In case you were wondering, my weight has been stable, currently about 8kg above goal weight.
I'm back in New Zealand. It's good to be back! Although I am grateful for my year in the Philippines, some parts of it were tough, and my inability to cope particularly well didn't help. Mainly we're talking depression and anxiety. Problems that I had in New Zealand followed me to the Philippines.
Anyway, I have decided to post now and then about my experiences, and try and get into the routine of posting every calendar month again.
Just a few notes about how things went while I was there:
- My relationship with Miss Minadano was "okay" but she had to go back 3 months early because she didn't look for a job, as I was running low on money towards the end of my stay
- I never got used to being stared at. Although white people are there in the Philippines, the numbers vary considerably depending on where you are. Highest concentration that I came across would be Bo's Coffee in Ayala mall, Cebu where about 25% of people would be Caucasians. I took a few boat rides where I was the only one of 500 people who weren't Philippine. Being stared at constantly tended to sap my mental energy so I taught myself to not look back at the person staring at me. I don't know if it's a problem with other visitors, but I constantly felt like I was on display
- As Caron asked in the comments, Yolanda came and went, there was one fatality in Lapu Lapu, the city where I lived. The winds were strong there (you could hear the metal roof buckling) for about 4 hours but I never felt unsafe. Of course it was different elsewhere along the main path
- I did feel unsafe when the Bohol earthquake happened. After all that my home city of Christchurch had gone through in terms of earthquakes, to be sitting upstairs and starting to notice that the bed was shaking, reminding me of all that Christchurch had experienced, was rather unsettling
- The heat was amazing. I got sweat rashes, stood in heavy rain and didn't feel cold, and generally loved the heat. Surprisingly, where I swam the water was cool. Highest temperature was my upstairs bedroom at 38 degrees C, lowest was 26 degrees which actually felt cool. Ha ha! But it wasn't so much the heat, as the humidity which had an equal effect on how you felt
So that's a brief summary of some of the things that have happened in the last year.
I found it rather difficult to lose weight in the Philippines, mainly because I use vegetables as a way to lose weight and the veges that I came across in the local supermarket were rather sad looking. Open air markets would have been different, but I was too far away from them, and it would have been too costly to travel regularly to buy them.
Now that I have easy access to quality vegetables, it's time to lose weight! Getting back to goal, I want to lose about 1kg/month, resulting in my reaching goal weight in late December. I really don't think I'll have trouble getting there. From then, it's staying at goal weight for 2 years then applying to join the National Weight Loss Registry. I am eligible to join now, but I feel two years at goal is sufficient time to show I'm capable of staying there, I don't want to shame myself by joining and then putting on 5kg or so.
See you next month.
