I was speaking to a lady last night in passing who was bemoaning the fact that she’s put weight on recently. She’s starting a diet on Monday 🙂 so she can get in shape for her holiday in September, although she doesn’t have a lot of weight to lose…I’d estimate maybe fifteen or twenty pounds..? The thing is, I know it’s all relative and she has every right to be unhappy with her mini-muffin top, but two things struck me as we chatted.
Firstly, I’m not so sure that if I’d been standing there feeling fifteen pounds too heavy, chatting to someone who was clearly ten times heavier than me I would’ve been quite so quick to moan about how I hated looking in the mirror and seeing ‘all this fat’. To be fair, I imagine that when I get down to being just fifteen pounds overweight you’ll have a hard time stopping me licking my reflection, never mind avoiding it. But whatever, I guess she was just being honest.
The second thing that struck me was envy. Envy that she could start a diet on Monday with a reasonable expectation that in a couple of months’ time she would’ve fully reclaimed her bikini body ready to sizzle on the beach. Let’s just pause a minute in wonder at how that feels, to know that within a few short weeks, you could earn your hallowed string bean stripes.
I’ve been doing this now for ten months, and I’m still almost one hundred pounds too heavy for my frame. Sure, I’m on track and I’ve already lost seventy pounds which is awesome but digging in for the long term is a proper feat of endurance, you know? A marathon, rather than a sprint. It’s different, and it requires a whole bunch of stuff that a ten minute diet doesn’t.
I remember that first day, 17th August 2015 waking up with hope coursing through my veins…this time was my time and I was really going to do it…no, I mean I really was. Let’s be honest, there was no difference whatsoever between that time and the time before and the time before that in terms of what was going on in my head because the finish line seemed so bloody far away that the Asshole voice in my head was just laughing hysterically.
He didn’t even need to put words in my head, you know? I already knew that the odds were not stacked in my favour…my past was littered with false starts because every single time, once the initial flush of determination waned and the reality of how long this was actually going to take started to bite, I always found it really hard not to throw the towel in and head directly back to the land of cheese balls and Haagen Dazs.
It didn’t help that my first few milestones passed by un-noticed. Even when I’d dropped forty pounds, nobody noticed, and why would they? There was just so damned much of me it was hard to tell the difference even if you were looking for it. But I was so determined, and by some miracle I managed to hit that sweet spot where nothing was going to knock me sideways.
So how is it different to a short-term diet? I recognise and embrace tenacity…if you fall over, just get back up again. I’ve had to recognise and embrace patience (she says through gritted teeth) because until you make your peace with it, you’re shafted.
And now…well, now it’s different. Mentally, I’m dug in for the duration. Ten months, and I’m not even half way to Skinny Town yet but you know what, it doesn’t matter…I am more sure than ever that I’m actually going to pull this off. It’s stopped being about how long and now it’s simply about how. There’s no reason for me to think about how long it’s going to take because the foundations of my skinny life have been laid, and now all I need to do is keep on doing what I’m doing.
I’m not even halfway there, but it sort of feels like I’m over the worst, you know? Clear my mind of time, one foot in front of the other, and repeat 🙂
