Hello!

Welcome to my blog, and thank you for taking the time to visit!

Nikki and Harry :-)

My name is Nikki. I've been on and off Weight Watchers more times than I care to count, have often been tempted by quick fix diets (but never really been quite silly enough to try them) and in the meantime my weight has crept up to 14 stone six. I'm five foot one. This makes me obese, and sends my BMI through the roof. To 38.1, to be exact.

Yeah, I know. Yikes. My ideal weight according to the NHS healthy weightchart is between seven stone and nine stone five. I'm going to try for somewhere in the middle, so I'm aiming to lose six stone by Christmas.

SIX STONE. OMG. THAT'S LIKE A CHILD. I NEED TO LOSE A CHILD.

Luckily, my best friend, housemate and all-round-motivator, Harry, has recently completed a level three personal training course. He needs a guinea pig to practise on, and I sure as hell need some help.

This blog will document our experiences; the good, the bad, and the downright hilarious. I'll also be interviewing some weight loss experts for tips on how to lose weight in a healthy way – and how to keep it off.

How it's gonna go down

We'll be breaking the journey into 12 week chunks, and I'm aiming to lose two stone during each bit. I'll be following the NHS eating plan and doing the CouchTo5K and Strength and Flex exercise programmes during the first section. Harry will be helping me to train, making sure that I'm doing the exercises correctly and motivating me, as well as taking my measurements each week.

Where you come in

As well as sharing my experiences, I also want to hear about yours. Are you trying to lose weight? Have you managed to reach your goal weight? Are you sick of talking about weight?

Please feel free to comment with questions, thoughts, or tips of your own. I need all the help I can get, and I'd love to hear how you're getting on!

If you'd rather message me privately, feel free to email Nicolettethewriter@gmail.com

Thanks for reading!

Why is it called the Fat Fag Hag, I hear you ask? Because I seem to be something of a professional hag, I write another blog called the Fag Hag Rag, which concerns my quest to find the best LGBT entertainment in Manchester. Come on over and have a read!

The scale of the problem

Talk about falling at the first hurdle. I managed to write an entire blog post before falling off the wagon and leaving my millions of dear readers (read: my mum) waiting for the next post that never came. My sincere apologies. Here are my rubbish excuses:

Excuse number 1: I was tired.
Excuse number 2: My cat ate my notes. (This one isn't actually totally unbelievable - he genuinely tried to eat Harry's hat today. He must have lost a bet.)
Excuse number 3: I had a cold. Many people can testify to how pathetic I am when I have a cold.
Excuse number 4: I had lots of work to do. However, the fact that said work is writing articles and other blog posts just makes me look even more pathetic.
Excuse number 5: This is the biggie. My scales broke.

Not as in a "Ugh, I haven't lost any weight! They must be broken!" kind of way. I had stuck religiously to the plan, but after the first week I had apparently lost two pounds. This is a healthy weight to lose during a week, but what made me a little suspicious was that this was a median weight (mode? Mean? The average where it comes up the most, anyway) and my possible weight fluctuated by up to about two kilos.

I started the second week feeling a little deflated, understandably, but didn't buy any new scales as I was blaming the weight change on our ridiculously uneven floors. If I could only find a spot and stick to it, everything would be fine.

Week three came along, though, and this time the scales just wouldn't work. Ugh.

Wow, this post is so boring. I'm going to cut to the chase - some trouble with Amazon and then, finally, a successful delivery Of a brand new set of analogue scales meant that I started week four with an accurate weight, but no idea what I'd lost.

And what's worse is that I weighed a pound more than I thought I had at the start of the plan.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

After many paddies and having thrown just about every toy I owned out of my pram, I eventually calmed down. Harry gently told me that the beginning numbers didn't really matter - I was on the right track. I had to be losing weight as I was eating less, and moving more. I can still do better with the moving bit, but still. It's got to be doing some good, right?

The problem is that I've been on so many diets and eating plans in my life, and every single one of them has focused almost completely on the numbers. Without that two pounds per week to refer back to as proof that I'm doing well, I feel like a failure. I feel like I have to show everyone some evidence for my new healthy eating plan to be worth anything, instead of focusing on myself and how I'm feeling.

Of course in the end the numbers do matter because the end goal is to get to a healthy weight, but what I find disappointing in myself is just how much they always seem to matter. The magic eight and a half stone mark is still more important to me at the moment than being able to run fast, and that makes me really sad. I've got lots of bad habits and mindsets to break, it seems.

I think the key to this is concentrating on the positives - I really do feel better. I have more energy, I generally feel happier (except when those bloody scales play up) and my friends and partner are noticing these changes in me. That dreaded cold didn't even floor me as per usual - it was just a few days of sniffles. I might not have had people telling me that they've noticed any changes to my body yet, but that's not the only thing that matters. And it's daft to wait for other people to validate your success, anyway. The only real success is me feeling happy in myself, and the only person who can make that decision is me.

Anyway, I'm babbling.

Despite these setbacks, I have eaten some very yummy things recently, and I promise that I'll share the recipes and photos. I'm writing this on my phone as I'm on a bus (ahhh, the wonders of modern technology) so I don't have the photos on me. There I go with my excuses again.

Do pop back and see me on here  soon. I promise not to leave it so blimmin' long next time.

Let me know how you deal with setbacks - I'd love to hear from you!

Week 1 (in which I eat the world's most pathetic snack)

I'm not going to lie: during the first week on the plan, there were points when I felt pretty hungry. I think this is down to a couple of reasons – my stomach needed time to shrink to a size where proper portion sizes are enough to fill it; and I should have eaten more vegetables, as they really fill you up for barely any calories at all.