My headaches are gone and the dizziness is only just there. I only notice it if I really pay attention. I feel wonderful and ready for an energetic day. I’m looking forward to doing some yoga when I’ve finished covering the phones for work and I want to get out and about. I always know when I’m healthier inside because I instinctively and automatically seek out physical movement and doing ’stuff’.

Very gratifying.

I haven’t yet taken my garlic this morning, but I’ll be doing that as soon as I go downstairs in about ten minutes. I wonder just how many other remedies are really out there waiting for us. I know cranberry juice is very good for cystitis and such, not that I’ve ever needed it. Still, it does make you wonder what we’d all be like if we weren’t fogged down with so many chemicals and additives in modern food. I like to think we’d all be a bit calmer and more lucid.

I’ve just found out that my brother’s not going to the farmers market tomorrow after all. He’s ‘probably’ going next week. That usually means he won’t bother so I may take a trip there myself instead. I’ll ring him later and see if he wants anything while I’m there. Last night I made a chicken casserole without using processed food and I have to say it tasted delicious. Mind you, a large part of that might have been that I didn’t eat it until I was actually and scientifically hungry! They do say the finest food you’ll ever eat is when you’re hungry, don’t they?

Tomorrow is my weigh-in day and I don’t really expect to have lost anything yet, but I’m committing myself to posting on a Sunday as a form of discipline to help me with the fat control. I’ve also got a host of subliminal recordings and scripts that I’ve used in the past which I’m going to use again regularly and I’ll post some of the details here. I’ve got commercial recordings and a very helpful home-made recording. I may put up an mp3 of my recording in case anyone wants to download it. It’s always worked for me when I use it; I just have to remember to keep using it.

If anyone is interested in a copy of my recording please let me know in comments so I can see whether it’s worth sorting out facilities for downloading.

I took my blood pressure this morning and it was very, very high, which made me feel low. So I’ll be eating garlic again this morning to bring it back down. I’m lucky that I don’t really interact with people face to face all that much so at least I won’t offend them by reeking of garlic. If I have to meet people I’ll still reek of garlic and that’s their problem, rather than mine, since I won’t give up the advantage it confers. Quite a magical food, really, when you think how much it can affect your blood pressure. I guess that’s one of the reasons why Mediterranean people tend to live longer lives on average than us people in cold, wet, grey countries!

There’s a long list of things I need to do today, although since I’m staying at home again I’ll have trouble with a couple of them. I think I’ll make a list in Outlook and just work through it, starting at the top. There’s a chunk of personal stuff in there mixed in with the work stuff so I’ll have to take that into account, naturally, but even so it should be possible to get the most important jobs out of the way. I read somewhere, forget where, that you should employ the BANJO technique for getting things done. It stands for Bang A Nasty Job Off and is intended to avoid the situation where you leave a job until it festers. If you get it out of the way early you feel better and get on with more afterwards.

I really need a couple of items from the office, but it means driving all the way over there and back. I’ll have to see how my dizziness is after I’ve taken the garlic – I can always go tonight if necessary and ask Marie to drive.

Right, on and up!

BUT, a couple of hours later when I checked my blood pressure it had dropped really significantly to 122/70 which is an excellent number. Perfect, in fact. Earlier, it had been 145/85 after resting in bed all day and taking all my medication. After a lot of activity (for me) and the garlic I got the better numbers. I must say I’m happy with the result and we’ve bought some fresh bulbs of garlic and I’ll take it every day from now on until I reach my target weight. I’ll stink to high heaven, but I’m really more concerned with staying alive right now than being nice to be near!

The pounding headache I had all day has gone and the only thing I regret is not having taken the garlic sooner. It’s not really very nice to ‘eat’, but the alternative is so scary that I’ll pop my cloves like tablets and smile when I’m doing it.

It’s already tomorrow so I should get some sleep and be sensible, but I like being up at this time and pooching about on the web.

I saw a really good-looking blog here and tried to post a comment on one of the posts, but couldn’t – don’t know why. But it was the post where nubiana decides to keep it secret from her mum that she’s going to the works gym. I think that is so funny! And how lovely to have a gym at work.

One thing that has happened is that it’s fired me up to get up and do something, instead of whingeing about it. I can’t start running races tomorrow and I can’t really take up serious weight-lifting, but I sure as hell can do some very gentle yoga and some equally gentle walking. I have to be patient enough to allow a very small amount of activity start to take effect. Then I can up the intensity bit by bit.

I took an enneagram test online which suggests I’m a type 5; the investigator. I guess I tend to live in my head more than my body and that’s part of the problem. In fact, most of the time I feel like I’m a brain with a body hanging down off it. It’s pretty weird to feel that way, actually!

So, I’m going to adapt a few of the ideas I’ve seen on other blogs and apply them here. I’ll start posting my activity, food consumption and results and hopefully the shame of broadcasting this publicly will make me a little more accountable. That’s the idea, anyway.

Here goes.

Height: 5′ 6″
Age: 47
Weight: 23 stones 6 pounds, or 328 pounds for American readers.
Short term target: 20 stones or 280 pounds
Mid term target: 18 stones or 252 pounds
Long term targe: 16 stones or 224 pounds

I’m realistic enough to accept that I may never again weigh under 12 stones, as I did for my wedding and thought I was fat then! Honestly, right now to get to 20 stones would improve my health enormously.

I certainly won’t weigh myself every day because that can be counter-productive, but I will weigh myself once a week. I suppose my clothes will tell me whether I’m losing fat.

Please join in and help me if you have a few minutes spare every week. If I don’t post, or I seem to be going off the rails please make an encouraging comment. I’ve decided that when I reach 18 stones I’ll give away an Apple iPod (Nano) to one poster whose name will be selected in a draw. You have to make an encouraging post though!

So I’ve taken an old-fashioned remedy, which is lots of fresh garlic cloves. If you’ve never tried swallowing cloves of garlic chopped up into large pill size you don’t know how nasty it is. And the side effect of the taste in my mouth is not so pleasant either. By the time my body’s absorbed the garlic I should have less of a headache and much, oh much, more stinky breath. Let’s be honest, second-hand garlic coming off somebody is nobody’s favourite smell. While I love the taste of garlic in food I don’t think much of it when it’s lingering on a person! Still, I’m so worried about my blood pressure at the moment that frankly I don’t care how bad I’m going to smell as long as it works. I know it does work because I once used it to normalise my blood pressure before a medical exam and it did the trick, even if the nurse did keep pulling away from me.

My family keep telling me I should ‘just’ lose weight. Of course, I’ve never thought of that – stupid me. If all it took was to ‘just’ do something I suppose we’d have no cigarette addicts, heroin addicts, food addicts, sex addicts or any other ‘addict’. I seriously need to lose weight, that’s a given, but if all it took to be able to do something was to know you had to do it the world would be so simple and we’d all be millionaires. If I knew what my real problem is with weight issues (and it’s clear that those issues are in my mind rather than my stomach) I’d be at least halfway to solving them, I believe. Unfortunately, that level of self-knowledge so far is eluding me and I remain unable to understand, explain, or influence, my need to eat to excess and gain weight on such an on-going basis. Perhaps one day they’ll invent a pill that you ‘just’ take and it sorts out whatever’s wrong in your mind. I’ll be in the queue.

Now, being fat doesn’t make you a bad person so if anyone fat (let’s not be too sensitive – we fatties all know who we are) is reading this and thinking they’re hearing some self-loathing going on then please think again. I hold myself in healthy high regard and like who I am. I am simply unable at this juncture to analyse a major bad habit that is detrimental to my health. Maybe I have a fat gene? Perhaps it’s my glands? I’d actually quite like to be able to blame something outside myself instead of acknowledging that I have the capacity within me to do something about it.

I’m at an age where I’d really like to be able to do something physical with my time. A stroll in a park, visit to a museum, session at a gym, that kind of thing. I would like to, but if I try to do any of those things, even the most basic walking, I find it very awkward and unpleasant. When I’m a more reasonable weight I know that I enjoy exercise, but getting to that more reasonable weight seems like an ever more distant prospect. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but it sometimes feels like it’s running out of battery power.

If anyone out there has successfully battled their weight demons and recognises my symptoms I’d be very glad of any pointers. Really.