Don't worry, I haven't starved to death...

I've just been busy. Yes, it is actually possible to be busy when you're not eating or drinking like a normal person. I've also been very tired, so haven't had the energy to write (I write all bleeding day, so sometimes it's the last thing I want to do when I get home). A couple of people assumed that the absence of bloggage meant that I'd given up but "au contraire!", as someone twatty might say, it's still going very well - as of yesterday, I've lost 1st 11lbs... in five weeks! Apparently that's the weight of an average two year old - I would like to illustrate this point with a photo of me when I was two, but there are two problems: 1. I don't have any to hand and 2. I'd imagine I weighed a lot more than that when I was two, given that my brother and sister used to nickname me the Michelin baby. Oh yes, I've always been "curvy".

The other good news is that, from what I can remember, I now officially weigh less than I have since approximately the second year of university - although, weirdly, my body is a different shape. My boobs are bigger than they were then (since starting this diet, I've gone down a back size, but am still the same cup size), but my waist is smaller (it now stands at 32.5 inches - three inches smaller than it was five weeks ago!). My my, I must have blossomed into a woman.

I now have a week off work, but I'm not going anywhere - instead, I'm sorting out my flat. I've lived here for a year now and I love it, but it still feels a bit incomplete - I haven't even fully unpacked. Oh my god, I'm a terrible human being. To be fair though, it's a small flat without much storage, and I own a lot of crap. So, this week I'm sorting a lot of stuff out, getting rid of things (including all the clothes that are now too big for me) and then my mum's coming to stay for a couple of nights to help me decorate - brace yourselves, for the pink palace will be getting even pinker!

I think this urge to do nesty things is probably diet-related - maybe I want to make over my flat as well as my body, or maybe I'm using the energy that's normally reserved for socialising too much and actually doing something positive and productive with it. This is exciting, as if my flat's looking good, it will make me want to invite more people into it (oo-er, does this apply to my body as well? Time will tell!) and my home is a much better environment for me at the moment than bars and restaurants. I also have a lot of tedious personal admin to do this week, including renewing my driving licence (which means I've been on the road for ten years. God, I'm old). This is a bit annoying because I don't really want to get new passport pictures taken for it until my cheeks have gone from festively plump (my ex-boyfriend used to squeeze them and say "A round face is a happy face!" - um, no, a round face is a greedy face) to "Excuse me, would you mind awfully if I sliced this lump of cheese on your face?".

Although I just wrote that "my home is a much better environment for me at the moment than bars and restaurants", I have actually been spending a fair amount of time in eating and drinking establishments, and it's really fine - normal food just seems like something that's not part of my life at the moment, and it genuinely doesn't bother me when other people are eating. In some cases, it seems to bother them a lot more than it bothers me- there's been quite a bit of "I'm so sorry to eat this in front of you, are you sure it's OK, I can go somewhere else" etc etc. Please stop this, real life friends - in fact, shut your cakeholes!

As for the drinking... I do still miss it, but not as much as I thought I would. In theory, I'll be finishing the abstinence part of this diet on November 14th, and after that you go to the management stage, where you start introducing different types of foods gradually (there's a set programme, it's all very sensible). As far as I'm aware, you don't re-introduce alcohol until the fifth or sixth week of that but given the time of year this will coincide with, I just don't think this is going to work for me, so I'm going to have to adapt it somehow. Whatever happens, I'm going to drink on November 22nd - it's my lovely friend Raji's hen night, and I'm very excited about it. But if that's the first time I've boozed in over three months, I'll have to be very, very careful.... although at least by then I should be light enough for me friends to peel me off the floor if necessary.

I've got a mental list of things I want to write about in this blog (and some of it's quite juicy...) so I'll try to get round to it during my week off... probably when I'm trying to avoid sorting through my endless piles of junk.