Z muses

I went to a wedding yesterday and received compliments on my appearance and weight loss (this is so double-edged, as it so evidently means "gosh, now you aren't nearly so fat as you used to be!). And today, a friend whom I see regularly asked me if I'd lost more weight because it looked as if I had.

So maybe I'm doing something right after all.

Still haven't actually weighed myself though - that is, I occasionally pop on the bathroom scales, but I rarely have my contact lens in when I'm in the bathroom and they are old scales with a wobbly needle, so although I can see that I'm still the right side of 9 1/2 stone, I can't tell by how much.

Anyway, the more I think about it, the more sure I am that a lot of us who want and need to lose weight and eat healthily and take exercise simply eat more than we realise we do, because we've been doing it for so long that we don't notice. I've been observing people and, on the whole, the slender ones stop eating when they've had enough and the fat ones clear the plate. The fat ones pour cream onto a gateau which already contains whipped cream. Having been on holiday with a group of people recently, I couldn't help but notice that if they had cereal, they put more in the bowl than a standard portion. And the little individual jars of jam were scraped clean - a thin person used the amount needed for the roll. So, if you asked each of them to keep a food diary, even when they wrote down the same thing, one of them would have eaten much more than the other, and been quite unaware of it.

The thing is, I think I've got to understand what not to do if I want not to put weight back on. It's all right when you're dieting - you just avoid what you're supposed not to eat. But it's so easy for the quantity to creep up. And it is all right to have the occasional tasty extra - but again, 'occasional' can easily become several times a week.