Since July is long gone (well, four days gone..) that means that I've officially been on my healthy living plan now for four weeks; more than enough time to write in and share how things are going with it so far.

Let's start with the positives: in four weeks, I'm down  fourteen pounds. I'm pleased with that; despite only losing a measly 1-pound in the last week itself. It's a pretty consistent loss when you work out the average of around 3-pounds per week. I've become a lot more aware of my portion sizes; particularly with innocent meals like cereals and dinners - I was going completely overboard and not even realising, since that was "normal" for me. Now, I'm starting to find myself fuller for longer & I'm never really going without, which is important to me.

Another positive is that I'm being a lot more conscious of eating enough food. While I was busy spending May and June working out rigorously, I wasn't losing any weight. Looking back, I think it was because I was eating my meals all wrong, with big portions at set times each day and not many snacks in between. I'm now eating more - but smaller sizes and at random times throughout the day. I'm eating a lot more fruit, and finding good things to snack on that will keep me within my calorie "goal" (I hate the word "limit") each day. I downloaded an iPhone app called Lose It, and while it took a bit of time initially plugging in most of my regular meals, it's super easy to use now.

But of course, there are always downsides to a weight loss journey - if it was a quick and easy fix, I'd already be at my ideal weight and size. The most common gripe I have is about ME and how I carry my weight: because that fourteen pounds lost has not made the slightest bit of difference to my figure. Please don't think I'm complaining about how much I've lost because I know that fourteen pounds is great and I'm mighty pleased with myself, but honestly - where has it gone from? It's so hard not to be disheartened when you look in the mirror and see no progress, despite the numbers finally starting to budge on the scale. Progress is everything to me. I like to see results. I like to know that the effort I'm putting in is noticeable to others, but more importantly, to myself.

I'm a pretty critical judge.

Part of this intense need to really see results stems from my impatience; yet another thing I struggle with. I have a long way to go on this journey; let's face it, with the amount of weight I need to lose, fourteen pounds is a very small percentage of the whole picture. Mentally, I need to make sure I'm 100% focused on this as a long-term thing - I've learned from failed past attempts that it's all too easy for me to go from being a little wobbly with my commitment, to eventually toppling off the bandwagon in a spectacular fashion.

I had a moment this morning where I felt utterly dejected after reading that 1-pound loss; where I felt like this was ridiculous and that I was once again wasting my time and energy into something that just isn't going to happen for me. I just felt awful, like a big, fat lump. I sat down on the floor in my underwear and thought about raiding the cupboards to make the worst possible food I could come up with. I thought about the fact that I had eaten out twice this week for my birthday - naughty Thai food, apple pie with ice cream and wood fire pizza, and figured hey, that explains it you silly girl, get off the floor and start over.

But then I got angry. Really, really angry. So angry that I would have punched something, except that there was nothing here to punch. Why? Because I'm bitter. I'm jealous and I'm bitter. I ate two small meals this week that were what I would consider a splurge, and my weight loss stalled because of it: yet why are there people out there who can eat terribly every day, drink cans of coke every day, not work out at all - and can not gain a pound.

Why is this such a hard journey for me? What did I do to deserve always being large? WHY? It's not fair.

I'm over that now. I got up and I moved on, and I indulged in a small portion of cocoa & granola with milk for breakfast. But you know, deep down, I am still all of those things. I am sad. I am angry. I am bitter. I am jealous. And to be perfectly honest, I don't think that anyone can empathise unless they have been fat themselves. And I'm not talking a few pounds over their 'skinny' weight. I'm talking about people who are well over a healthy weight range, who have a lot of weight to lose, and who have probably (like me) been heavy their entire life. I don't know if these feelings will change as this journey progresses; I hope they do.

But to end on a positive and to summarise: four weeks down, fourteen pounds lost.

I have this horrible fear that being vocal about my weight loss journey and having support from Jase is fantastic - but that I'm going to let everyone down if things stop working, or if my size doesn't change after all this. If there's one thing I can't bear the thought of, it's disappointing people.

So here's to the next four weeks, I hope you'll stick through this with me - no matter what the final outcome is.

This evening I ventured out to a new local restaurant to meet a few people for a dinner. One of them is a good friend who has been here on holidays but is heading back to Sydney tomorrow; so it was sort of a leaving-do for him as well as a catch up with a few other girls I used to work with. It was a lovely dinner & we all ate some of the most amazing authentic wood fire pizzas (my mouth is watering just thinking about it again.. yum) in London. It was a fun evening out, however it led me to thinking about personalities within groups.

You see, I'm more than able to hold a conversation of my own - despite growing up as a super, super shy bunny. I still find myself feeling and acting a little socially awkward more than I'd like to admit, and I do have some random quirks with speaking in public: one of those is phoning people I don't know. (Yes, at 26, calling up and getting quotes or speaking to people over the phone, really freaks me out. It's slightly ridiculous, but it's just me.) But as I've gotten older, I find that social conversations are a tiny bit less scary than they used to be.

There were only four of us out tonight and it was a fairly intimate restaurant. The two girls, one from Canada and one from America, are naturally quite loud and talkative - they're both the kind of girl who always has a story to tell, always have amusing things to relay to others, and always have a million things going on in their life to talk about. The guy, my darling friend T, is one of the most gorgeous people I've ever met, who always has adventure stories to share - the most recent ones being his travelling trips through Mykonos & Crete and his experiences as a club-goer world over.

And then there's me. Who, let's face it, lives a pretty boring little life! I love talking about travels, wedding planning and all that jazz, but compared to the amazing stories the others had ready to tell, those things just didn't seem so important - so I found myself sitting back in my chair and just taking it all in.

It's not like there's anything wrong with that, and I don't dislike being that person - but looking back, that always has been the way I function. I like to listen. I can interject here and there with a comment or a reply or some witty banter, but I've never really been the storyteller - unless it's a topic that I'm really interested in.

Sometimes people might mistake that quietness for shyness, but it's not. It can be awkward on occasion, yes, particularly if I really do have nothing at all to contribute. But tonight, I was perfectly content to sit, eat, drink and listen. While my cosy little life might be boring to some people, it's all I would ever wish for myself - to be happy, to love the ones you're with, and to be thankful for what you have!

What kind of person would you consider yourself to be in a group?

I'm still amazed when I'm reminded of the fact that blogging has been such a major part of my twenties.

I wish I was with my family this Saturday for my birthday, I miss them so much around the holidays.

I wish I had an unlimited supply of cash to play with. Okay, not unlimited. That's greedy. Let me rephrase that: I wish I had a nice little kitty of cash that I could dip out of that would make sending Oscar home and trying to squeeze some more travel time for ourselves, that little bit easier and less heart-attack inducing.

I wish I could make the boy stop worrying about things that are out of his control. I hate seeing him worry.

I wish I didn't enjoy being a homebody as much as I do, because it's going to be all the more difficult when I start going back to work and into the daily grind again.

I wish that I could lose weight as quickly as I can put it on. I also wish that I had a little more patience because this is not something that's going to miraculously happen overnight; but that's easier said than done.

I wish I could wear belts without them making me look ridiculous.

I wish that people would write back to emails quickly instead of always leaving me waiting for their reply.

I wish we had more carrots in the fridge. I'm having a major obsession with them & lite philly cheese right now.

I wish I could use spreadsheets as well as I can use pieces of flyaway paper. Maybe then I wouldn't be literally surrounded by scribbles in notebooks and on drafts. Unfortunately, I suck at making them work.

I wish for a puppy, even though I know that can't happen for a while yet.

I wish more of my old blog friends were still actively posting, and I wish that this blog had as many hits as my old one used to. It doesn't mean much in the long haul, but in all honesty, I do miss the love sometimes.

What are you wishing for right now?

Remember how I'm a slightly obsessed planner and an organiser?

Well as I mentioned a few days ago, I've been spending a lot of time planning for how the end of the year is going to work for us. It was one thing moving from Sydney to London - trying to plan for a life on the other side of the world with just one suitcase and a carry on bag to contend with. But that little life experience was nothing compared to how difficult it is preparing for the opposite journey home. People, it is harder than I imagined. Insanely difficult.

I should put it out there and say that we'll be officially out of the UK by November - which is only just over four months from now. I've already started the ball rolling for Oscar's departure and he's now the proud owner of an import licence from the Australian government quarantine officials, woohoo! Very soon I'll be handing over an extraordinary amount of money to a pet transportation company to arrange Oscar's flight details, travel crate, quarantine stay and vet fees, and then he'll be ready for the travel process in November when we are.

And as for Jase and me? Well, I've become a one-woman planning machine. I've started getting quotes for excess baggage. I've started donating things and throwing out items we won't be taking home with us at the end of the year. I've started researching travel deals some more and have been frantically trying to make dates match up to go on a travel adventure or two prior to heading back to Sydney - and that part has been more than a little bit stressful. It's not just our own travel dates that I have to work with here: it's tour operator dates, it's the date I return from Europe, and it's Oscar's travel preparation and flight dates. And, oh yes, it's the expiry  date on Jase's UK Work Permit in mid-November that we've been working with, too.

Wait, did I say mid-November? Silly me! After finally working out dates that matched up and getting a mock itinerary scripted - with papers and dates and prices strewn all around me, I had this horrible feeling that we were forgetting something. I went and checked the date on the boy's Visa and then I died.

Okay, so I didn't really die, but my heart did stop beating for just a few seconds & I believe I looked a bit like this:

When I'd asked what date we were working on him having to be out of the UK by, he'd sworn it was the 14th or 15th of November, so I was working on that assumption - which worked great with our dates: I returned from Europe on the 8th, we'd have a week to get the cat sorted out, finish cleaning and packing, hand over our apartment keys and fly away to our first travel destination. Er, no, not that simple. The expiry date on his Visa is NOVEMBER 7th.

(!!!!!!)

If you go back and read my last sentence, you might recall that I don't get back to London until the 8th. And the boy has to leave the UK by the 7th! Cue panic and freaking out. Basically, we're going to have to readjust everything - dates we leave, who does what, plan plan plan and so on and so forth. While I was going to be the one in charge of Oscar's vet visits and final transportation, that is now going to fall on Jase - so I'll have to get him up to speed and in charge of the paperwork very soon. It also means that he'll be finalising all of the apartment cleaning and handing the keys over - and then he'll fly over to our first travel destination and wait for me to join him a few days later. It's crazy: it also means that after living out of a suitcase for a month in Europe, I'll have no home to come back to - so I sense a whole lot of washing will have to be done in a random European laundromat somewhere along the way!

We'll manage, we always do. And I'm glad we found the spanner in the works this early on before all of our travel plans were booked and set in stone. See? Always have trust in your gut instincts. I firmly believe in mine!

We haven't done things the easy way; we never have. If we'd wanted that, we would have stayed back in Sydney, got married, bought a house and a dog and maybe popped out 2.5 children, or whatever the 'average' is nowadays. Instead, we've had an awesome adventure. We've travelled. We've saved. We rescued a cat, who is possibly the best thing that's happened to us since being here. We've lived together and learned together as a couple before finally getting engaged - and now we get to plan the long way around back to where we started from.

Wish me luck with this travel planning: to be honest, I'll need as much as possible to make this all work!

While doing some more travel planning this weekend, I found myself combing through the bookmarks tabs in all of my browser windows: yes, silly me has separate favourites saved in IE, evil Firefox AND Chrome. I'm slightly too organised for my own good. I noticed while doing so, that I've saved an awful lot of wedding-related pictures and how-to's - which led to me wondering about how to showcase these more effectively.

I actually can't remember if I have ever mentioned our travel plans for later this year on the blog. I feel as though I have, as they've been on my mind ever since that day back in January when the boy and I sat down and worked out what our year was going to look like - or at least a rough idea of it, anyway. So if you've heard all of this before and it's old news, I apologise - and if you haven't, feel free to get excited along with me.

First of all, I'm travelling with my awesome maid of honour (Miss K) and an equally awesome bridesmaid (Miss J) which is exciting enough in itself! We're waiting for the traditional summer holiday period to end for a few reasons: a) We have lots of visitors stopping by over the summer and I couldn't take time away then, b) I hate, hate crowds and waiting in crazy lines in the summer season, c) It's hot, and d) Travelling in winter is amazingly beautiful and is a lot cheaper - which is perfect since we're on a crazy budget now. The girls will be arriving in early October and after a little while in London, we'll be joining a tour and re-visiting Europe! Other than small trips over the last few years, the last time I really went country hopping in Europe was in 2004 with Jason - we were such babies then! This time, we'll be visiting similar countries as well as a few new ones, and I'll be enjoying it with the girls.

The countries we'll be visiting include: France, Switzerland, Spain, Monaco, Italy, Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic (Prague, love) Belgium and Amsterdam. I've never been to Spain before, so this will be a first for me, and there are a few cities like Berlin and Vienna that I can't wait to properly explore. The trip is for just under a month.

There will hopefully be one or two more bits and pieces on the agenda that will actually include Jason, I haven't forgotten about him! Being able to travel with two of my best girlfriends while he's finishing up at work and looking after Oscar; it is a huge reminder of how lucky I am to be with someone as generous and as amazing as he is. I'd like to think it goes both ways; we've both always been free to travel independently if we wanted to, yet we travel equally as well when it's just the two of us. A little bit of freedom does a happy relationship make.

Without giving too much away yet since things are only partially booked and in the cards, I can tell you that we're hoping to finish our time abroad with a bang! Instead of the usual long-haul flight from London-Sydney with its miserable 24 hour flight time, we're hoping to do things in a super random way and visit a few places we've never been before. I can't wait to update you all, once we know more. It's going to be fantastic!

If you could travel anywhere right now, where would you go - and why?

I'm squeezing in two posts today, because it's not every day a blog-friend has a virtual Baby Shower! Today's blog is dedicated to the lovely Erin, who is expecting twins in the coming months - and I couldn't be happier for her!

So as well as a day of double blog posts, I thought I'd share some of my very own favourite things that come in pairs:

Erin, have the happiest of days - while we've not met in real life, I think you're a doll and you're an inspiration for so many bloggers out there. Maybe one day I will be able to give you a hug in person, but for now, virtually will have to do! I just know that you & Ted will be fantastic parents and your twin girls are incredibly lucky to have you both.

We're in a funny cycle right now - where I'll go for weeks without thinking about wedding stuff too much, and then where it's all I can think about and right at the forefront of my mind. This past week has been the latter - and I have to say, I love it. It'll be nice when it's closer and it's one of the only things I can focus on but I'll take what I can get.

This weekend we caught up with the boy's brother and girlfriend, as they had just moved into a new apartment (with London city views!) and we wanted to check it out. It's just the two of them; J has asked M to be his best man at the wedding, and they get along really well - but don't really celebrate things like birthdays or buy each other gifts or anything. I can't understand that, so we brought along a bottle of bubbly as a house-warming gift for them, and lucky we did.. as they announced that they'd gotten engaged the night before! I did my best not to bombard them with questions since I remember from personal experience just how overwhelming that can be, but it will be exciting to see what they plan and when they set a date. I wonder if M will ask J to be one of his groomsmen?

Anywho, seeing her beautiful rock of a diamond led us to talking about wedding bands. My biggest fear with ordering wedding bands is basically down to my hands. You may call them slightly large for a lady; I call them man hands. It's ok, after twenty five years on this planet learning to love them (despite a certain jeweller actually laughing at my ring size when I was younger, ouch) I'll admit it - I have super large fingers.

If you've been a blog reader of mine before the move over here to "Breathe Gently" you might remember these posts: the one where my engagement ring was sent away to be resized just a mere day after our engagement, and the one where it finally came back to me all those months later. That wait was really, really difficult. But to this day, I've always been worried about what would happen when it came to choosing wedding bands - because no matter what kind we purchased, it would need to be resized and I would have to wait. (Patience is not one of my strong points.)

So here came the hard part: choosing the type of band to match to my ring. Jase has already decided that he wants the simplest of all white gold bands that he can find, and that's that. He'll be easy to buy for: we'll probably wait and get his ring back in Australia a few months before the wedding. Other than a watch, he doesn't wear any jewelery at all, so a ring is a big deal for him! I'm still torn about what to do with mine. Because I still think my e-ring is super beautiful and awesome, here's another picture for you - observe, the chubby man hands & wonky fingers!

The reason that the resizing took so initially, was because of the stones set in the half band that you can see. Logically, the easiest way to remedy that was to go for a simple white gold band at around the same width as the e-ring - 3mm. The plus side to this was also that it was the cheaper option too. But then, I really wanted to see how a sparkly band would pop against the my ring, so wanted to try a few on for size. Um, crazy move.

First things first, we went to a handful of random jewellery stores nearby. The plain gold band was nice, but was just that - just nice. Not dramatic, not amazing, just simple and nice. But alas! We couldn't find a diamond band to match the width or the size of my e-ring band. I tried on loads. They all looked wrong. One helpful friend told me that the only way to get a real match would be to head back to the store where the engagement ring was created... a fact which I relayed to Jase with glee, and then watched as he turned a nice shade of pale. I didn't specifically want or need a matching wedding band from a certain store, but it was worth looking anyway - so off we went.

And wow. I forget just how beautiful everything is there until I go and look at the display cabinets. I know it's super expensive and that you're partially paying for the brand, but the service at Tiffany & Co is great and they really, really know their jewels. I showed them my ring and they brought out a few options to try on, but there it was: the exact matching wedding band, right down to the size and sparkle of the diamonds. Of course, I had to examine it stuck on my knuckle with my e-ring loosely over the top, but you get the idea - it was beautiful.

What happens next? I have no idea. We haven't made up our minds yet - and I'm still in two minds, because one side of me is jumping for joy at the sight of those matching bands but the other side is feeling overwhelmingly guilty, because we could use that money to go towards our travels home or the wedding itself.  They have ordered in the wedding band in a bigger size for me to try on properly, so maybe we'll go look again and see what happens - or maybe we'll stick to the traditional gold band. It's early days yet, but I certainly want to get it ordered as soon as possible, because we'll be out of the country for a few months travelling later this year which will make ordering and waiting for a delivery to be virtually impossible to plan for. I guess we'll wait and see.

What do you prefer: the idea of plain, matching or mis-matched wedding bands? 

Have you ever wished that you knew someone, anyone, in a particular field to help you out and throw a favour your way every now and again? I know I have - especially lately, since I'm trying to plan for so many things at once.