Lucybell33's Journal

Thanks to everyone for all your lovely comments on my last journal! I'm still not doing brilliantly on the eating. I'm just SO tired, so hubby's doing all the cooking, and I have developed an aversion to veggies at the moment. Fruit's OK, but the thought of a something like a bit of broccoli just turns my stomach! Pasta, bread, potatoes, cheese, tuna are all acceptable to my delicate stomach, but little else.

Anyway, according to the What to Expect site, I should have only gained around 1.8lb by this stage (week 8), so I do need to try to be more careful. It's just so hard when I feel so faint and nauseous all the time - and the only thing that helps is something like a ginger biscuit!

Hope all my fabulous buddies are doing OK. I'll check up on you as soon as I can! xx

Thanks to all of you for your congratulatory messages on my qualification yesterday! I had a fantastic day celebrating yesterday - we started with champagne and strawberries at around 11am and continued through until until 8pm before hubby had to take me home!!

For those who don't know what an Actuary is, I had a look on the Institute of Actuaries website for a definition. The best they could come up with is: Actuaries are problem solvers, business analysts, consultants and financial risk assessors who look at past and present information, to develop and communicate a picture of the future.

Basically, it's a relatively small, specialist profession and we use statistical techniques to quantify risks and try to put a value on uncertain events. In my case, I work for a life office, so I try to quantify the value of life insurance products, which involves making assumptions about things like future expenses, mortality, rates of surrender etc, in order to estimate the amount of profit my company will ultimate accrue from a contract.

For anyone not yet convinced about using the power of positive thinking (as per The Secret) to achieve your goals, how about this for some strong evidence. At the start of the year I gave myself three goals all of which I wished to achieve this week and have been positively visualising for months:

1) Get to my goal weight - I actually reached a new low of almost 4lbs below my goal weight on results day.

2) Qualify as an Actuary - it might have taken a grand total of 15 years to get there, but I finally did it!

3) Win the Premium Bonds (the UK government's "lottery") - this is where I clearly wasn't specific enough, because although I did win, I won £50 rather than the £1m I had meant!! Oh well, maybe next month...