A rocky start

Well, it's been a rocky start with a few successful sabotage attempts I'm afraid however while I've lost a few battles, I'm still winning the war.

19/10/09 - 121kg
16/10/09 - 122kg
14/10/09 - 125kg

So in total I've lost 4kg in 5 days, now that's really quite good, however I will admit that over the past 5 days I caved to both a kebab and a big mac meal, not ideal, I know - The Ticket Restaurant curse hasn't helped matters either. Let me explain; in France, there is a company that arrange a scheme called "Ticket Restaurant" and almost every food business and employer is in on it, here is a picture of our enemy:

Basically, for every day you work your company gives you a Ticket Restaurant, you get them with your pay slip every month so you generally get a book of about 22. The amount is set by your company and is generally linked to how much you earn, my tickets are 7€. Half of that 7€ per day is taken from my salary and the other half is matched by my employer.

These tickets can then be used almost anywhere that serves food. Fast food places (McDonalds, etc), all restaurants, some supermarkets (only very few and unfortunately none local, this is also generally limited to a 2 ticket spend to stop you doing your months shopping with them) all fall into the list of establishments that will accept these tickets as payment. However (and this is why they're the enemy), most places will not give you change for them because half of their value was paid by your employer and is technically not your money.

This means you feel obliged to spend the entirety of the 7€ and even if you don't feel this obligation, the person serving you will point out the amount you have left to spend on your ticket and point out everything in the shop that falls into that value as you might as well have it because you're going to lose that money anyway.

It's quite a clever scheme and works out very well if you're going for a meal in a restaurant, but not ideal when you're on a diet - I go for a baguette, I walk away with 2 baguettes and a pain au chocolat because the woman on the til can't cope with seeing me not make full use of a ticket. As you can imagine, this brings temptation to a new level.

As a result, generally my daily diet has been 2 baguettes + some sort of extra treat that they've forced on me, like a pain au chocolat, though I'm not complaining as clearly up to now this has been working with my weight loss and it's nice to not deny yourself the treat.

Unfortunately giving up smoking isn't going very well, I end up being offered cigarettes by a work colleague quite regularly who now has told me I owe him a box >_< In fairness, I do owe him a box by now, so I've had to cut into my only 20€ to buy a box of cigarettes to give him today in order to not look like a cigarette stealing tramp. This left me with 14€, however I need to go to the laundrette as I basically have no clothes. Guess how much that costs? You guessed it, the wash and drying will cost me the entirety of that 14€.

This means, ladies, gentlemen & diva's, I have 0€. Not a penny. All I have is 5 Restaurant Tickets, however as you can't get change with them this can't be split over more then 5 days, so I effectively have 5 days left of being able to eat. I get paid in 9 days. Funny, isn't it?

It's ok though. I have 2 small bags of emergency pasta and some pesto. I've got a feeling I might end up losing more weight then intended!

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