Gulp: couch to 5k

I start 2019 at the highest weight I have ever been.  I do not like this.  I have also been thinking for ages that I need to reduce my alcohol intake.  It's not that I drink a lot at any one time because I don't but I have fallen into the habit over the last two or three years of drinking something every day.  It started when my dad was so ill with Motor Neurone Disease.  We undertook the weekly six hundred mile round trip to see him with all the physical and emotional effort that entailed.  My mother had died suddenly of a heart attack and her loss was and remains huge.  Life was hard.  For the first time in my life I began to have trouble sleeping.  I am generally a great sleeper but I found I couldn't go off to sleep.  My mind would whirr with what I could and should do for Dad and whether I was doing enough to support him through his lonely and terrible journey into silence and total incapacity.  A glass or two of wine at the end of the evening seemed to help to send  me off to sleep.  I think that was probably understandable then but it is now three years since he died and the habit seems to have become ingrained.

As I ate and drank my way cheerily through Christmas and New Year I knew I was going to have to take stock.   On January 1st we were visiting older daughter in South Wales but on January 2nd I woke up at home.  Time to face facts.  I got on the scales.  I looked at myself sideways in a mirror.  Reluctantly I picked up a a tape measure.

Results:
Weight: 10 stone 10 pounds or 150lbs.  I am five foot four.  I should weigh about nine stone five, and indeed I weighed that, give or take a couple of pounds,  for most of my adult life.  This weight has accumulated gently and inexorably over the last ten years or so, post menopausal weight I suppose.
Sideways view: just ever so slightly, for the first time in my life, barrel shaped.
Measurements: 39 inch bust, 37 inch waist, 40 inch hips.  It was the waist measurement that horrified me.  I have always been a straight up and down shape with a similar bust and hip measurement and a not very curvy waist.  Even in my twenties and thirties when I was at my slimmest and fittest my waist was about 28 inches.  But I know that fat around the middle has health implications and it seems that pretty much all of my extra weight has settled firmly around my middle.  It can't be good for me. 

Time to change.

I think that because I have done yoga for years and now do Pilates as well I tend to feel that in fitness terms I am not too bad for my age.  And  indeed as regards flexibility that is probably true.  And because we live in a beautiful place and we like to walk I think we manage to move and keep active reasonably well.  But despite all that here I am, with a waist measurement that suggests I am at risk of problems with heart health and I know that my mother died of a heart attack and both my grandparents did the same.  Never mind vanity (which is undoubtedly a factor.  I hate looking like a barrel), if I don't look after myself who will?

So what to do?
Well I thought I would start off by cutting out alcohol in the week completely.  Simply by cutting out the glass or glasses or wine from Monday to Thursday I would slash my alcohol consumption.  I wondered about doing dry January but I don't do well with prohibitions, the remnants of an awkward streak I suppose.  Tell me I can't do something and my hackles rise, foolish I know.  And I like wine and think it is one of the pleasures of life.  I just need rather less of it and to reinstate it as a part of a meal rather than as a nightcap.

In terms of diet I have been eating gluten free for a few years and find that it helps quite a bit with my IBS.  I try hard to avoid processed food and we pretty much always cook from scratch.  I think our diet is healthy so I have no great desire to change it all that much.  Maybe I should have a go at reducing portion size and resisting the urge to eat cheese and biscuits in the evening!  Other than that I am intending to increase my consumption of protein, which I know makes me feel full, and reduce carbohydrates, which I don't find it too difficult to go without.  Not all carbohydrates are the same so I really mean I will reduce what I would call "white carbohydrates": bread, potatoes, rice, pasta.  The kind that come as part of eating lots of vegetables are fine for me.  And I already try to eat very little sugar but I will have a go at cutting it out completely.

And I am also going to increase exercise.  I have done quite a bit of reading since discovering how much weight I was carrying around my middle and it seems that three things are likely to help with reducing that: the diet and alcohol regime, more aerobic exercise especially running and doing some lifting of light weights.  Running.  Hmmm.  I used to enjoy running about twenty years ago and weights at the gym too.  But I am sixty four now and have done neither since I was in my forties.  Ian has been looking at the "Couch to 5k" website and app and somehow I seem to have suggested that I will do it too.  To be totally honest the idea of running anywhere seems very unlikely.  I like walking.  Walking is fine.  Running seems to belong to another life or to other people.  But apparently I only need to run (or very slow jog) for sixty seconds to begin with before walking for ninety seconds.  Surely I must be able to do that?  How hard can it be?  Gulp.