If I’d gotten around to doing Christmas cards last year, my newsletter would have had an acerbic comment about 2012 being the year in which I lost 10kg twice, this being sadly different from losing 20kg. It’s amazing how fast you can eat 10 kg back on – just over three months last summer for me.

But it is going back to coming off as these helpful badges from MyFitnessPal show:

MyFitnessPal – Nutrition Facts For Foods

(As I write, the badges say 24 lbs lost, 36 lbs to go – conceivably the story could be worse or better if you are reading this a long time after January 2013!)

Going many, many days over Christmas eating only a few hundred calories a day because I felt so rough, helped no end, and finally, from a BMI point of view, tipped me from “obese” to “overweight.”

In addition to keeping tabs on my weight I am tracking some vital statistics with an old fashioned tape measure. And despite a fairly significant drop, the measurements I have taken (chest, waist and neck) have not gone down at all. And yet people have started making a point of telling me I look as if I am losing weight. Maybe it’s just because I’m wearing the bad suit I bought in a hurry that never really fit even in the dark days when I was over 100kg.

I’m losing weight because I take a very sensible, fruit and sandwich based packed lunch to school. I don’t tend to eat breakfast because I just don’t feel hungry at 6am, so my daily sandwich, apple, banana and graze box tend to get me to about 600 calories by 6pm, which leaves me loads in which to eat a sensible evening meal. Although there is a cake-selling canteen at work, it is easily avoided, so basically all I can eat is whatever I take with me. So long as I avoid pitstops on the journey home, which I do most days, we ought to be at target weight before the end of the school year.

I’ve also invested a little in gadgets and am currently wearing a Fitbit Ultra tracker (no longer on sale) which is helping me count steps every day, turning that into km walked, and also, thanks to a tiny onboard altimeter, it estimates how many equivalent flights of stairs I have climbed. I can also wear it at night on a wrist or ankle cuff and it tells me how well I slept and for how long. During flu days I have been sleeping for 18 hours plus. And newsflash – when I’m at school I am spark out within minutes of head hitting pillow and I stay fast asleep almost all night!

Liking the graphs and data I get from the tracker I also bought a set of wifi scales that wirelessly record my weight and percentage body fat, if I stand on them with bare feet. This is a needlessly fancy and expensive gadget. But I like it a lot. Which is more than I can say for any other set of scales. (I previously weighed in weekly or less often using the 20p scales at the supermarket)

The magic scales have once – ONCE – recorded a weight below 90kg in the last few days, but apart from that they have been, ahem, faulty.

I have also taken to calorie counting using MyFitnessPal, which is pretty awesome. A) it links seamlessly to fitbit’s data tracking. Standing on the wifi scales automatically sends my weight to MyFitnessPal too. B) it has the most complete food database I have encountered during quite a lot of experimentation. And it’s actually UK food! also C) the mobile phone app has a barcode reader that is also helpful!

In 2010, I successfully lost a bit of weight with Diet Chef – so much so that when I bought a tailored suit for getting married in, I confidently told the tailor I would lose more weight. At my thinnest, I was 94kg. I stopped with the diet with a months worth of food left uneaten, as poor motivation took over. The suit didn’t fit great at the wedding.

By the start of 2012, I was over 100kg. The suit was a struggle to do up.

Somehow, during teaching practice, fourteen weeks from January to May this year, not counting the school holidays, I got down to 92kg, the lowest I have been in some considerable time. (My target weight is 75kg, the weight I was in 1999, which felt fat at the time.) My prompt for getting back on the scales was putting the suit back on for an interview and discovering the waistband was ridiculously loose. Ten kilos off translated to 8cm off my belly.

I lost weight on TP in the following ways, I think: leaving the house so early in the morning I was not ready for breakfast; sometimes being too nervous to eat for most of the day; and once, having to stop the car to be sick on the way to work. More positively, eating packed lunches every day and mostly making them very healthy: a graze box, 2 or three pieces of fruit and a sandwich made from 2 pieces of bread.

That last bit sounds vaguely healthy – but it also led to being ravenously hungry by 4 or 5pm and many nights stopping for desperately unhealthy fast food on the way home. So quite how that all added up to ten kilos of weight loss is a bit of a mystery.

I reweighed this evening and the weight is coming back on. The current phase of teacher training is less nerve racking than actually teaching every day, and there are too many opportunities for biscuits and cake in the staffroom. The same packed lunch that was too much food on TP is now not really seeing me through till morning break.

Dietchef had positives and negatives. On the bad side: it was expensive. I didn’t really like the food. What came in what they had the cheek to call a “hamper” was not all you eat as it needed supplementing with salad and other fruit and veg. The meals were odd. Essentially it was porridge or cereal for breakfast, soup for lunch and something sloppy like a casserole or pasta and sauce for tea. There were various fake chocolate, fake biscuit and fake other things for additional snacks and milkshakes as well.

I got into the habit of calling them misery pouches. Although a few were quite nice, it was a real struggle to eat them and not find almost anything else to eat instead.

I think what it gave me most of all was a better understanding of calorie counting. Because you had to eat both the pouches and regular food, you had to count quite carefully. So I do now know for certain that if I can stick to 1500 calories a day for a few weeks I do lose weight.

Some of the surprises with counting was pasta, potatoes and bread. You really do not need much to get up to staggering quantities of calories. My standard day used to be two pieces of toast with butter and jam, and two pieces of bread at lunchtime as a sandwich. But if each piece of bread is the best part of 100 calories, 4 of them is almost a third of your daily allowance. Best cut one lot out.

It does seem though that if you eat a sensible amount of porridge for breakfast, with no syrup or cream, and base your lunch around soup – any soup – and fruit you will be eating healthily and constraining your calories without trying too much. There’s no need for them to be expensive special diet porridge or diet soup as almost all porridge and soup is low calorie.

This understanding is still very much theoretical, of course, I haven’t actually put the knowledge to use consciously to lose weight.

Another weird and annoying part of the Dietchef régime was that it was set up for women who have a lower calorie requirement – so the basic Dietchef day was a 1200 calorie diet. Men and those who have more weight to lose – and I was in both categories – get more. So they suggest you have a 200 calorie milkshake and then 200 more calories to find yourself. I have to say that the milkshake just seemed to me to be a complete waste of calories. Milkshakes do not normally play any part in my diet, least of all manky UHT box horrid bleirgh milkshakes. If I have to get 200 calories from a drink, what’s wrong with beer?

At the time, living off ready meals was a hardship. Perhaps I ought to reconsider using that approach next term when I might again be too busy to cook properly?