Day Dot

My husband has to have open heart surgery in March next year.

It’s not a shock, we knew this operation was coming but looking it square in the face makes it very real and rather frightening for both of us. 

On the plus side:

It’s not unexpected - we can plan and prepare

Our insurance policy will pay us a chunk of money

And best of all the cardiologist tells my husband he needs to lose weight before surgery.

I think about Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, whose poem about death and dying began with the line “Do not go gentle in that good night”.  My husband is not going into the biggest operation of his life with any risks around his health so we take this advice seriously. 

I'm pretty active but in the 14 years since I had my daughter I've put on 14 kilos. It seems like a good time to join my husband in losing weight. I would love to feel healthier and lose weight.

I have so many wonderful clothes that don’t fit me and I don’t love what I see when I look in the mirror.

We’ve talked about losing weight for years but our lifestyle hasn’t enabled it to happen. We’re big drinkers, love eating and are generally very social people. 

We discuss our strategy. It needs to be simple, easy to follow and above all, something we can stick to.

I’m not prepared to bamboozled by diet fads, pay for food to be delivered or go on any form of crash liquid diet. 

Calories in - calories out should be a simple formula. We’re both fairly analytical people and it makes sense to just cut out the things that are high in calories and low in nutrition. 

Oh dear, those two things happen to be cheese and wine. And one goes with the other. Sigh.

We decide not to set weight loss goal, we decide to do this by timeframe.  The first priority is health, weight loss will surely follow. That way we also don’t need to be weighing ourselves each day and stressing out about the number of kilos on the screen.

There are 635 calories in a bottle of wine. A female’s daily intake for the whole day should be 2000 and 1500 if you’re trying to lose weight. This means drinking a bottle of wine is nearly half of these calories. And what’s worse is that those calories are empty calories. They have zero nutritional value. ZERO.

This makes me feel better. I’ll be cutting out something that does absolutely nothing for my body. 

In addition, alcohol lowers our inhibitions and stimulates the appetite, a lethal combination which lowers willpower and leads to packing on the calories from snacks like crisps (also a weakness). 100 grams of crisps = 536 calories.

Alcohol can also lower blood sugar which causes cravings for sugar and carbs. 

We’re convinced. 

It’s Day Dot of six months alcohol free. We’ve never gone more than a month without alcohol. Can we do it? 

Let the journey begin...