'Tis the season to feel guilty

I've long held the suspicion that guilt is a waste of emotion. That doesn't prevent me from feeling weighed down with guilt right now.

To begin with, I've been absolutely rubbish at posting over the past few days. In my defence, I should probably mention the fact that I've been away in France for three days and have had 8,000 words to write this week (split into five different articles rather than one massive piece). But I should have found the time – or even made the time – to log on more regularly.

Part of the reason I haven't, I suspect, has something to do with my other burden of guilt. My weight's not gone down much at all over the past three weeks. I weighed in at about 86.7 kilos when I got back from Bordeaux 10 days ago, then went up to about 87.3 a couple of days later, then lost about 300 grammes by the end of the week, and am now back up to 87.1 kilos. Now I could make all kinds of excuses for this, such as the fact that, due to the exercise I'm laying down muscle rather than fat (it weighs more), but I suspect the truth is that the weight came off so easily in the first few weeks that I got slack. I conned myself into believing that it would come off without too much effort from me, as long as I showed a modicum of self-restraint. I now think I will need to be a bit stricter about what I'm eating and when I'm eating it. In short, I have to go back to the principles I was sticking to religiously early on in the diet. This is going to be a tough recommendation to follow, especially given that it's my mum's 70th birthday dinner tomorrow night and I'm judging a food-and-Champagne-matching competition all day on Tuesday, but if I want to see some results, I'm going to have to put in a bit of effort. Nobody said this was going to be fun.