Week 43 WI

And I've been a bad, bad girl.

Well, actually I thought I was pretty good, if I completely blank out the 2 days I spent in London at my friend Anne's.

Saturday was lunch at Carluccio's (hey, I had the tomato soup for starters) and Sunday full roast lunch at Brown's (oops, did I mention the oven roast camembert we shared for starters?). Both meals nicely topped off with sparkling wine (the kind that goes down a little too easily).

I actually thought I had limited the damage as I was too full for dinner both days, but snacking on twiglets and pretzels washed down with white wine obviously didn't fit into that plan.

Anyway, back from temptation and the damage as measured this morning is 0.4 kg / 0.9 lbs on.

I've been back on track since Monday, but still not actually tracking. I'm just really tired with the whole counting points and I think it actually has a negative effect on me: I eat healthily all day and listen to my hunger signals, but when I point everything I've eaten and I'm under points, I suddenly start wondering what else I could eat. If I don't add up the points, I don't actually think about having that extra snack.

Anyway, I've decided to give pointing a rest for a while longer and see how it goes. Fingers crossed.

Happy to report...

I am really happy to report that I have managed to stick to my points so far this week!
I'm back in Brussels for the weekend and peeked at the scales this morning, and it seems I'm down 1.3 kg / 3 lbs from Monday, so I'm guessing Anne's scales - which I've been weighing in on for the past 2 weeks - are slightly higher than mine. Very good news :)

I'm really enjoying London, and am starting to find my way around Sainsbury's and M&S for lunch and dinner... have discovered the "count on us" and "be good to yourself" ranges and really enjoying trying new things and finding the healthy options out there - so much more choice and variety than here in Belgium!

For lunch I usually have either a healthy choice tortilla or some sushi or some chicken tikka bits from Sainsbury's, with a huge portion of fruit - mango chunks are my favourite! That sees me through to the evenings, and if I am peckish in the afternoon I can buy a banana or an Alpen bar at the school cafeteria - which is great :)

It does make me realise how little options I had up till now at work - if I was hungry in the afternoon and hadn't thought of bringing something with me, all I had to choose from were Mars bars (bleh!), M&Ms (yum, unfortunately), a bag of crisps and other similar niceties... I seems society in general doesn't really help people make healthy choices. TV ads are always for the foods you can't eat, or else for the "miracle" products promising to make you thin (usually also full of stuff you don't want to be putting in your body, like aspartam). And vending machines are full of high calorie, low filling snacks.

If there was a fruit vendor on every street corner instead of a newspaper stall full of crap, we'd be healthier people, I figure.

Anyway, on this rant, I'm off to enjoy the rest of the weekend and will report in after WI on Monday :)
Have a great weekend!

Life in London

So, as I mentioned in my previous post, I have been in London for a week now and am nicely settled into Anne's great spare bedroom and my TEFL course.

This past week has been amazing - probably one of the best weeks in my life (except holidays of course ;)).
It's a mixture of the doing something I'm really enjoying, learning new things, meeting new people, doing more exercise and feeling I'm moving towards a goal that's gotten me feeling so psyched.

First of all, the course is great. There's 10 of us in the class and we have 2 really nice teachers, Ray and Jack. Ray's a jolly red-haired Irishman, while Jack's a quiet, well-spoken English lad. Can it get more stereotypical?

The other people on the course all seem really nice. Most of them are doing the course with the intention of moving abroad, to Spain, Japan, India or other places. A few are doing it to move back to their home land after living in London for several years. There's a nice mixture of Brits and foreigners, with me being somewhere in the middle of the two.

Last week we sarted off softly, with no teaching practice, but lots of other really interesting classes and exercises about how to structure and prepare lessons, how to manage a classroom full of student, English grammar, peer teaching and Welsh - yes, the whole class took 4 lessons in Welsh so we could experience it from the point of view of a foreign student. Freaky experience. But I can now say "Hello, pleased to meet you" in Welsh ;)

For the peer teaching, we had to each give a 5-minute class to 4 of the other students, on any subject we wanted. I chose - for some obscure reason - to teach them to make origami fortune tellers. I had a really good time preparing the short lesson and found it very comfortable "teaching" them, got some good feedback from everyone and from the teacher, so I hope once we start teaching real students next week it'll continue like that.

We also had a class on learning styles, which I found really interesting. I was already familiar with the NLP-based types of learning styles: visual, auditory and kinaesthetic. But I was convinced I was a very strong visual learner. After doing the test, it would seem I am just as much a kinaesthetic learner as a visual one. Auditory on the other hand is not my strong point. In one ear, out the other... :)

Tomorrow we have to hand in our Unknown Language Journal, documenting our experience learning Welsh. I still have about 1000 words to write tonight, but am already really pleased that I actually already started it on Thursday and got 1200 words on paper - take that, my inner procrastinator!

So, so far, so good. Tomorrow we will meet the student we're going to be teaching and have a first 15-minute session each, animating an activity with them. Then Tuesday the serious stuff begins. I'm lucky, starting with a reading activity, as some people got grammar revisions on their first day!

But I'm looking forward to it all, and really glad I made the decision to quit my job, take the course and start out on this journey...

Week 13 WI

I'm almost a full week late posting my weigh in results for week 13, but it wasn't much to write home about as I had a stand still. At least according to Anne's scales.

So, results for week 13 are:
Loss: 0 kg / 0 lbs
Total loss: -7.8 kg / -17.2 lb

In the meantime, and more importantly, I have arrived in London and have completed the first week of my course, so I'll be posting a bit about that in a few minutes.

I've been walking to the course every morning and walking home every evening, it's a 30 minute walk one way, so I'm really pleased with all the extra exercise I'm getting. And Bart was just over to visit this weekend and we've been walking all over London, at least 2 hours a day yesterday and today. Which just about makes up for the afternoon teas at Costa's :p