Oh my goodness, hi guys! Miracle of miracles, I am alive!
I bet you probably all thought Iâd abandoned Slimming World, huh? Well, I didnât!Â
 I had a huge career change that ate up all my time while I was getting settled (Seriously, Iâve been pulling 60 hour weeks hehe). However, while I am super super busy, I am also much, much happier. I donât know how many of you were aware but before I was working in a telesales role and was extremely miserable there. But, back in November, I managed to land an amazing opportunity with a start up company handling their HR. Human Resources is something I really wanted to go into but found it very hard to get my foot in the door. Now though, my new MDs are very happy to leave me to my own devices, putting me through college in September to get my CIPD certification and Iâm helping a baby company grow while learning on the job, something I am extremely proud of. Itâs extremely gratifying to do a job where I come home every day feeling like Iâve made a genuine difference. And no more sales floor!
So everything was going swimmingly. weight loss was continuing strong, I was swimming and gymming regularly, I even lost weight over Christmas week... Then disaster struck in January.
Leaving the house to walk to work in the morning, in the glorious Winter sun, I got all of twenty feet out of my front door and slipped on a patch of ice.Â
Now to give you a quick bit of background about me, I am known among friends and loved ones for being notoriously clumsy. Itâs a common joke with my boyfriendâs mum that I am not allowed to help her with dinner dishes because I am likely to drop them. And I canât make it through a single Winter without a trip to A&E. So when I looked out of my bedroom window that morning and saw the ice glistening everywhere, I knew it was a given I was going to fall over, because it happens every time. I actually said to myself âYep, Iâm gonna go down today...â
Cut to me plonked on my bum on the pavement, giggling at my own idiocy while a few nice drivers going past pulled over to see if I was ok and I happily waved them on assuring them I was fine, nothing was bruised but my ego. I felt a bit sore but mostly just red faced. However, on the attempt to get to my feet, pain went through my left leg like I have never known and I was back down on the ground again.
It was fortunate really that I was so close to home, because at that point I was able to pull my mobile out and ring my boyfriend and housemate, who came running to scoop me up when I explained I was beginning to suspect Iâd broken my ankle. Even more fortunately, my housemate is a trainee nurse with a medical science degree and 5 years experience in hospitals under her belt, who took one look at my ankle the size of a grapefruit and insisted we went to hospital.
Weâre both still giggling about this whole thing while weâre on the way up there and when weâre wheeling me in, AND when we spend the next two hours waiting, because this is so typical of me. Iâm expecting to be told itâs a mild sprain, called a Drama Queen by the housemate and sent packing with a couple of ibuprofen. The trip to the hospital is just a big, funny adventure right up until the point my X-rays come back and it turns out Iâve managed to separate the bones in my ankle in a rare and very severe sprain called a Sydesmosis Diastisis. I was informed it would have been much simpler and quicker to heal if I -had- broken my ankle. This was way worse.
2 days later Iâm being wheeled into surgery to have my ankle rebuilt with a bunch of pins, before being told I canât put any weight on it and have to keep it elevated for 2 months.
And thatâs what I did. For the next 2 months I laid motionless on my sofa with my leg propped up, not budging except to go to the loo or wash. I couldnât even get up to my bed. The sofa became my bed. And itâs leather. So you can imagine how much that sucked. I wasnât able to do anything for myself, not even get a cup of tea. Absolute misery.
I have to admit, I fell off the wagon for a while there. I went completely off my food, would go two or 3 days without eating, and then when I did want to eat, all I wanted was rubbish, like cake. Why cake I have no idea, because normally I canât stand the stuff, but apparently my healing body went haywire. My boyfriend and housemate made gentle attempts to steer me right where they could, but when I stopped eating for days at a time, I think they got to the point where if I actually showed an interest in any sort of food they werenât going to question what it would do to my weight loss.Â
This carried on for maybe the first month or so, then as the pain started to improve I began to find my motivation again. I knew that when I did eventually start walking again carrying any extra weight was not going to help and I had to sort my mentality out. So the boyfriend and housemate helped get me organised, left me trays of good food each day while they were at work, and when I was eventually able to weigh in again 7 weeks after my operation, I had managed to lose 4 pounds! Thatâs not a lot I know over a period of weeks like that, but for me it felt like such a victory, because Iâd been able to pull back from the bad choices I was making and undo any damage I had done.
Iâm still losing weight now as well, although it is very, very slow. Despite being nearly 4 months since my accident, I still cannot walk without the aid of crutches and moon boot, and cannot manage more than a few feet. I am far from healed and on the 26th of May I actually have to go for a second bout of surgery to have my pins removed as there is likely to have been some breakages. The doctors have said it will be at least another year before I am walking unaided again.Â
Immobility and ups and downs in my mood have been a real challenge. I am a terrible comfort eater. And even when I am 100% on point with my eating, the weight losses are still small. I know that consultants at Slimming World always say you donât need to exercise to lose weight, that Food Optimising on itâs own is enough, and I believe thatâs true. But I think the lack of almost -any- movement in my day to day life at the moment is having a detrimental effect on the speed of my weight loss. I spent two weeks being 100% on the new SP plan to see if that would give me a boost, because everyone goes on about how itâs this magic wand for weight loss: I lost 3 pounds in that two weeks...
Itâs been a bit of a yo-yo. But I keep fighting and overall the pounds are going down. Slowly, but they -are- going. And I will not give up because I have made the commitment to myself that this will be the last time I try to lose weight. This is the last time I will be this weight, and I will persevere and get to target. I have plenty of reason to, not least because if I had been my original weight when Iâd slipped, my ankle would have been a compound fracture (where the bone breaks through the skin) and that would have been a year in a metal cage.Â
Iâve also decided I need to pick this blog up again to help with my motivation. The less isolated I feel when I am struggling like this, the less likely I will be to make bad choices. Particularly when I am back to being stuck on the couch recovering from my second surgery in a fortnight.
So, Iâll be back to posting weigh-in results each week, along with interesting food ideas, etc etc!
And finally, just to show that I have been doing some things right during this rough period:
Current Weight Loss: 4 Stone 3.5 Pounds
(Iâve also gone down 4 clothes sizes now. I can officially shop in Primark!)
