as far as "not knowing" what something is, I try and get my best guess... to be honest, I don't eat out very often, so it doesn't often arise, but after nearly 3 years of pretty much weighing or otherwise measuring everything I've put in my face, combined with cooking pretty much everything from scratch rather than buying convenience foods, I've got to the point where I can pretty much look at a plate of food, and recreate a recipe when at home that is probably 90% accurate.

If it's at a friends, i'm crafty - I'll say I enjoyed it so much that i'd really like the recipe... even if I'd no ambition whatsoever to actually cook the dish myself, at least I'd got the proportions...

But, the big secret is quite simple really - it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. It took me 47 years to get to my peak weight of 397lb - it only took 18 months to lose 152lb of that. But thats not to say I didn't have days when I "fell off the wagon" - indeed there were at least 7-8 days that I actually PLANNED to jump off the wagon (Birthdays, Christmases etc.) and expected to gain over the week. I've since taken a year or so of "maintenance" - keeping my overall weight the same, whilst "working on the engine instead of the bodywork" - getting fitter and losing body fat whilst gaining muscle mass. This was mainly motivated by actually allowing some of the lose skin etc. to "rebound" a bit, as I was getting more than a little baggy and saggy in places.

As the summer's hopefully about to kick in, I'm thinking that it's time I started to crank back up on the weight loss side of things again - maybe drop another 10 or ideally 15kg...