Chinese New Year Temptations

It's the first week after the CNY celebrations and I am proud to say that so far, I have not given in to two of my faves: bak kwa & pineapple tarts. The only time I think I really broke my diet is during the reunion dinner when I defintely had more than my allowed share of fishballs and fried yam cake. :P

It's been about 3 weeks since my last update and I am glad to say that I am more or less keeping to my exercise regime. I've been making it a habit of going to the gym before going to work and if I can't make it to a gym for any reason, I make the effort of going for a brisk walk around the neighbourhood of at least an hour.

For food, I think I'm still quite disciplined but I feel myself getting a little lax on some days. I have to admit that it's becoming increasingly tempting to indulge in some of my familiar favourites, but everytime I feel like giving in, I feel this deep sense that I am wasting the progress that I have made so far. Hence, so far, I have not really given in. Some food habits which I have been cultivating:

- eating chicken rice with plain rice instead of the oily chicken rice. I actually bother to bring my own white rice from home to eat together with the skinless white chicken meat together with my favourite chopped ginger and black sauce. It's been almost a month since I last ate a bowl of oily rice. And to be honest, I think the taste is still as good.

- eating western food but asking for the sauces (like BBQ sauce and Thousand Island) to be served separately. I get to control the amount of sauce I put and I find that I am actually eating so much less sauce then I usually do.

- drinking iced tea with only about 1/2 a tablespoon of sugar. I've tried drinking it without sugar but I find that the tea at most coffee shops are not so freshly brewed so it ends up having a pretty bitter aftertaste. Other than that, I only drink water/coke lite/pepsi lite.

I'm quite pleased to say that I find that I am losing the kilos, slowly, but at least fairly steadily. This morning, I found that I'm about 127kg. That means I'm losing about 1kg a week which is the recommended rate. But I do find that this past week appears to be a fairly slow week. I'm hoping that I can keep up this rate of lost. It would be really awesome to be less than 120kg come april....

I went shopping today and I found that my waist has dropped about 1 to 2 inches since the end of Dec. I had bought a fitting pair of pants in the last week of Dec and my waist then was 48inches. Today, I tried on a pair of size 46 inch pants and found that they fit pretty nicely. :) I've also thrown out my old shirts cause they were beginning to look really big on me. I think I've dropped about 2 shirt sizes - I used to buy 3XL/4XL shirts and today, I was trying on XL/2XL shirts. :)

The going has been tough, but I must admit that it felt REAL good when I was trying on the clothes today. My next goal... to be able to buy shirts off-the-rack from Marks & Spencer. :P