Keep calm...

I managed to sleep for almost seven hours several times during the last week. That is good news insofar as my average sleeping time had dwindled to about four hours (read: way too short for me) since last October due to being tied up in the care of the elderly relative whose flat we now have to clear out. And with DH being, finally, at home again permanently I have started to cook dinner again, which means that vegetables are on the meal plan again. So is a regular breakfast of a hard-boiled egg plus a protein-berry smoothie with some peanut butter and mcp oil worked in that tides me ober till dinner. DH insisting on an early dinner means no more eating after 10 pm, which I had gotten into the habit of doing because there was no way to do it earlier. So, the necessity of scarfing down handfuls of crisps or whatever there was on hand on returning from work because I was so freaking hungry has been removed, too. 

As per today, that means that, after regaining to 98.4 kilograms, I am down again to 96.1 kgs, showing a net loss of 500 grams a week. At that rate, I would be back down to 83 kilograms by November, just in time for the next family occasion. My goal weight would be reachable by August next year. 

The annoying part is that I will have to lose those same twenty kilograms for the fourth time since starting my recondensing project. My weight curve looks a lot like the Dolomites. Had I continued to lose instead of regaining and losing the same ten kilograms several times I would have been at goal long ago. But seeing the curve I know now what the biggest weight hazards for me are. Stress and lack of time which translates to lack of sleep and unwise food choices. 

With the elderly relative we had to take care of finally gone, recondensing should be a lot easier. After all, I still have a closet full of almost-new trousers that I bought in the elation of my weight having gone down. I want to fit into those again, fast. 

Two thirds

After a longish blogging hiatus, that's how much I have put back on. Or, in other words, I am approaching that dreaded two zentner mark again, having regained two thirds of the weight I had lost back in 2012. Not the place I wanted to be, but right now there is so much stress and so little time, be it to cook or to sleep, that I simply have no strength left to dedicate to losing weight. I still hold out about fourteen kilograms below my all-time highest weight, but I know all too well how fast I could regain these, too. On the decluttering front, having to dismantle the household of a relative has brought lots of stuff into our already well-filled flat that needs putting away, so it's back to square one in that respect again, too. I am actually glad about every bit of stuff I have already let go. The surprising thing is how many things that I thought I should keep are, upon revisiting them five years later, easy to let go of because they just take up space and haven't been used once since the last decluttering stint. 

Still, right now it's all too much. 

Going through that relative's stuff was actually a serious eye opener. The remains of a lifetime of packratting make it abundantly clear that there is such a thing as keeping too much stuff around. That the place, after removing just the obvious trash, was more than half empty, came as a bit of a shock. But it provided a valuable lesson on the kind of things that are keepers versus things that just hang around. Having them tidied away just masks the fact that the latter are essentially trash. 

On returning home, I went on a first round of decluttering that yielded several almost empty shelves, and I am not finished by far. Perhaps I will never have a place that fits the standards of minimalism, but I want a place where the people who will someday dismantle it won't keep asking themselves why I kept so much junk.