You have to prepare of course; lots of moisturiser, SPF sun-cream, a good (stylish) hat and a light cotton shirt for when the sun got too strong. You have to look good too so a pair of sunglasses, smooth-skinned legs and even your nails need attention (dead sea nail care works great) as your feet are on display don’t forget. I could never read on the beach but took a little portable radio which I placed beside me – and a good sized beach towel too, there’s nothing worse than trying to lie on a bath towel with half your body on the sand.

The Monday night meetings are always entertaining because almost everybody has a tale of guilt to tell – we all give in to temptation in some form between Friday evening and Monday morning and getting together and having a laugh about it is good for everyone’s self-esteem. One lady is aiming for buying her first bikini in fifteen years, another is getting married in August and will soon be sending out bridal shower invitations and intends to buy a ‘killer dress’ for the occasion – she’ll get there too as she has lost seven stone in just over a year!

My opinion is that if you have done really well during the week and stayed on track then a little off-plan stuff on the weekend wont affect your weightloss, unless you embark on an orgy of fry-ups and chocolate for 48 hours. Anyway, fingers crossed for tomorrow night!

Until child number five arrived six years ago I never had a problem with my weight and always hovered between a size 10 and size 12, which suits me perfectly. About ten years ago I lost an incredible amount of weight through stress and went down to a size six and weighed around 7 stone, it did not suit me at all and I would not be looking to returning to such an extreme ever again. Let’s be frank ladies – once you hit your 40′s you should not be aiming for the size zero look, not only will you have no shape or curves whatsoever but a size zero face on a mature woman is very, very ageing. Not a good look at all. Anyway, I don’t blame my youngest for leaving me with three stone of excess weight entirely because at the time I was living in France – beside a winery – and despite my very busy lifestyle at that time there is only so much physical activity that will counter-effect the ravages of an abundance of red wine and brie taken on a daily basis…

So I piled on another stone on top of the post-pregnancy weight and within two years I was weighing over 13 stone. From a starting weight of just nine stone that is quite a hike! anyone who has found themselves overweight within a relatively short period of time will know how distressing it is; none of the nice stuff you wore just a couple of years earlier fit any more and you have to start buying larger sizes, and you just don’t feel as though you look nice in anything! even then, you still somehow feel you don’t look that different to how you used to – until you see of photo of yourself…and it is reality check time. Well now that I’m living back in Belfast I met some mums at the school who were going to Slimming World locally and they all appeared to be shrinking somewhat over the weeks and months since last September…well, I decided that I wanted in on whatever they were getting and doing because it looked good to me!

I joined Slimming World at their group last month, with lots of support and enouragment from them, and in the first week I lost five and a half pounds…weight that no amount of ‘cutting back’ had managed to shift in the past six years. I was amazed. Slimming World is not actually dieting but rather learning that there are far more foods that you can eat as much of in a day than you assumed was possible. Now I will admit that it does involve cutting right down – but not out entirely – on foods like bread, butter and milk, but the list of ‘free’ foods that you can consume right throughout the day is as long as your arm. Lean meat…? the sky’s the limit – poached/scrambled/boiled eggs…? go for it! – now wait for this…boiled/mashed/roast POTATOES – indulge baby! the secret in cooking too is using fry-light which is an oil-based spray which you use instead of olive/vegetable oil but you can use as much as you like so you will go through gallons of the stuff. It works brilliantly too. Nothing is banned on this eating plan, you are simply re-jigging the balance of what you eat…but the thing is you MUST eat as much of the ‘free’ foods as you can a day as they are chosen for their low-density and the speed with which they are used by the body. Okay some more examples of free foods; any canned, fresh or frozen fruit; pork, beef, chicken, turkey…just trim the fat off; fish – so long as it has no batter – is free; muller-light yogs – eat as many as you can or want in a day (great for filling up or snacking between meals), same for activia fat-free yogs; mushrooms, tomatoes – toss them in a pan with fry-light with a egg or two and some lean bacon and you can have a fry-up every morning for breakfast! sometimes I save my two slices of wholemeal bread daily allowance for later in the day and stack it with salad, ham/chicken and a slice of low-low cheese. Or – a slice of wholemeal toast with the slice of low-low cheese melted under the grill with a cuppa for supper.

Okay the, so I lost five and a half pounds the first week – then missed two meetings in a row due to the easter break and when I returned found I had rediscovered two of those lost pounds…not to worry though because I went a little off track, but I am back on the bike again and have lost another half a pound in just three days. Not bad at all! This week I am doing really well and hope to lose between two and four pounds so, fingers crossed, by eating my through the free-food list every day and doing some cardio stuff at the gym I will achieve this. No – I WILL achieve this! my goal is ultimately to get back to nine stone and I WILL do it! when you see men and women at your meeting who look wonderful and fit and then discover that one has lost five stone in eight months, and another has lost TEN stone in a year…you know that you can achieve the same success. If they can, why not me…?

Feel free to join me on this journey! I will be updating here weekly and would love to hear from anyone else who is doing the same thing…or considering it.

It happens so slowly that you don’t even notice anything different; gradually – day by day, week by week, etc – your habits change until one day you realise it has been at least 5 days since you touched the bottle of shampoo and the elastic band has become your stock fashion accessory. As you comb the your child’s hair before school one morning, making sure every hair is in place, you recall somewhere at sometime that you too once did something with a can of mousse and spray and the result was wonderful…but that was a long time ago and who uses mousse foam these days anyway? and that stupid lipstick in your bag that keeps lurking at the bottom where your loose change is…how long ago did you buy that, or even wear it?, because the price tag shows a currency no longer in use…and I’m sure that those CD’s you used to love driving along to on your way to work (remember having your own car?) still exist somewhere…or were they cassettes? no matter, Marvin Gaye would only stir up memories of that guy your husband will have hoped you had forgotten. As yet another brochure for the opening of the latest candle-lit-incense-fuelled Day Spa drops through your mail box you think for a brief moment how nice it would be to be smoothed with orange scented oil and covered with warm pebbles as whale-mating music plays gently in the background, but who has 2 hours and £95 to spare for such folly? the one day, all of a sudden, you stand thinking in the middle of it all – the lost moments for putting on lipstick, for looking for that darned matching sock, for blowing £95 on a 2 hour back rub – and you wonder where the hell you went…where YOU went!

Well you know, she’s there. She’s combing other people’s hair, matching other people’s socks, picking out nice outfits for kids to wear for ‘no uniform day’, admiring other women’s hairstyles and outfits. All you have to do is get a shovel and start digging because she is not too far below the surface, she just needs a little help escaping. Identity is something we all have but in order to keep it alive you need to nurture it, and doing that requires time – everyday – and you have to be the one to do it because nobody else can or will. But it is there, in the back of your mind and inside your heart, as crowded as those places have become in the past few years, ‘she’ is still inside you. Give her some attention now and then and she will stay right there, even if you are the only one who still recognises her.

For many women the hunt for weight loss pills that work will be a never-ending one, and one that will both bring happiness, and sadness, to many.

You know, when you see them in photos looking a bit plump and then on TV looking incredible you know they have done more than just go on a diet. I don’t mind if they go the pill-route so long as they share their secrets with us! I would like to know if they have found the ultimate in healthy healthy diet pills so that we mere mortals can share in their good luck. But they always seem to keep that sort of information to themselves…

While you are looking for products to help you with your weightloss just remember that most products come with customer reviews – such as hydroxycut reviews – and it makes good sense to read them over before you commit yourself and your health to buying them.

You’d need the dress, you’d need the hair and no doubt you’d need the whole image. For that you’d need to be slim, so how would go about shifting those extra pounds…? you could do it the hard way – diet and exercise – or you could combine that with some pills, there are plenty of those around to buy. There are other ways you can achieve a quick weightloss and one of them is a herbal colon cleanse and actually this is said to be a healthy option and one favoured by many of Hollywood’s elite. These treatments have come a long way in recent times so that they are quick and relatively comfortable to endure. One thing is certain – if you want that image you have get serious about it!

Being anything over a size 6 would be like social suicide in a place like Hollywood for this big event and I’d guess that all those actresses have been out to buy fat burners in the past few weeks, if not months. It’s a bit sad really when you think about it because most of them would look just a great with a few extra pounds on them – but as there is more pressure on the women than the men to be as slim as possible I doubt the culture will change any time soon.

ELAS estimates that as many as 375,000 UK workers will “throw a sickie” today.

When taking into account the lost work and business opportunities, together with the cost of salaries and overtime payments, today’s absenteeism could cost the UK economy more than £32 million.