Welcome to my journey.

Before:

Weight: 269 lbs
BMI: 42.2

During

Weight 218lbs

BMI 34.1

51 pounds lighter

and a long way still to go 

Never give up bloggers!!

Anthony Nolan

In the space of 2 months, I was unfortunate enough to lose 2 friends to the same horrible disease, Hodgkins Lymphoma. Around the same time I heard about the Anthony Nolan Register.

"Anthony Nolan is a pioneering charity that saves the lives of people with blood cancer who need a blood stem cell, or bone marrow transplant. In 1974, Anthony Nolan's mother, Shirley, set up the world's first bone marrow register to match donors with people who desperately needed a transplant.

Now, every day, we help two people in need of a lifesaving transplant by using our register to find remarkable donors who have matching stem cells, or bone marrow.

We are a UK charity with international reach. We carry out world class research into stem cell matching and transplants to improve outcomes for all patients."
-anthonynolan.org

I went about doing my research about what it entailed and what I would have to do, reading through the criteria list I found that I was not eligible to be on the register. Why? I was classified as Severely Obese and having a BMI of over 35 meant that I wasn't able to donate. This gave me more motivation in my weight loss journey, this is something I wanted to do I want to be able to donate if I'm needed and even if I was never needed the option is there. I made this my next goal!

For a long time I floated around with a BMI of 35.1 which in all honesty was infuriating haha 0.1 is such a stupid number but considering I started with a BMI of 42.2 I was impressed with myself and even more motivated to burst out of the Severely Obese class of the BMI. 

On the 8th of September I stepped on the scale to see a weight of 223 pounds!! Otherwise known as a BMI of 34.9. I had done it! I am no longer Severely Obese and I am simply Obese (this will change!) and I met my goal and could sign up for Anthony Nolan! 

The application was fairly straight forward just filling in your details and some check boxes about your medical history, it was fairly short and didn't take much time at all. Today my spit kit landed on my door and I thought I'd tell you all about it.

 This is what it looks like just a little tub, it doesn't look like much at all.

This is whats inside, you have your little tube and you can see on the top there is a lid with some liquid that you mix up once you've collected your spit in the tube (pleasant I know!!) and then you remove that lid and put the little screw cap on.

Before I changed the caps the liquid from the top goes in and mixes with your saliva. 

And then you pop it in the little bag and post in back in the padded envelope, I did feel a bit nervous about the fact it said biohazard on it.

And thats it done! All I need to wait for now is my donor card. I do feel sort of proud of myself, I hope I'm a match for someone.

For Jane and Maurissa! 
xx

Bloglovin

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Just checking it out to see what its all about.

The day before shopping day.

So I've hit the day before the shopping day and I'm running out food and using the spare bits and bobs of food. Dinner time came and I had to come up with something and this is what I ended up with.

Considering what I had left in the house I'm quite pleased.

 75g wholewheat spaghetti
2 Linda McCartney vegetarian sausages
1 large orange pepper
a handful of broccoli (no specifics when it comes to veg lol)
2 small baby corn
1.5 tablespoons Baxter tomato chutney
1 teaspoon sesame seeds

It was also ridiculously simple I boiled the spaghetti and veg until they were cooked through, cooked the sausages as instructed and basically just mixed everything together and added a teaspoon of sesame seeds on top. It was a huge meal and I'm more than full now, I tried to bulk it out as I'm trying to up my calories a bit and it didn't work out too well.

Anyhoos for anyone thats interested

Nutritional Info
Calories: 645
Carbs: 92g
Fat:13g
Protein: 43g

Enjoy!
Hope you're well blogland!

Oh hai plateau-land!!

I've not updated on here for a while, I'm really proud of the progress I've made so far but it seems I've stuck at 224. For the last 4 or 5 weeks (if we ignore my holiday) I've not lost any weight at all, I'm still running 3 times a week, I'm still swimming once a week, I'm still eating a healthy diet with anywhere between 1200 and 1700 calories a day. So I'm on the case I'm not about to hit week 6 with no movement on the scales. I'm going to be swapping my rice for brown rice, ditching my bread altogether I think, and looking for less processed foods.

I need to push past this obstacle, exercise wise I'm not sure how to bump it, I want to get a kettlebell but I dont have the funds for it at the moment. I might jump back onto the 30DS while I'm waiting and let Jillian kick my ass for a while and see if that helps.

Not really sure where to go from here just going to have to figure it out I suppose.
Hope you're well blogland!

Holidays!

I've had a busy few weeks so really haven't had any time to update on here, my poor wee blog gets neglected more than anything else I own.

Anyways I went away to Aviemore which I personally think is one of the most beautiful places in the country! We did treks and trails and ate amazingly calorific food. It was an amazing week I love it up there I could stay for months and months.

Some photos :)

Anyways back to the point of this blog post there was a picture I took that I was actually quite surprised, I can see the weight loss starting to change my body shape :)

I know we've all seen this one before but I just wanted to put it there as a comparison, some day I'll learn how to do the split screen photo thing.

Anyhoos that's me for now, hope you're well blogland
xx

Cheat day, kind of!

So today was my Cheat Day, on a Sunday I give myself a little leeway to eat stuff I wouldn't allow myself normally. This was gonna be a look-how-awesome food-porn update but I have no pictures and for that I am devastated because the food was amazing! Just because its my cheat day though doesn't mean I go overly mental its usually just dinner that is my treat :) I swim every Sunday morning to burn some calories and for damage limitation lol I also really like swimming so its win-win really!

Today however I couldn't swim because it was that delightful time of the month, so I dragged my boyfriend out on my run with me, I like it when we run together because my sense of competition kicks in and I really push myself hard and run sprints and I just don't do that when I'm running on my own. According to My Fitness Pal that burned about 350 cals not bad!

One of our treats on a Sunday is we get a roll and sausage from the cafe so that is our little breakfast tradition. We spend all week deciding where we will eat on a Sunday and if I'm honest that is part of the excitement and this week we picked here:

The Inn on the Loch, overlooking Lanark Loch, its very pretty and the food is always amazing. This is the part where I wish I had photos, I had decided during the day to try and convince my other half to have a starter instead of dessert which he never wants to do. The method in my madness was if I had dessert I could have some sort of semblance of nutrition :). Anyway he agreed and I picked Chicken Goujons, Garlic Mayo and side salad to start and for my main I had Chicken Fajitas with another side salad, it was all amazing on the tastebuds and out of interest my other half chose Garlic Bread with side salad to start and Steak Pie, chips and veg for his main! The next time I do one of these posts I promise I'll have photos so you can all see how amazing the food was.

I think for a cheat day I did ok, got some exercise in the morning didn't go crazy and got some veggies in, all in all not bad for a cheat day. :)

xx