163.2 @ noon when I woke up. Today has been successful so far with the exception of an unplanned cheese & ham toastie I bought when I went to meet my sister for coffee. Breakfast was a smoothie (frozen raspberries, red pepper, tangerine, cayenne and grape juice), a piece of wholemeal toast and 1 banana microwaved with cinnamon, vanilla extract and a small amount of butter. Then I had the toastie with my sister (305 calories), a cappuccino, another coffee (black) with C at Starbucks and just made myself a Caesar salad with quorn chicken, romaine and celery for dinner. It's 9pm so if I have anything else it'll be veg because that's literally all I stocked my fridge with today. Cabbage, leeks, stir fry, celery and lettuce. Either way I'm only at a total of 970 for the day, so technically I still have ~200 calories 'wiggle room'. It may however be spent on wine as I find it helps me sleep.

It's alarming to me just how quickly I seem to be able to fall right back into restricting whenever I'm at home. I don't know what it is about being here that seems to facilitate that mentality. Part of it is not being able to eat whatever and whenever I please. My health-consciousness in London seems to increase ten fold. I never get take-out with the exception of sushi literally once in a blue moon. The fridge is always stocked with low-calorie or healthy foods, and whenever we have a cooked dinner it's always protein and veg and maybe some organic pasta. Then there's the not being able to eat at night. That's a big one. By 11pm everyone's usually in bed and the house is dark. I live on the mezzanine floor (essentially the attic) and don't have a door, so a sneaky midnight trip to the kitchen is out of the question. I eat less meat. I walk more; I also sleep more, and wake up earlier. All of these factors mean that some kind of weight loss is always inevitable here whether I'm thinking about it consciously or not.

The question is when (or where) to stop. Technically, it's only 10 pounds until I hit the number I was maintaining last January, when I met L and had just gained some rebound weight off the back of illness. Ostensibly I was 'slim', not underweight nor overweight but perfectly healthy and with pretty much nothing to worry about. Having gained to 172 this year, however, 153 seems like a dream. The worry is I get there and still feel fat. I certainly felt fat at 153 last January, but that's because I was comparing myself to my post-flu low-weight of 137 pounds. To be perfectly honest, I think 137 is about as far as I can push my body when it comes to weight loss. Not that a lower weight wouldn't look nicer, but for the sheer fact that when I weighed 137 my bones started jutting out. Being almost 5'10" has its perks.

Update: Had the rest of the Quorn chicken with some lite salad cream and a glass of wine. So total calories today = 1170. Watching House and sipping a diet ginger beer. Slowly weaning myself off Coke and so far it's been doing wonders for my water consumption.