According to my army of fans* I need to blog more often

* it's a small army.

Things are still going well. Saturdays are exciting for me now as it's when I have my weekly Lighter Life meeting and get weighed. Is it a bit sad that it's now probably the highlight of my week? Today I'd lost another 3lbs, so that's 1st 2lbs in total - in three weeks! I'm delighted. But to be honest, I find clothes sizes more tangible, so even more motivating is the fact that, before I started this process (crank up the Westlife and cut to voiceover: "Isabel's journey to The X Factor hasn't been an easy one...") I was a size 16-18, depending on the shop and the item in question, but I'm now firmly a size 16, all over - my size 18 jeans are dead to me. I'm sure a lot of skinny minnies reading this would cry if they were firmly a size 16, but it's an achievement for me, alright? I'm not going to buy any new clothes until I'm a 14, so for now they will just all have to be a bit loose, and I'm not going to buy loads of clothes until I'm a 12, when I will pat myself on the back and eat one tiny piece of chocolate.

So, who wants a visual? As I said, I've lost 1 stone 2 lbs, which is 16 lbs. Here's some shit that weighs 16 lbs:

This fish (sorry Liv, I think it might be a koi carp):

The bowling ball that Barack Obama famously scored just 37 points with (ooh, topical):

Kacper Skulska, aka the biggest baby ever born in Poland (he's the one on the left. I think):



So it's basically like I've given birth to a huge fish/bowling bowl/giant baby. Weird.

All in all, it's been a good week. Socialising has become enjoyable again (it was particularly enjoyable to watch all of my workmates get horrendously drunk at Jo Carnegie's leaving do on Thursday. I felt quite smug. Oh no, I'm one of those people now...), and now that I'm really able to see/feel results, it's very motivating. Also, today's meeting (two hours of "counselling") was really interesting - we learned about ego states, which I'd imagine is already a familiar concept to anyone who's studied psychology, but it was all new to me. It's to do with how we (and the people around us) either behave like a critical parent, nurturing parent, adult, rebellious child, free child or adapted child. We can all be all of those things at different times, and you can take them literally and apply them to your own relationship with your parents - I definitely have one critical parent and one nurturing parent (you know who you are!), but both of those things have positives and negatives. For example, a nurturing parent might have "treated" you with junk food when you were growing up, which could lead to a dodgy relationship with food now. I also act like a critical parent quite often, in that I'm quite, um, vocal about my opinions of people, even my friends (if I've got any left after admitting that) but wait, wait, don't hate me, I'm nurturing too - I like looking after them if they're sad.

Anyway, I could go on about all this for ages, but it's a bit too self-indulgent. Now I've got to clean my house. I've read on a few diet forums that some people use all the new energy they get from losing weight to clean their houses all the time. Sadly, this is yet to kick in. It's a pig-sty... it's just that the pig is a bit smaller now.