Ma Vie à Villefranche

Bonjour mes amis! I can't believe that I have been in Villefranche for a week already. It's gone by so fast. I have been having such a good time and been so busy that it has been hard to find time to stop and write about it.

After school on Wednesday I went to get a drink with some other students from school and by the time we went for a walk along the water and had dinner it was 10 pm when I got home! Thursday night we all went on a boat trip to Monaco and Friday night there was a party at the school so it's been quite busy.

The boat trip to Monaco was great but I felt sick after a while. The sea was very choppy and the boat wasn't that big so I enjoyed about the first third of it and then wanted to go home! The view was extraordinary and on the way back I literally saw a red sun setting behind Villefranche. I have never seen anything like it - a huge red sun. I tried to take a photo of it but the camera couldn't pick it up and it didn't last long but it made the sea sickness well worth it.

The people on the course are great - a diverse group of people from many walks of life, mostly older than me. There are a few younger people here but I would say the average age is 50. On the first morning we all took a test and our name and age was on the front page and on a quick glance around my table of 8 people, there were four women in their 60s. There is one man here who is 80 and the youngest would be a girl who I would guess is in her early 20s. There are 10 people in my class incuding myself. Two women in their 60s, one man in his 50s, 2 men in their 40s, 2 women in their 50s, one woman in her 40s and 2 of us in our 30s. I noticed that they all seem to have considerably more experience with the language after a couple of days and I asked the teacher at the party last night if I was in the wrong class! She said that my initial test showed I was more Beginners 2 level but that there is no Beginners 2 class this time so they put me up. She said that she could see I was picking things up quickly and that she would have put me down to Beginners 1 if she was worried so I am lucky! I want to learn as much as I can so I'm glad to have the opportunity to get a good headstart.


I'm sad to say there are no hot men around, well, none that aren't married. One of the teachers is gorgeous, I can imagine all the girls fall in love with him (see right). The teachers are all very funny and it's amazing how much we all laugh and understand what is going on. I think the teachers must be trained to speak with the simplified vocabulary and they are all entertainers. Some of the translation issues are hilarious. We were discussing our favourite cuisine and one woman mispronounced 'Francaise' and said 'Francois', which is a boys name. The teacher said, 'you like to eat Francois??? Ooh la la!' and proceeded to back away slowly, it was hilarious.

Some things are normal, like the state of my apartment. As Dad would say, 'it looks like a bomb has hit it.' I've been having too much fun to tidy up! So here I am in Villefranche on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, writing in my blog, replying to all my emails and cleaning my bedroom! I will update my blog when I can but it takes me a long time to put one together, maybe an hour? Sometimes more. Anyway, I shall leave it at that for now and post more when I can.

Hope you are all happy and well. :)

M. x

Le Institut de Francais est tres magnifique!

Bonjour! I thought I might put up a series of blog posts about my life here in Villefranche. One about the school, one about my apartment, one about the food, etc... as I find time, of course! I thought I would start with the school. I have just finished my first day of tuition, which is Day 2 of the course. All I can say is - WOW! Today was conducted entirely in French and I'm pleased to say that I understood most of it. I understand how things work here now and it is phenomenal - I've certainly come to the right place.

The Institut de Francais follows the a total approach program and they state that their 'one and only objective is to have you speak French as fluently and correctly as possible at the end of your stay.' Sounds good to me. The big question everyone asks is, 'how do they do it? In one month??' Well, the answer lies in a method developed after 4 years of research requested by the French government to combat the increasing number of foreign students and teachers coming to France. After determining what kind of French to teach (scholarly French? tourist French? business French?), they decided to teach the French that everyone speaks in France. They placed microphones in a variety of public places and gathered a large amount of data. They discovered that there was a collection of 50,000 words used. Of them, a list of 1,500 words were arranged according to frequency and that list constitutes what is now known as the 'French Fundamental Vocabulary.' So, this is what they teach! It's extraodinary. So it's not about knowing the right word for something - it's about knowing how to ask what the right word is for something. :)

I feel like I've achieved more today than I ever have, it's hilarious. I just had a little penny drop with one of the big verbs and the present/past/future tense, and already feel comfortable saying what has irritated me for the past 5 years. So funny as it seems hilariously simple and I don't know why I haven't got it until now but I am loving it. Class is hard in that it's very difficult to have the phrases naturally roll off the tongue - the physical resistance to the phrases is so obvious once you hear it and can repeat it in your head only to find your mouth doesn't follow when you try to speak. It's like trying to say a tongue twister fast when there are 8 other people in the room looking at you. But that is why I am here. I am sick of not feeling comfortable speaking French. Gosh, I've spoken more French today than I have in the past 10 years collectively. Not that it's good French, but it should be at the end of 4 weeks!

The school is absolutely stunning (see the photos) and the teachers are hilarious and friendly. Breakfast consists of bread (freshly sliced baguettes), croissants, several cheeses, yoghurt and jam. Lunch is a 3 course meal. Yesterday was a vegetable soup, roast chicken/potato/roast tomato/beans and chocolate mousse. Today was Nicoise Salad (the famous Nice salad with anchovies/egg/tuna), beef schnitzel/broccoli/pasta bake and pistachio ice cream. It's very hard not to eat dessert when a plate of it is placed in front of everyone and there are spares in the centre. I've tried not to eat the carbs as much as possible but c'est tres difficile! There is also, of course, always fresh bread on the table and so far I've resisted pouring olive oil all over my plate and mopping it up with bread, as everyone else seems to be doing.

I've been placed in the intermediate level 1 class which seems to suit me well. I'm very happy, I've always been in the beginner levels at the Alliance de Francais so I was pleased. I was suprised considering I felt like I did dreadfully in the tests yesterday - I had to speak for 5 minutes describing a picture for one task, and all I could get out were very simple (and lame) sentences. And I ran out of things to say before 5 minutes! Ha. Oh well. I'm pretty happy with where I ended up.

Now I've just got to work out a way to afford coming here every year. ;)


M. x

Bonjour from Villefranche!

Houston, the Eagle has landed. Here I am on the otherside of the world feeling like I am home. I love this place. I love that everyone speaks French and I don't hear English much at all. I love that it even feels French. Ahhh, I just love it. :) I have settled already and am loving my new home (even if it is only for 4 weeks). It's getting close to dinner time here on Sunday afternoon meaning it's almost 3 am Monday morning at home. I'm feeling pretty tired but have switched to French time already and am looking forward to school tomorrow.

Villefranche-sur-mer is a gorgeous coastal town just out of Nice and is full of locals and the normal French hustle-bustle. There are cafes everywhere you look and a gorgeous bakery and fruit shop just down the road from my apartment. Here are some of the restaurants down by the water. I took this photo yesterday afternoon (Saturday). The cafes are quiet as it's not yet dinner time and the people are all down at the beach with icecreams. :)

I took some photos of my apartment but just thought I'd share the important ones for now - my delightful balcony and the stunning view from it! The apartment is old but full of everything I could wish for. It even has a dishwasher! I have a desk for my laptop, a couch, a tv, a bed, a fully equipped (albeit small) kitchen and the usual bathroom with a washing machine in it. I'm all good to go! I haven't quite got the hang of the shopping hours here yet, I found a little supermarket but they seem to be open early and late and shut for the whole afternoon. I'm sure I'll work it out eventually but for now I know they are shut at about midday and also at 4:30 pm. Seems odd but the good news is that I think they will be open after school so I can buy food if I need to cook dinner. Not that I'll ever need to with so many places to eat around here.

I think my apartment has the best view possible (see left). I'm stoked with it but unfortunately I am quite a way down the hill from the school. When I say 'quite a way down', I don't mean that it's a long walk - it took me about 8 minutes to walk there today (including the time it took me to get down the 3 flights of stairs and through the 3 locked doors/gates to get out of my apartment building, plus the time it took me to stop and look at the map before I set off)... but it is a steep walk. I think it was 5 minutes of stairs. Let's just say I was puffing when I got to the top. Hopefully by the end of 4 weeks I'll be zipping up them in no time but for now I'll just have to remember to leave a bit earlier so I have time to stop panting before I walk through the gates to the school. Ha ha. ;)

It's 7 pm now and I'm about to go for a walk back down to the restaurants to have dinner. I'm going to go via the grocery store to check if it's open... wish me luck!

M. x

Melanie in Maintenanceland... or... Having your cake and eating it too!

Well hello there people! Sorry I've taken a while to update the end of my Cohen's Diet Journey - refeed technically finished on Saturday but I've been extremely busy. :)

What a journey it has been. I've learnt a lot along the way, I feel a lot like Alice in Wonderland, falling down the rabbit hole and having a big adventure. All I can say is I will never be the same again. The last few days have been a steep learning curve. I relaxed a lot over the weekend with Mum and Dad visiting and drank 5(?) glasses of wine on my last day of refeed and snacked through the day on Cohen's friendly food. My first day of maintenance I again had about 5 glasses of wine, bacon for breakfast, a banquet for dinner and chocolate for dessert. Needless to say I gained about 1.4 kg for my efforts.

We are taught that we should be able to enjoy ourselves like that occasionally and that we can do a 'carb reset' where we don't eat carbs for 2 days and the weight should come off again. I tried to do that on Monday and Tuesday of this week but on Monday, despite eating no carbs, I ate too much food in general and an awful lot of fruit (a natural carb) and Tuesday (yesterday) I ate cake!! Ha ha, easier said than done, but the cake was divine. What I learned is that I can have my cake and eat it too - on Monday when I ate too much food but no carbs, I stayed the same weight. Tuesday I ate 2 pieces of bread, a nut bar and a piece of cake and lost weight because I didn't snack and followed my maintenance rules on how to eat cake without it causing a big blood sugar crash. So today I have decided to relax. I think, as long as I don't start munching on food all day and have clear breaks between my meals, I will be fine. I am not the same person I used to be - I choose differently now. Even though I ate cake yesterday, I ate only fruit at the big morning tea that the cake came from. There were about 10 cakes and all sorts of other various sugary foods and I ate fruit. I had some cake in the afternoon, but the old me would have tried a few small bits of several cakes in the morning and snacked on the leftover cake all afternoon. Because I had cake after lunch, I also politely declined a kahlua and milk and a chocolate brownie in the evening. Previously I would not have said no to any of it.

I am off to France on Friday. Very excited and a tad apprehensive about not being in control of the food that is available to me. I'm also a little scared about how often I'll be able to choose wisely and how all the wine/cheese discussion classes will affect my weight - we all know I don't have a huge chance of saying no to them!!! But I know that I will enjoy myself and try to be good at the same time. I've come too far to undo it all now.

 

Wish me luck!! And thank you again for all of your support.

 

M. x

 

PS - Since I have achieved what I set out to do in this blog, I am removing everyone from the automatic email list. I will update again from time to time so feel free to check in, and by all means, if you want to stay on the list let me know. :)

Cohen's Diet Refeed; Day 17... or... Thank goodness this is nearly over!!!!

Wow - what a week! I went from 'going great guns' and having completely stable weight and enjoying refeed to ABSOLUTELY CRACKING on Saturday. I had a bit of an emotionally stressful morning and thought I got over it but I realised mid afternoon that I'd had 250 g yoghurt (I'd been having a spoonful or two each time I opened the fridge) over the day without realising it (good lesson to learn - no fridge snacking!). I couldn't stop myself from eating it and ended up eating the rest for dinner (the other 250 g) and not having my steak, and I ATE CHOCOLATE! I had a little pouch of Hershey Kisses that had been in my cupboard from a massage I had in May (that came with chocolates?) and I cracked and ate them with only one week to go. ONE WEEK!

I decided I needed to get out of the house (to prevent further eating) and go get some chromium tablets (they are meant to help with future sugar cravings) so went to the chemist and I walked past the lolly stand and they had a small bag (90 g) of sugar free licorice. Well, all I can say is that the past month of licorice cravings finally got to me. I bought (and ate before I left the car park) that too. Oh boy it was good. It was almost worth it!

 

Needless to say I completely stuffed up 'the delicate balance' that is refeed. The next morning I was up 600 g and the day after I was up 700 g! I was pretty annoyed at myself after that and took a few days to get back on track but it's all good now. The weight came back off and I have since eaten pasta, rice and potatoes!!!!! Oh, and BISCUITS! I ate 2 granita biscuits yesterday, and today I am going to have 2 scotch fingers. Oh how exciting. :)

The best part of all is that this afternoon I am going to have my first glass of champagne with my parents!!! They are coming over to pick up Bella so they can look after her while I am in France. AND TOMORROW IS MY LAST DAY OF REFEED! I will blog again next week when it's all over, and to say farewell before I head off to France. I leave you with the photos of my lovely food. Salmon and prawn pasta, pork and prawn rice and chicken schnitzel with chips! The schnitzel is on a big plate. Can't believe how much food I've been eating!

M. x

Cohen's Diet Refeed; Day 8... or... One of the craziest weeks of my life.

Hey everyone! Thanks for all of your messages of support, it means a lot to me. :) Refeed is going well! I've enjoyed having the extra food, I'm up to 3 pieces of bread a day now! My dinner tonight was huge (and probably the most expensive meal I've cooked myself in ages) and consisted of fillet steak, prawns and a whole bunch of asparagus. That's on a big plate too, and those prawns are big. :) I know the presentation is awful but I wanted to eat it while it was hot and just slapped it on there quickly. ;) Thought it was the best photo because it shows how much I am eating now - the asparagus is almost the full length of the diagonal of the plate so you can see it's huge.

My latest exciting food has been banana - wow, I forgot how nice they are. Pineapple has been rocking my world this week, as did my open steak sandwich that I had for lunch yesterday. I forgot how good it was to have meat and cheese together!!! Funny, I don't eat red meat much at all but I've had it twice in two days - I think it's a product of trying to work out which proteins go well together (I have to start mixing them now) and steak is such a winner. On Sunday I can add salmon (I'm going to pair it with prawns) and then on Monday I can have pork so I'll have that with chicken.

On the weekend I will be having pasta - woo hoo! Ha ha, can't believe how excited I am about what used to be staple foods. Fruit and pasta and mixing meat and cheese. Funny! I'm going to have pork with chicken next week and make a fried rice with it, so excited about rice too! Basically I have had to get used to feeling full again, which is a funny feeling when you've not been full for 5 months. I started this diet 5 months ago today - golly, who knew I could stick to it for so long.

As for my weight - I am holding steady, as is the point of refeed. I've added 2 pieces of fruit, 3 pieces of bread and about 150 g protein and 150 g veg to my day and I've lost 100 g all up for the week. I have been going up or down 200 g a day mostly, which is apparently pretty stable. A lot of people react to bread and some of the fruits which can cause them to put on up to a kilo if their body doesn't like something. Luckily I'm all good *touch wood*. Still have 10 days to go so we'll see. I still have to add in pasta/rice/potato, lamb/pork/salmon/scallops, milk, margarine, biscuits and wine...

As you can imagine, this has been the most complicated week of my life, with food measurements and rules from here to Christmas. Plus I have 2 weeks until I go to France for 5 weeks and all of the organisational issues that come with that, not to mention preparing work for my almost 6 week absence. Needless to say I've been a tad preoccupied. Oh and did I mention I am also enrolling to do Honours in Psychology next year and will probably have to move house when I get back from France? No? Well, there's that too!! Plus, my gorgeous housemate moved out on the weekend and so I've been reorganising and trying to fill the void (there is an Angela-shaped hole in my heart!).

Anyhoo - I hope you are all having less crazy weeks than me! You get out what you put in, and all of this stress is what is making this 2011 - The Year of Mel. I'm sorting out my body and self image (crazy diet), my career (enrolled in course this morning), my goals (going to France to learn French) and my home life (moving or getting a new housemate). All of which will set me up for an amazing 2012.

Watch this space people!

M. x

PS - I may have eaten (on occasion) an extra piece of bread (like when it was freshly sliced at Bakers Delight - come on - how could I not eat that thin bit of crust when I'd not eaten bread in 21 weeks??) or an extra banana (because they were so freakin' amazing) or an extra cracker (I miss them because I haven't eaten them for 3 days) or an odd extra bite of fruit here or there (just because I wanted to). You got it out of me. Oh and a few spoonfuls of the DELICIOUS homemade yoghurt I made yesterday, or an extra bite of cheese when I wasn't meant to have cheese.... I suspect I might actually have lost weight if I was sticking to this 100%. It's getting harder and harder in some ways, and getting easier now that I'm allowed more food so I am less prone to snacking...

PPS - I made blueberry jam out of my 100 g blueberry allowance and one sachet of Natvia (a stevia-based sweetener) and some water. It rocked my socks off. Especially on toast. :) xx

Cohen's Diet Refeed; Day 1... or... Welcome back bread, my old friend.

Well hello there! Can't believe I'm here. No, seriously. I started this diet with the firm intention that I get to refeed. I remember saying to my Mum, 'It's really important that I start and finish this diet properly, so that I can reintroduce all the foods properly so that my body learns how to deal with them again.' And here I am - doing just that. I remember absolutely panicking on the inside that this would just be another one of those diets that I committed to and never followed through with, and yet somehow I knew it would be different. I followed all my Landmarky principles and put measures in place to help pull me into the world of success - this blog being a huge part of it. Having to own up to you guys each week has been a huge help to me and I really appreciate that you all came along on this journey with me. :)

It's been an interesting few weeks. I got stuck at the same weight for about 3 weeks. I lost 0.5 kg twice and put on 0.5 kg once (my little binge fest) but I kept coming back to the same number. It's like my body just put the breaks on. So did my mind - I felt like I was going crazy. I kept walking around the supermarket with food I wasn't allowed to eat, having 20 minute conversations with myself (as I did the rest of my shopping) about how eating the non-allowed *yoghurt/nuts/dried fruit/fruit and nut bar* wouldn't make a huge difference, only to put it down on a random shelf just before I went through the checkouts. It was a strange time. I finally relaxed over the last few days, knowing that refeed was coming and that I'd soon be able to eat more food. Today is day 1 and I'm 0.5 kg lighter than I was at weigh in 2 weeks ago.

I had the most divine lunch - Mozzarella cheese with tomato and fresh basil on... wait for it... BREAD! White bread. Fresh from Bakers Delight - it was delicious! I notice how much I am loving simple food now. I'm starting to notice all of the junk and 'numbers' that are added into foods and wondering what food I can make myself so as to avoid it. I even brought my own yoghurt maker and am going to make my own yoghurt when this is all over.

I also noticed how quick I was to put myself down this week - I got my letter from Dr Cohen (the standard one you get when you get to refeed) which said, 'Dear Melanie, Congratulations on getting to your goal weight!' and proceeded to say what a great job I'd done. I immediately thought to myself that I was not that good since I didn't actually make it to the goal weight he gave me (I'm 9 kg away from the upper limit he set) and how I haven't done a very good job after all. Hello!!?? I've lost 24 kg. It's ridiculous how much weight I've lost. Who cares if I haven't finished - I'm stopping early to go to France - wooo-freaking-hooooooo!!!!!!!! I can come back and lose the extra 9 kg if I feel the need to, because, you know, I'm a person who CAN LOSE WEIGHT IF SHE WANTS TO! Maybe I won't even want to, because,  you know, I look pretty awesome right now!!! I walked into Guess on the weekend and fit into about 5 pairs of their size 12 jeans and looked fabulous! So yeah. That's all I've got to say about that. :)

So I enjoyed my blueberries with my yoghurt this morning and I loved my first slice of bread in 21 weeks. I have to weigh myself daily and add in various amounts of various foods over the next 18 days to a point where I am adding 3 pieces of bread, 2 fruits (that's 4 a day in total), extra meat and veg, pasta, rice, biscuits and wine. My food is going to double. Let's just hope my weight doesn't, he he.

I'll keep you posted. ;)

M. x

PS - I love purple cabbage.