Not long now

Loads of red Arrows! They were amazing. If you've never seen them I urge you to catch a display somewhere as it is awe inspiring what they can do. Just simple wow factor!

There's only 3 days to go before my big finale on the track at the velodrome. We're told that Sky are going to make a bit of a fuss about it and are filming with 3 crews, one of which is in 3D for some unknown reason! Still, I'm not worried about all that. I'm going to concentrate on my time and just enjoy myself.

We had our last training session last night which was exhausting. It was taken by the aussie fitness coach who set us off on the track all those weeks ago and he is a hard nut. But it was brilliant. We did 4 15 minute sessions: a warm-up; a series of flying 500m's (where you're cruising along and then have to sprint for 2 laps every time the whistle blows - knackering); a hard hard fitness session right at the top of the boards where you have to climb at every bend and can cruise a bit during the straights and finally some sprint start practises. I was very tired but happy last night.

And I'm also very happy this morning to see that I've dropped another 2 lbs so am now 13 stone dead and have only 2lbs to go to meet my "drop a stone before 1 August" challenge (as proposed by Lainey).

I think what had caused the slight stalling was a creeping tendency to sneak extra fruit and the odd cappucino here and there. I hadn't increased my meals or slackened off on the exercise but was having quite a bit of extra fruit and the occasional capp where previously I had not . I wrote them down for a couple of days and realise that this had added several hundred calories to each day for the last few days and had probably contributed towards slowing my weight loss. My sneaky chimp rationalising that "fruit is healthy - right?"

I was talking last night with the psych guy (our last session - booo). We discussed my chimp's habit of acting in a pseudo rational fashion. He says it is common among intellectual types (she preens a bit here...). The chimp is still the same emotionally driven creature but she dresses up her arguments in a cloak of logic to make them more acceptable to me and often fools me this way.

Eg. a plate of biscuits is going round, all plain apart from one chocolate. I think that it would be rude to take the only chocolate biscuit but of course my chimp wants it. She rationalises that someone has to have it and if I take it then everyone else will be spared the choice! I'm satisfied with the skewed logic of the argument and take the biscuit which she wants! It reminds me strongly of "crooked thinking" from Lighter Life days. Although now I understand it as I have an underlying explanation.

Apparently my chimp is VERY adept at this sort of rationalisation so I need to rely on objective markers of sucess only. Have I lost weight? Are my clothes smaller? He also said I should avoid short term weight targets as these would encourage my chimp to start "bargaining" which she will love but which will stress me out. You know the sort of thing "I can eat over this weekend because I'm going to be good all next week". He said I would be better "living the life" and if I have food or drink not on my plan, it's not bargained for but accepted up front as a deviation.

So, basically, every day healthy eating must be my NORM not me being "good".

So that's what I mean when I say I have got to live the life now. And I will.