🌞Weight Loss Wednesday: Diaries Of A Middle Aged Woman. Week 2 #Health #Life #LifeStyle #WomensHealth

📢Join me for another week of thoughtful rambling! Sit down and take the weight off of your feet, we’ve got something to talk about.

Last week I mentioned here, why this was the right time for me to talk about the weight I’d gained especially through the menopause and Covid lockdowns and what I am doing to reduce it.

This week I am going to start talking about celery. I began reading articles about the type of foods that might help with weight loss. Celery was mentioned as a suitable food. Although I don’t mind a crunchy stick of celery, drinking a glass full of celery juice just seemed unpalatable and extreme.

So next I considered the possibility of raising my metabolic rate. This way I might burn extra calories. I read up on burning belly fat, burning calories while you sleep and all sorts. We all know there is a lot of nonsense advice out there, so I tried my own ‘sensible stab in the dark!’.

Around this time I got a fitness watch to review. I’m not normally a gadget person and only have an Android phone, but it was pretty easy to set up even if I did have to download an (comedy moment) “App-lica-tion” to my phone (yes, an App to everyone under the age of 30!) to cross check with the watch. Once I got used to the insanely easy difficult user functions, I found recording of the number of daily steps and calories burnt quite useful and motivating. (Yes it’s not perfect—it recorded 7000 steps in the 4 hours that I drove a bone-shaker truck to Cornwall, but you can get a feel for a pattern.)

Next I found a recipe for a juice drink which claimed to give your metabolism a boost. Although sceptical, the ingredients were healthy and I thought I’d give it a go. Now, I only ever use recipes as ‘guidelines’, it is a family joke that I never accurately follow a recipe, so here is my rough list:

In a food processor blend:

Half a cucumber.

1 x green apple.

1 x large handful of spinach

A stick of celery.

1 x avocado

1 clove of garlic.

1 inch of fresh ginger

A squeeze of lemon and lime juice.

A dash of cinnamon

And enough pineapple juice to fill up to 1-2 cm of the bottom of the bowl.

You might get 4 glasses of thick green ‘juice’. I ate mine with a spoon each day for 4 days before making a fresh batch. It can be diluted with water to make it drinkable, if required, and I often varied the recipe with other fruit. After a couple of months I got fed up with it and stopped making it.

Did it work? Was it tasty? Well it ‘felt’ healthy, wasn’t too horrible to eat, but probably didn’t do much other than help keep my bowels regular! But psychologically it worked alongside my decision to complete 10000 steps a day. My fitness watch gives a little ‘buzz’ when I reach 10000 steps and it’s actually very satisfying getting that emotional ‘pat on the back – job done’ feeling.

I set myself a challenge: To do 10000 steps every day for a week. Then two weeks, then a month.

Now there were NO overnight sensations, no visible weight loss in a week or even two weeks. Not much movement of the scales in a month, but the scale hadn’t moved higher, so something good. Then one day after about six weeks the needle didn’t reach my usual weight. Not a lot but what a boost that day was!

What about you? Has anyone else tried celery juice for weight loss? Do you walk 10000 steps a day?

Next time I’ll tell you what that needle budging boost did for my moral and where I took it next.

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