her her text is to be believed.

Talk later, have a glorious day everyone.

Merry Christmas everyone! We spent three days cleaning and preparing then once everyone left at 9.00pm last night the house looked worse than before we started! Ha ha, pretty normal for a big get together. We had a fantastic day and a lovely time with family. Madly cleaning up now but looking forward to some down time soon so I can read everyone’s posts leisurely

Ate way too much yesterday but now can relax and think more about healthy eating

Good luck in the heat everywhere in Australia and stay warm in the Northern hemisphere…

9am, Wens, Adelaide, hot

Cali, sounds like you have everything organised. I am not a pork eater, but I think all of the pome fruits go very well with pork. I remember my mother in law always served a pear and walnut chutney with leg ham and that was lovely.

I am just fortifying myself with a cup of tea before heading to the local shopping centre for the Boxing Day sales. My state has traditionally had quite restrictive trading laws compared to the other Australian states. This is the first time that suburban shops have been allowed have ever been allowed to open on Boxing Day – it’s still restrictive though, they aren’t allowed to open until 9am.
I am not planning a massive spend. I had previously planned to get a new toaster and kettle with any money I received for christmas. I will also look for a pair of walking shoes and as T2 are having a 3 for 2 sale I’ll stock up on my favourite teas. After I’ve accomplished that I shall depart the shopping crowds and escape to a quiet house.

I hope Cali & Penguin are having a nice Christmas day/evening and that the rest of you are recovering well from christmas day.

My main over indulgence yesterday was cheese as someone foolishly put the cheese board directly in front of me. I am fasting today, I imagine I won’t be alone in that. I have another family lunch to go to tomorrow so today is very necessary.