The story so far: I am effortfully losing the final few pounds at the end of a long diet. 27 pounds down, eight to go.

Good evening readers. Today found me at 143 pounds, so I’m a pound heavier than the dramatic victories of Friday and Saturday. My diet (I am doing Noom) has me eating a lot of vegetables and sticking to a calorie limit. I find I am good at sticking to my diet for 3 or 4 days, then I suddenly go off plan and eat sugar, setting my weight loss back a pound or two, this happened when I was working late on Saturday night.

If you are on a diet, or even if you are not and you just want a treat, here’s a list of things not to bother eating because they are horrible.

• Milky Bar ( Nestlé). Used to be delicious, now tastes like a slab of candle wax, probably because the recipe has changed to include cheaper ingredients. 0/10. I have switched to Lindt white chocolate with vanilla instead.
• Toffee Crisp (also Nestlé). Once soft and chewy with the perfect amount of crispy resistance, Toffee Crisp seems to have been reduced to a hard, thin, tasteless block of tough material that you could use in construction projects.
• The vegan cupcakes I recently had from a local supplier were the worst cake I’ve ever encountered. They were as hard as rocks and had half a tub of margarine squirted on the top instead of icing. Vile. They all went in the bin.
• Mug cake. I have never succeeded in making a good mug cake, they are always unpleasant at best and are occasionally disgusting. They can easily exceed 1,000 calories.

I have resolved to think more carefully about what I’m bingeing on when I have diet lapses, because all of the above are awful and not worth any calories at all.

Anyway, today was the second of two good days for healthy eating so I will soon start losing weight again, maybe tomorrow. In fact, I ate steamed vegetables for a mid-morning snack, as you see here. I think we all know what an effort of self-control that was, even though steamed vegetables are nice.

I exercised fairly vigorously today including 35 minutes of strength training. I bloody love strength training because muscle looks attractive and it burns up calories just by existing. I’ll write a separate post on strength training another time because I am changing my programme.

Hope you’ve had a good Monday! Remember to eat up all your veg.