Louisa's Weight Loss Blog

When a relationship ends, you may certainly be heartbroken. It is normal to cry and need a comforting hug from your friends and family, fun drinking sessions with friends and so on to forget about the emotional pain. The thing is that most people cannot get to the fun stage until they have finished the ‘wallowing’ stage and this is where the Heartbreak Diet comes in. We have all been there and most women will support you and try and help you by telling you of their experiences and how they got through it. You will get over it and you will meet someone nice again. I didn’t meet anyone remotely nice until Jonny came along which was three years after my last relationship!

Most women will be familiar with the Heartbreak Diet and it can go one of two ways.

• Some women won’t want to eat at all. They will only eat when forced and each mouthful of food sticks in the throat and you always feel sick afterwards. Normal eating will usually resume after a few weeks but women who have lost weight as a result will typically be thrilled with their new bodies and will work hard to maintain their new weight.
• Other women will turn to food for comfort and can’t stop eating. They will put on weight and may spiral into depression and feelings of low self-esteem.

When your heart is broken, you will either turn to food for comfort... or turn away from it.

There are ways around the unfortunate second option if you believe you may fall into this trap.

• Surround yourself with mates and maybe eat with them too. Cook healthy meals for each other and go to exercise or dance classes together.
• Keep your self esteem up, stay busy and treat yourself regularly with small gifts that aren’t food.
• Join the gym, spend all the time you would have spent with him exercising and working for the body you always wanted.

Back in September, I wrote a post about why women crave chocolate and it seems to have struck a chord with the majority of visitors to Total Chunk. I put forward an answer to this age-old question by suggesting that women crave chocolate around the time of menstruation because their body is lacking in magnesium. This is a mineral that is required for bone growth (it works with calcium) but researchers have also indicated that magnesium helps to relax your muscles which is vital when a woman is menstruating for easing pain.

Can you resist chocolate when you're on a diet?

I answered why women crave chocolate and suggested that ladies drink hot chocolate if their craving becomes critical. This has been met with a mixed response, most people think this is a great idea but my mum disagrees. I am always open to (constructive) criticism and suggestions. My mum (Janey to you) said that hot chocolate doesn’t satisfy her, for her it is about the texture and feel of chocolate when she consumes it. Her desire for chocolate is not often satiated by a drink.

So back off to the drawing board I went! We are all answerable to our mothers and the purpose of Total Chunk is to offer a big range of diet tips because not all tips work for all people. What is the point in suggesting you eat only bananas for breakfast if you can’t bear the smell of them?

My first tip was to drink hot chocolate so here are a few more so you can enjoy a little of what you fancy without ruining your diet:

• Buy a small amount of expensive chocolate, you will eat less but enjoy it more because you know it is special chocolate
• Drink coffee (preferably black) with a couple of squares of chocolate as it makes the texture very satisfying and you will savour it more as it lingers for as long as it takes to drink a cup of coffee.
• Switch to dark chocolate. Magnesium is in cocoa and dark chocolate has a high cocoa content so it’s in theory, better for you anyway.
• Share your chocolate bar with a friend

Today is Saturday and I’m feeling much better today. I’m still a bit snuffly and tired and weak but I fully intend to be starting the diet again PROPERLY on Monday. There is no point in doing anything half arsed. When you’re trying to lose weight, you should never resent your choice to improve your life. You should always feel in control of your decision. Once you have decided something in your life has to change you have to decide what must change and how you will change it. People who write down their goals and share them are more likely to achieve them. Ask yourself the following questions and write down the answers, stick the answers on the fridge as a constant reminder of why you are doing what you are doing.

Why have you decided to lose weight?

How will your life improve when you hit your target?

Losing weight and keeping it off is not dieting, it is a new life style choice. You must be ready to embrace these changes. Are you prepared to make the changes necessary?

Take your time and think about it. If your reasons and motivation aren’t strong enough, every day of your diet will be hard, you will resent it and you will probably fail. Don’t torment yourself, be prepared and determined to succeed.

I’ve not done one of my top tips for a couple of days now, apologies for my neglect! I should make it a good one. Now let me see…

Ah yes, stomach crunches! I have fallen victim to this problem. So many women who are trying to lose weight through diet and exercise complain that it doesn’t matter how many stomach crunches they do, they still don’t have a gorgeous washboard tummy. WHY OH WHY OH WHY?!

As a teenager, I bought one of those roll cage dooberries that help you to do sit ups. I must have done thousands but all I succeeded in doing was getting some hard muscle under my flab and the lower part of my stomach remained blobby to say the least. I so desperately wanted to be thin enough to get my belly button pierced but alas, it wasn’t to be. Last year I got a tattoo of a butterfly on my tummy because I figured a tattoo would look better and not get infected. You can see a picture of it on my twitter page, it was taken in April before I put on another 7lbs!

Sit ups are great... but they must be combined with a cardio workout

What was I doing wrong?

Sit ups are fantastic for working the muscles in your upper abdomen and that it. If you want to get that blobby bit under your belly button to catch up and also get toned, you need to do leg lifts and weights. The best place you can do this is at the gym because people have been over-ambitious and given themselves hernias! You can also hurt your back doing sit ups so please do take care.

The reason why I had killer abs under fat was because I wasn’t obeying the most basic of exercise rules: if you’re trying to tone an area as stubborn as your stomach, muscle exercises must be combined with aerobic exercise. So if you want to fix your stomach, go for a run, do an energetic step class, boxercise, spin whatever and THEN concentrate on your stomach crunches. You will see the results you want much quicker as aerobic exercise encourages the loss of fat so that you can see those gorgeous muscles you’ve been toning.

Totalchunk Top Tip: Only do stomach crunches when you have completed aerobic exercise. Your muscles will thank you for releasing them from under their fatty prison! Bring on those weird cut off belly tops that skinny celebs seem to love so much right now!

I have a lot of time to reflect at the moment on my past weight, particularly my weight and appearance when I was an undergrad student. I weighed 10 stone 3lbs back then and I would like to go back to just under that weight. It’s weird, I don’t believe I was particularly active, I certainly didn’t drink as much as I have done since meeting the love of my life this year! My diet became limited in my 3rd year due to dietary problems that have since become less of an issue.

Me and 'Giselle' the stray cat I adopted as a student

I don’t understand why I wasn’t happy with my body back then!  Why didn’t I appreciate my lack of ‘love handles’ and my nice soft and feminine yet reasonably flat stomach.

I was 11 stone 3lbs when I was 17 and was desperately upset when the doctor weighed me and told me the horrific news. I was about to perform at a school concert and was mortified going up on stage not even an hour after this news was delivered. I just wanted the earth to open up and swallow me! Funnily enough, I lost 7lbs of that blubber when the cake shop across the road from where I worked part time closed! The rest of the weight fell off gradually as I became unhappy and depressed with student life.

People seem to divide into two camps, those who eat and get fat when depressed, and then those like myself, who will lose weight. Neither of these responses to depression are healthy! The problem I had was that my housemate was unwell for 3 months and had to go back home. I had no one to eat with so I didn’t bother to cook properly.

Me at university when I was thinner and had nicer arms!

If like me, you’re wondering why  you didn’t appreciate a good body when you had it, don’t worry. You can get it back! As you get older, you have to work harder to maintain the body you want. This is unfortunate but you need to be aware that ‘dieting’ is actually a life style change. You can’t expect to maintain weight loss if you go straight back to doing no exercise and eating rubbish. This is why you must try and come to enjoy the weight loss process. Start to find fun in shopping for brightly coloured vegetables, be more active and enjoy shopping for lovely ‘thin’ clothes.

Reminiscing about your old body is great because it means you can visualise what you’re aiming for. More people will achieve what they are aiming for just because they know exactly what it is that they want – a slim healthy body.