Nowt to be ashamed of, Pip! Sometimes life gets in the way of best intentions and denying yourself treats is the exact way to make you crave them even more. You're still allowed the Haribo sweets and chocolate, just use it for treats when you've done something well instead of as snacks. Like you said to Lisa, snack on carrot sticks and cucumber and stuff, then have the sweets and chocolate for treats only. If they still do those small bags of Haribo, put one of those in with your swimming cossie and towel and take it to the sports centre with you to use as a reward for going swimming then have a bar of chocolate every time you increase the number of lengths you do.
It's hard to make the change to start with because it's new, but I only have J2O's at home as a reward for writing 4,000 words a day. I have chocolate once a week as a reward for doing at least 250% with the pup on her daily walks.
You need to reprogramme part of your mind to learn that you can still have treats (the Haribo sweets and chocolate) but they are
treats, not snacks!
How about promising yourself a few of the biscuits for every mile you swim and a piece of shortbread for every mile extra you swim. Encourage yourself to very slowly increase the distances so that you do one mile next week, two miles a fortnight later, 3 miles a fortnight after that etc. Build it up very very slowly because you know you'll be allowed the biscuits and shortbread as a reward. It's taken at least 18 months or 2 years to build up from 50% a day to hopefully 500% a day this week for me and the pup.
You can do it Pip, just don't take things too fast and use the shortbread, biscuits, sweets and chocolate as
rewards to motivate yourself rather than snacks... use carrots and cucumber and fruit as snacks and increase your portion size to adult portions instead of child-sized so that you don't
need to snack throughout the day. Occasional snacks are all well and good but if you are snacking every day because you're hungry, it's your body's way of telling you that it needs more food.
Sowwy.
I'm ashamed of myself as I had all good intentions to try and post here at least once a day
.
Okay, Rick is a nightmare with snacks as he has loads of crisps, chew sweets - Aldi's equivilent to chewitts and suck like, marshmallow type biscuits, chocolate and so on, he even has a box of hula hoops which hasn't even been opened. I have absolutely no desire to touch any of his snacks but then I can be a bit fussy what I eat. For example I don't eat crisps very often as I was diagnosed with high blood pressure (210 / 160) in 2009 so immediately I cut down on my salt intake so I find crisps very salty generally. Sometimes I will have a packet but it isn't the norm. My stumbling block are Haribo sweets mainly and chocolate a couple of times a week which is a lot of chocolate to me. We were given a few boxes of biscuits for Christmas and a box of shortbread which is my weakness.
It doesn't seem a huge deal but for me it is as I put weight easily. I'm trying to keep up with my fluids to help me feel full up for longer, I don't have sugar in hot drinks as I stopped when I was about 14 back in the 1970's when there was a sugar shortage. Trying to eat at regular times is difficult and often I miss breakfast.
A positive is I have started swimming regularly and have started increasing the lengths I do last week. I'm up to 14 lengths of a 20 metre pool which I'm pleased with but I have the goal of doing at least 11 miles for Swim 22 but want to do the full 22 miles..