Author: Wattle

Yesterday Waratah’s mother and I went for a drive to a rural town. We had a delightful look around which included visiting some opportunity shops. I bought an elegant glass carafe. It has a sturdy bottom making it a particularly practical item for every day use.

I firmly believe that developing the habit of having a large glass of water with dinner has led to the permanent loss of about half a stone of weight. I think of it as a half stone, but the scales would read it in the metric amount of about three kilograms.

What a great result for turning on the tap and tipping the water down the tunnel! It has to become a habit though, every night, it’s just as important as placing the food on the plate. Now we will enjoy chilled water with our meal.

We also bought a large quanity of delicious fresh apricots. So there is today’s pre-defined task, to get them into the freezer to be ready for our pancakes in “Aprilcot.”

Have you noticed that it is getting increasingly more difficult to buy tins of fruit that have no added sugar? If that is all that is available I’d suggest throwing the liquid, which is pretty much pure sugar, straight down the sink. Yes I know that is a wasteful thing to do, but it is so much better than being “waistful”.

Meet my new culinary BFF. Just in case some readers don’t know what a BFF is, those letters stand for “Best Friend Forever”.

Here is a description. It is tall and gracious, and is named Steamer. Made of stainless steel, it is moulded like an enormous boiling pan. A glass lid allows it to display what contents are sitting in its stainless steel sieve-like basket. When its makeup of vegetables is applied its natural beauty is enhanced, making it look like a work of art.

It is forgiving of my vagaries because if I forget its boiling on high with 3 inches of water in it for a half an hour it doesn’t burn its bottom. User-friendly doesn’t do it justice. It is so easy to wash, and it hates soap, making its maintenance very inexpensive.

Chocolate ripe you are not my culinary BFF any more.

Today I am going to tell you about how I invented the Collendar.

After giving up smoking I gained a lot of weight. For the first few weeks the brain demanded enormous amounts of sugar, presumably something to do with the changing chemistry. Then for some months after that the desire to keep moving the jaw and mouth after meals persisted, along with eating sweet foods as a substitute for cigarettes.

The problem is that the cravings for sweet foods last more than a few months. They go on for many months and meanwhile the body is growing larger and needs more food. To anyone considering giving up cigarettes my advice is to resist the comfort of patches and allow the weight gain to happen, even though it can be alarming, in the interests of giving the brain plenty of time to adapt to the loss of nicotine, say a good six months to a year.

There are a few things that can help. One of my favourites was to cook up a brew of filling broth. It had a litre of water, a chicken stock cube, tomatoes, onions and mushrooms and one quarter of a bottle of dried basil, all  boiled together for half an hour. It isn’t too hard or time consuming to make and has the wonderful and comforting characteristic of involving a lot of hand to mouth actions.

So a time arrived to think about losing some of the weight.

That was roughly when I learned that the value of catalogues is multi-faceted. Not only do they inform you of the shop’s prices, they can be the basic material of an activity called “Collage”.

They have images of foods, motivating words and phrases, and all sorts of things like shoes, clothes, and parts of them are just plain colours. I set to to cut out all sorts of images and sometimes using sticky tape grouped them as my own picture on a page. My hands became very busy without the associated movement to the mouth.

Sometimes the groups of images started looking like “Calendar” pages. I would find an image with the month’s name and cut that out, and incorporate it with an image of a number showing what date it was and place all sorts of other images in my picture.

Voila! The “Collendar”.

When I look into the mirror I like to see me. With a few kilograms less weight it will still be me. It is my belief that there is an important relationship going on here and I call it “Weight and See”.

Did you know that as you lose weight you need to eat less, proportionately less of each type of food to maintain that lesser weight? I didn’t. I found that out at a commercial weight loss organisation. I think the reason I didn’t know was because until then I’d never lost enough weight for it to be an issue.

Its actually quite easy to lose weight. What is harder and for some almost impossible, is to maintain a weight which is a lot less than the amount it was a short time ago.

What a revelation it was, and what a shock. As this knowledge entered my mind it dawned on me… less potato crisps, less chocolate ripes! Less meat and gravy, less desserts. The only thing that seemed to not be less was lettuce. Alright, that is an overstatement. The sad fact is, even less lettuce is required.

The trouble is that this knowledge was not owned by my stomach. It shrunk hardly at all during the fast and marvelous weight loss experience. So my mind and eyes wanted to see more food on the plate, my stomach was demanding to be kept fuller of the more satisfying foods and you can imagine what happened. Yes indeed. Most of the weight went right back on again, almost as fast as it was removed.

Now after some years of this slower journey to lose weight my eyes and stomach have caught up, and when I look into the mirror, I still see me.