Wow, here I come!

14st 7lb. It's the first of November!!! It's the start of "Me Month". By the end of this month I intend to be feeling happier, healthier and be at least into the 13stones. This 14/7 business has gone on too long. This is supposed to be a "weight loss" blog not a "stick-at-the-same-weight-for-6-weeks" blog. I am supposed to be inspiring fellow suffers of FCD ("Fat Cow Disease") to join me in the quest for a healthier life, not boring you with the tedium of a busy life.

This is my horoscope from yesterday's Daily Mail (yes, I know, but we can't agree on an alternative and I can't afford two papers).
Pisces Time is precious. That's why its so important to waste it. When you try too hard to make every moment count, you end up putting yourself under pressure. Hours fly by like seconds when a person is in a hurry. To make them slow down, you have to push your agenda aside and create a little space in which to drift. That's also how you gain access to inspired ideas. So gaze into space. Let the fairies spirit you away this November. They'll take you to a place where you can eventually see more clearly how to clear up a mess and solve a problem. Those fairies are far more practical than you imagine. Trust them this month.

Well, wasn't that just written for me (I can't believe it fits the agenda of 1 in 12 of the population mind!). I loved the Flower Fairies as a child and my children could recite the poems off by heart as babes, so leaving life to the fairies is not a difficult decision.

This is my plan for November:

1. You are stuck with me, day in, day out. I am blogging away to my heart's content and you, my imaginary friends, are filling me with inspirational positivity.
2. My diet is going to be good. Not a pressured, plodding diet but a feel good, healthy, vitamin-packed diet, full of flavours, colours and texture.
3. This incredible positivity is going to be fed by the fact that I will make time to walk and get proper exercise. I will glow. The dog will shine.
4. I am going to take time to really think about where I want to be in this life and how I can achieve it. I know I want to be out of catering but I don't know what I do want and what is practical living where I do. Should I retrain? If so, what as? Can I afford to change direction? I know I want to do something more meaningful.
5. I am going to work my way through this whole dirty little house and clean it. It gets me down. A bit at a time will do the trick (as long as the little blighters don't follow behind creating havoc in my wake!).

I am starting with soups. This week I am going to make lots of lovely healthy soups and I am going to love them. I have probably already said that my mother is the Queen of the Soup - she loves them, makes interesting, flavour packed ones and her diet is really working, mainly down to soup. Today we had a major novelty in our house in that all five of us sat down to breakfast and chatted amiably, then four of us had a proper roast Sunday lunch. It seems so long since our lives had an normality or continuity. It is the best thing about the Autumn - the closing of the curtains at Sunday teatime, snacky bits for supper, all the family in the sitting room watching Antiques Roadshow (ok, all the family in the sitting room whinging at having to watch AR!). Anyway, we had a roast leg of home bred lamb for lunch with loads of lovely vegetables. I roasted extra butternut squash, sweet potatoes and peppers so that I could add it to softened onions with garlic, a tin of tomatoes and some chicken stock. I then blended the whole lot together to make a lovely thick, very tasty soup for tomorrow. I am going to focus on colour so I intend making a fresh tomato and basil; a gorgeous peppery watercress; a beetroot and orange - any other suggestions? By the end of this week, I will be bursting with vitamins and well set up against winter flu.

So, my little band of supporters, I plan to succeed and not to disappoint. Target: 10lbs by November 30th. Any takers for a competition?

See you tomorrow!

E xx
PS Going to every three days for weighing in.