Oh wow, I have been neglecting this blog for a bit. To be honest, I have been neglecting my DDPYoga too. I shall slap myself on my wrists.
We have had some crap to be dealing with at home recently and as its winter, the usual viruses are making us all I'll.
I have, however lost a little more weight, so I'm now down to 204 lbs. this has made me very happy. I'm hoping that the raging earache that I currently have nuggets off soon.

I have no idea if anyone actually reads this blog but even if they don't, it's good for me to keep a record of my progress. I'm still on the lookout for decent low fat recipes, do please post in the comments if you can recommend any.

I can't believe that I'm missing my beloved Clandestine Cake Club meeting tonight. All because of this sodding gallstone. I'm having to be on a strictly low fat diet still. Life is so bland without cake 😩
On a better note, I'm now back to being able to do my DDPYoga workouts, which I started again yesterday. I'm still in pain & have some heavy duty painkillers, so I have to take it easy but at least the antibiotics have finished.

I have taken some more measurements tonight, which show I have minimal size loss but I suppose that's better than nothing.

Chest below bust 91.5cm
Chest over bust 111.5cm
Waist 109.5cm
Hips 112cm

I treated myself to a haircut yesterday & coloured it today, so I'm just waiting for the usual streaks of hair dye to run down my face after a good workout.

Soooo..... It has been a while since I last posted on here. I haven't managed to do many of my DDPYoga workouts as it's Sod's law, as soon as I get some of my teaching sessions planned for part of my DDPYoga certification work, then something manages to stop me in my tracks. Eleven days ago I was admitted into hospital. I have a 2.5cm gallstone (nicknamed the boulder) stuck in the opening of the gallbladder, resulting in an inflamed & infected gallbladder. That was absolute agony!

I'm now waiting for a surgery date to remove the gallbladder completely. Because of this, I'm out of action on the DDPYoga workout side of things for the moment. I'm also on a strict low-fat & white flour free diet. I tried eating some chocolate while I was in hospital but almost instantly felt as if someone was stabbing me in the stomach & twisting the knife. So that means no yummy cakes for the foreseeable future too. How am I going to cope?

I'm hoping that I can get back to my workouts etc. soon, as it's frustrating. Hopefully I will lose a decent amount of weight on this awful diet too.

I have a target that I'm aiming towards for the end of the year. One of the members of DDPYoga as set himself a challenge of completing 60 superhero/superman push-ups (google it), so I decided it was a good challenge. I have set my target of one superhero push-up.

So here are my 6 photos that I have to take for my DDPYOGA progress. I had to take more pictures recently due to my slight "pause" in my DDPY journey, as I had gained quite a bit of weight. I don't like these photos but they are there to serve a purpose. I can look back to them & notice what a difference has been made on my journey, even if the scales don't say the same thing.

I'm slightly later than I expected to post this blog entry as it has been total chaos here. The run up to Christmas was hectic & I have been in a hell of a lot of pain, so I have not been able to do many workouts. I have now got the DDPYOGA NOW app now running on my iPhone & iPad & there are some great updated workouts on there. You can find out about this on https://www.ddpyoganow.com The cost of the app is $8.99 per month but it has been worked out to cost about 30 cents (whatever that is in GBP) per day, so for me it works out much better than paying out over £5 per week for Weight Watchers (which did absolutely nothing for me) or Slimming World (which worked for a bit then tailed off). 
I have done a fair few diets in my 40 years of life & tried numerous slimming aids. The best one I ever had was a drug that was prescribed for me by my GP, which was Reductil. I lost over 2 stone in weight as it curbed my appetite but it was sadly withdrawn from the drug licensing due to some people getting nasty side effects. I'm still not fully in the mindset for eating super healthily at the moment, as I love food so much. I used to be a chef, so eating yummy foods started my ever increasing weight gain. Its true what they say, never trust a skinny chef, as they obviously don't have the same love of food as the rest of us ;)

Anyway, time to confess what my weight has been up to. I weighed myself on Tuesday 29th December & my weight is 213.4lbs. I can't remember what my last weigh check-in was, so I'm hoping that I have lost some.

Grant & I are planning on doing 2 DDPYOGA workouts tonight, as we want to end the year 2015 in the manner that we started the year in. We did a workout just after midnight on 31st December/1st January, so we will do one workout before midnight & one workout just after midnight, to ring in the new year.

I shall hopefully find a way of putting my starting-point photos on here soon, as I'm not very technically minded & I keep forgetting to try putting them on.

I have to be honest here & admit that I have only done 2 and a bit workouts in the last week. I have been struggling badly with pain & I have an added new complication of water retention causing my feet to swell up. I think it may be down to the gabapentin medication that I have been taking for a while, so I have an appointment to talk to my doctor about this next week. I'm constantly exhausted too which may be down to the gabapentin or it may be to do with my underactive thyroid.

The DDPYoga workouts that I have done are:
Stand Up - 30mins 16sec
Strength Builder 2.0 - 43mins 34sec
Energy 2.0 - incomplete

On the positive side of things, I think that my weight gain over the past couple of weeks may be down to the water retention. So once that has gone back to normal, I will be happier with my weight.

As per usual on my journey to lose weight, I have gained 3lbs this week. In the past this would have really annoyed and/or upset me but I'm used to that crap now. My body is seriously screwed up when it comes to losing weight. I have PCOS, an underactive thyroid & I'm on medication (Gabapentin) that causes weight gain in many people.

I have eaten some "treats" this week but I have also been pretty active. I'm currently doing a DDPYoga Advent Challenge, which is where we do a workout per day from the DDPYoga beginner or advanced DVDs. Each day is drawn at random for the workouts. So far I have done:
Stand Up! - 30 mins
Energy! - 21 mins 
Red Hot Core - 12 mins (of abdominal hell)
Fat Burner 24 mins
Red Hot Core - 12 mins
Double Black Diamond - 1 hour 5 mins 

You may have noticed that there are only 6 workouts listed & that we are on day 8 of the challenge. That is because I had 2 days of absolute horrendous pain due to a fibro flare up, which may have been triggered by me pushing my body too far when working out every day & also that I had my flu vaccination done the day before too.
Tonight the workout set is either Below The Belt or Energy! plus I could add on Wake Up if I want to. I haven't decided on what I'm going to do yet.