Monthly Archives: January 2018

Resident Of Lazytown

In the here & now, ,

So my conscience was poked a bit when Susan asked me on Wednesday whether I’d resumed workouts and whether I was still swimming…the answer is no. And Susan, by the time you’d passed further comment relating to how much you’ve always admired my drive and determination in pushing on with the workouts, I was shaking my head in embarrassment with my hands covering my ears. The truth is, I haven’t done much since before Christmas.

I know.

That situation needs to change, I recognise that. I full intended to go back to swimming straight after the new year, and I would have, except I had a small cyst taken off the side of my jaw and I had to have stitches in my face. They’re out now though, and I still haven’t been back to the pool so what does that tell you? As excuses go, it was quite a good one, although at this point I can’t quite remember what excuses I used running up to the holiday season as to why my activity had tailed off. Too tired, not enough time, full of cold…I suspect I used all of the above at least once or twice as I descended into inertia.

I’ve been light on the workout front since I had my knee surgery. I was due to go back to it in early November…by that time my knee was well up for it but sadly my head was not. There’d been a few changes at the Kingdom of Pain that I didn’t much like and it didn’t hold the appeal it once had, plus the rigid timetable had always been challenging in terms of getting there, so I moved on to pastures new. Well, technically I just moved on, since I haven’t yet settled into any particular new pasture worth noting.

There are lots of things I fancy doing, you know? I fully intend to resume my swimming because it’s a great way to decompress and I really do love it. I’d like to do more of the spin classes that we enjoyed so much a couple of months ago. There are a couple of other classes at the same place which look and sound like they might be fun, and I’ve also got access to thirteen leisure centres and almost five hundred classes a week as part of my swim membership. I’ve got lots of options, but I’ve been so busy considering all of them that I still haven’t gotten around to hauling my fat ass out of Lazytown and actually doing anything.

And I can feel the difference. In addition to the extra weight that managed to find its way back into my pants, I feel sluggish, you know? I’m loitering in that place where the less I do, the less I want to do and it’s incredible how quickly my body and mind have both embraced the armchair mentality. It doesn’t help that the evenings are cold and dark, and in winter my one hundred mile round-trip commute seems even more wretched than ever. By the time I get home it already feels like there’s hardly any evening left to enjoy so it’s an easy gimme for the Asshole voice to convince me that staying in and relaxing is the only feasible option.

Except it’s not really, is it? I should be heading back to that place where the more I do, the more I want to do, not the other way around. Maybe now I’m getting some traction with my food plan I need to broaden my focus and make a real effort to burn a few calories.

Later on today I’m swimming for the first time in almost a month. There, I’ve said it out loud now…it’s a commitment to myself. And y’all heard me, right?

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Life In The Quiet Zone

In the here & now, ,

So I’m two days into this sugar-free living malarkey and I’m feeling cocky because it’s not bothering me at all. Normally, for the first few days I can be a bit tetchy (she says, as friends and family fall over laughing…actually I’m usually like a bear with a sore arse, in fact a bear with the sorest arse any bear ever had) as my eyes adjust to a bleak and barren chocolate-free landscape.

This time, nothing, in fact I feel amazing. It’s like my head has just gone along with the plan… oh right we’re doing this sugar-free shit now? Cool, no worries..knock yourself out. I nipped out of work at lunchtime yesterday to pick up food, and some bits and pieces for a bunch of my colleagues. There were two different kinds of crisps on the shopping list which required me to pause and browse the snacks aisle, as well as two packs of cookies which meant I had to stray into that other well-known danger zone. Even as I was throwing stuff into my basket, it didn’t bother me one bit because…well, that’s not my kind of food any more is it?

Back in the office, the cookies were opened for general consumption and they sat on the desk opposite mine all afternoon. I didn’t flirt with them, not even once. And I don’t mean in a huffy I refuse to even look at you kind of way either…they just didn’t make it onto my radar. Now, we all know that normally they’d drive me bat-shit crazy from across the room, and I can’t begin to tell you how liberating it is when previously impossible-to-ignore food become invisible. I feel normal.

The most amazing thing of all is the way I sat in the armchair last night catching up with a bit of TV, and my mind stayed locked and loaded into the programme I was watching. It didn’t set off on a mental adventure around the cupboards in my kitchen wondering what snacking opportunities may be lurking behind closed doors. It wasn’t calculating how many of my weekly points I could get away with using up by the end of Tuesday. I didn’t even consider licking a piece of Charlie’s dog-chocolate. I mean, nothing. 

I’d been so absorbed in what I was watching, it wasn’t until I climbed the stairs to bed that I realised just how quiet it’d gone inside my own head. And the more I thought about it, the more I remembered that feeling of calm from the last time I kicked sugar to the kerb…it’s like someone throws a blanket over the incessant chatter which exists to de-rail my good intentions and the noise just stops. My mind becomes a dieting quiet zone and it’s fucking awesome.

Now, y’all know I’ve crashed and burned at this point several times so I’m not counting my chickens. And I can’t put my finger on why exactly, but this time I don’t think that’s going to happen. I’m not fighting with myself and it just feels like the time is right.

I’m calm. I’m determined and I think it’s time to bring this home 🙂

 

 

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My Sugar Swan Song

In the here & now, ,

So I weighed in yesterday at the end of my first full week in this shiny new year and happily it was a number worthy of the effort I’d put in, so I’m feeling great that I’m off to a flying start. It’s also one whole year since I started recording my weekly weigh-in with a picture on my Shitbird page, which makes it easy to look back and see what I lost this exact week last year.

I’d started my clean eating challenge if you remember, and I managed to cut out sweet things altogether. At the time I think I described myself as refined sugar free, and although when I look back I wasn’t exactly sugar free, my version was good enough. No sweets, cake, ice-cream, chocolate or crisps. I gave a very wide berth to every single trigger food on my list, and I felt calm and in control. It really worked for me, so guess what…I’m going there again.

I’ve had a great couple of weeks. I’ve lost my Christmas weight, and I’m not getting mega-hassle from the Asshole voice, but he is there snapping at my heels. I know I’ve been playing with fire, and filling up on free food so I can snack on the sort of stuff that should really send me straight to hell. I’ve got away with it so far, but I refuse to spend the next twelve months in a scene from Groundhog Day, losing and gaining the same thirty pounds. I’m putting my foot down, I mean, I’m really not doing it. 

I don’t want to get bogged down in analysis paralysis, but I look back at those numbers from the first few months of last year and you know what, there’s no getting away from the story they tell is there? By the end of April I’d lost thirty pounds. Thirty pounds!!  Then comes the point where I obviously rekindled my love-affair with the fat-girl crack and for two months after that I lost fuck all, well except for the plot, clearly.

I briefly wrestled control back in July, before spending the next six months snaking my way right back up to just two pounds away from where I’d started.

I’ve done a lot of reflection over the weekend, and it’s no accident that the most successful bit of last year coincided with my decision to eat cleanly and cut out the crap. So, that’s my plan, only this time I’m going to keep it up for longer. I managed four whole months last year, including a sugar-free holiday aboard a ship where chefs waited around every corner just to tempt me, and still I lost weight. I enjoyed the challenge, so I know I can do it when I put my mind to it.

Right now feels like the right time. I might as well capitalise on the fact that I’m not being a dickhead. The stars are aligned and my head is playing nicely, so I’m all in. I enjoyed a lovely meal with friends yesterday where I had a small slice of naughty, and I ate a ginger nut last night…let’s call that my sugar swan song shall we, because from now on, I’m done.

I find that weirdly exciting 🙂

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It Never Ends Well For The Fat Ones

In the here & now, ,

Do y’all watch the MTV programme Catfish?  I’m a recent convert. I can’t even remember how I stumbled across it but to the dismay of my boy, who’s having to negotiate hard for TV time, I’m currently binge-watching my way through the first one hundred episodes ahead of their season seven airing next week. As far as mini-obsessions go, it’s not bad…it doesn’t involve eating so that’s a win, right? My boy’s perspective is bloody hell Mum, for an intelligent woman you don’t half watch some crap…

If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a show based around on-line relationships, with a couple of cool guys flushing out folk who are stringing other folk along with fake dating profiles. For someone like me, who’s endlessly fascinated with people – aka nosey – it’s irresistible.

Sometimes, like one time out of twenty, the person on the end of the dodgy profile turns out to be the real deal, but more often than not some rogue with questionable morals and a wild imagination has posted fake pictures to entice their poor unsuspecting victim into an on-line relationship.

Now, I’m probably thirty or forty episodes in at this point, right? And fascinating as it is, there’s a theme that I’ve noticed.  It never ends well for the fat ones. 

It’s a bit formulaic, and the story always unfolds like this; boy (or girl) meets utterly gorgeous girl (or boy) on-line and falls in love. Months pass, sometimes even years pass and despite endless texts/emails/telephone conversations the two never meet, so the one being strung along gets suspicious.

Along come the two cool guys and after a bit of detective work, utterly gorgeous girl (or boy) is rumbled, and generally persuaded to ‘fess up in front of their poor unsuspecting love interest.

Sometimes the person behind the fake profile is a bloke posing as a woman or a woman pretending to be a bloke. Sometimes it’s a woman who just looks like a bloke. Sometimes they have eyes that look in two different directions at the same time but mostly they’re none of the above…nine times out of ten they’re just fat.

And on some level you know, I get why they do what they do. As a fat girl, I totally understand the appeal of pretending to be somebody you’re not, and showing a gorgeous face to the world. It must be lovely, having members of the opposite sex falling at your feet declaring undying love at first sight. The truth is, It doesn’t really matter how warm or funny or bright you are, or how much love you have to give, if you’re fat you’re pretty much invisible.

This programme demonstrates the point beautifully. For all the victims’ chatter about being desperate to meet the person behind the pictures, and how what they look like doesn’t really matter anyway because they’ve fallen in love with the personality, as soon as an arse the size of South East Asia lumbers around the corner it’s pretty much game over, you know?

Now, being invisible to members of the opposite sex doesn’t actually bother me at all, because I’m not in the market for a love-interest for all the reasons we’ve discussed at length in these pages. If you missed those conversations I’ll summarise for you…I can’t be feckin arsed. Too much hassle and anyway I’m safer as a singleton. But if I was feeling fruity and in need of a good seeing to, I wouldn’t  imagine that my fat photo would drum up much interest at all.

I reckon that maybe one in a hundred fat folk would regard themselves as fat and fabulous…I envy the ones who do. Me, I’m definitely one of the other ninety nine 🙂

 

 

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My Balls Are Under The Wrong Cup

In the here & now, ,

It’s that time of year again isn’t it, where every other article you read and every other programme on the telly box is talking about diets and losing weight. Some of them are okay, but most of them are written or presented by folk who look like they wouldn’t know one end of a doner kebab from the other, and that raises serious credibility issues in my eyes. I caught the tail end of a programme tonight, and as the camera panned out and the credits rolled, the words of the presenter were left hanging in the air…

“It’s simple really. You just need to eat less and exercise more.”

No shit, Sherlock. It’s that fucking easy is it love? Right then. Praise the Lord! Let’s all eat less and exercise more and we’ll be skinny in no time. World obesity obliterated, because we’re all just going to eat less and exercise more. I might have been a bit more forgiving if she hadn’t prefaced the bleeding obvious with the words it’s simple really…

The science might be simple, but the execution relies far more on the human factor than a scientific equation, and that’s a buggeration factor that we just can’t overlook.

It’s like that old sleight of hand trick with the cups and balls. You can keep your eye on that ball ’til you’re blue in the face, but it’s never under the cup you think it’s going to be under when the cups stop moving. My balls are never under the right cup. And what I mean by that, is no matter how hard I try to keep a watching brief on everything that’s going on, something always ends up in the wrong place.

Just think for a second about all the component parts of being successful in the business of losing weight. You need a balanced diet, with representation from all your food groups. Plenty of protein to help stave off the hunger pangs. Not too many carbs if you can help it…easy on the fat, plenty of green stuff and some fruit thrown in for good measure.

Sleep. That’s important too…not too much but enough to replenish your energy levels. And plenty of exercise to get your heart rate up several times a week. Water, drink plenty of that but go easy on the salt, or your body will cling to the water like a fucking camel.

Stay away from trigger foods, you know those things where one means one packet, or one tub instead of the one bite that skinny people refer to. And don’t substitute one trigger for another, right? Eating fifteen bananas instead of fifteen hob-nobs is still fourteen bananas too many.

It’s exhausting, keeping your eye on so many cups and balls. No matter how hard I try, when I get to the end of my day and I do a quick recce, there’s usually at least one ball missing, or it’s under the wrong cup. So when some skinny fuckwit looks down a camera into my living room and tees up her pearl of skinny wisdom by saying it’s simple really…well, forgive me for wanting to punch her bloody lights out.

On the surface, it’s not rocket science. But for every one of us who gets to the end of the day with at least half of our balls in the right place, and a mental note to do better tomorrow, it’s cool. We’re doing fine. We’ve got this. It’s not about perfection, remember?

It’s about getting up again tomorrow and doing it all over again 🙂

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