Tag Archives: resist temptation

When Minnows Become Monsters

In the here & now, ,

So yesterday was a bit turbulent. I ended up scraping through on a wing and a prayer, and only by paying two hundred calories forward onto today did I manage to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Having said that, in and amongst the stresses of an incredibly challenging day I scored the biggest non scale victory ever, by walking past the pasty shop in Kings Cross station and ignoring the big fat stack of cheese and onion pasties which were shouting my name.

I reckon the girls behind the counter clocked the width of my arse and thought they had a guaranteed sale in the bag, especially since I locked eyes with every single pasty in their display. I’ve rarely made it past this particular pasty shop unscathed, and I wanted to stick my tongue out and lick them all as I walked past, but yesterday there was no sale.

At that point I was already sailing close to the wind, to be honest. I’d meant to buy a coffee at 5.45am before I boarded my train to London, but instead I’d bought coffee and a bacon roll. I’d meant to have coffee at coffee break but I’d actually had coffee and three cookies. All logged and counted but not the stuff healthy diets are made of that’s for damn sure.

We had a major crisis at work yesterday and I had to abandon my meeting a couple of hours in, heading three hours north back into the office. There were lots of colleagues pulling together to keep the wheels on in a superb display of teamwork until quite late last night, so we brought in fast food as a thank you to keep them going. I was starving, so of course I joined in.

That’s when the minnow-sized errors of food-plan judgment began to flirt around the edges of becoming a monster error, you know? Having access to fast food when I was tired and stressed could have gone horribly wrong. Thankfully despite the unplanned but welcome supper, I reckon I just about scraped through.

If I’d eaten sparingly until the point at which the emergency take-out arrived, I might have had a little bit more wriggle room. The fact that I’d allowed myself to have treats when treats weren’t really needed is a mistake I’m often too quick to make. The treats weren’t even that special, you know?

I didn’t need a bacon roll first thing in the morning, it just felt easier to grab it at the station than faff around making porridge before I left home at stupid o’clock. And there was certainly wasn’t much thought given to whether or not I should have cookies with my coffee. They were there, on a plate in front of me and I just ate them because I could.

I’m still fat enough to get away with a decent chunk of calories every day, even when I’m eating in calorie deficit and the temptation to play fast and loose with how I spend them is constant. I need to get back to that place where I’m eating as cleanly as possible, and staying away from sugar. I’m not quite there but I’m working on it.

Day by day, choice by choice, right?

Before you go, we have a brand new guest post today! My good friend Kayleigh has not only shared her story, she’s also taken the massive step of baring her numbers on her very own Shitbird page. I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing her all the luck in the world as we watch her journey unfold 🙂

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No Sausage Rolls Welcome Here

In the here & now, ,

In the last hour of yesterday, when I was kicking back and relaxing in my armchair, glued to the final part of a TV drama I’ve been looking forward to since last week’s episode, I didn’t eat anything, so I’ve officially declared it as a victory. It’s the first time in four days where I ended the day without incident.

It wasn’t a bad dieting day all things considered…I ate a sensible breakfast, a questionable mid-morning snack from the sandwich van, followed by a sensible lunch, a dodgy afternoon snack from the ice-cream van and very sensible light supper followed by an hour’s swim after I got back from the hospital. I tried, you know? And more importantly, I counted.

I didn’t want to. I mean, I wanted to want to, almost as much as I wanted not to have to but in the end I just bloody behaved myself and sulked about it like a petulant child. But you know what, as I was drafting some words for this blog post, for the first time since the weekend I felt like I could look myself in the eye and report that on the dieting front at least, my day had been okay. Even though it’d been a shit day in every other respect.

Mum’s poorly. I got quite choked at the hospital yesterday…I was telling her who was coming for a visit today, and she didn’t recognise the name of my best friend in the whole world, even though for the last thirty odd years she’s affectionately referred to her as daughter number two. That was a first. The doctors can’t tell me if this sudden mental decline is due to the infection, or whether the last pieces of mum are slipping away from me. I cried like a baby on the way home.

In between all that she still made me laugh. For some reason, she’d pulled the cannula out of the back of her hand, twice, and when I asked her why, she put on her very best innocent face and pointed at the old lady in the opposite bed… it wasn’t me, it was her, she did it. We both got a fit of the giggles when I caught her eye and she knew she’d been rumbled. It was the one bright spot in what was otherwise a difficult visit.

So let’s see what today brings. Between you and me, I’m hoping it doesn’t bring anything resembling a sausage roll. I’m working from home today and there’s only wholesome food in the house, plus neither the sandwich van or the ice-cream van will be calling to tempt me, so I’m in with a fighting chance.

I’m not expecting miracles…I just want to keep the wheels on, that’s all.

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Every Day’s A Lesson

In the here & now, , ,

So yesterday I learned two things. I learned that it’s possible to survive two days of conference without eating my own bodyweight in crap. I think it’s the first time ever. And although there was an incident with half a glass of prosecco and two bags of Scampi Fries on Wednesday evening, I’m still claiming it as a victory because forty minutes in the pool more than covered the calories, so I paid my dieting debt and then some.

On the other hand, I learned that it’s not possible to drive the one hundred and thirty miles home with a large carton of cherries on the passenger seat without incident. Like 400 grams’ worth of incident. I was only going to have one or two, but I walked through my front door clutching a carton full of nothing except stalks and stones.

Not surprisingly, overnight I also leaned that eating 400 grams’ worth of cherries all in one go is not compatible with a good night’s sleep although to be fair, after multiple trips to the bathroom I should’ve been at least ten pounds lighter by the time my alarm went off.

Every day’s a lesson, right?

Checking out of the hotel yesterday I felt so smug, like I was unbreakable and I wanted to tell the world about my will of iron. Not even half an hour later, faced with a large carton of cherries I’m a fucking pushover…I wouldn’t care, I only bought them because I noticed they’d been reduced in price when I stopped to buy fuel. Will of iron my arse.

Whatever. I’ve spent the last two days sidestepping bowls of boiled sweets, ignoring the mocked-up tuck shop that had been set out in the corner of the conference room for anybody to just dive right in and bypassing the burgers and sausages and fancy coleslaw on barbecue night in favour of chicken and salad.

I’ve had no chocolate and no dessert, and I shunned the big cooked hotel breakfasts in favour of skinny girl choices. I swam both days, and we had an escorted walking tour around Stratford-Upon-Avon after lunch on Wednesday which put a couple of miles under my feet. I pulled it off, so throwing caution to the wind and vaporising a ton of cherries isn’t worth wasting any angst over. For what it’s worth they were bloody lovely, even if they should’ve lasted me at least three days.

So anyway, with conference well and truly over, my thoughts are turning to the weekend. Are you up to much?

Back in March, when July seemed like a lifetime away (and I’m bound to be skinny by then, right?) in a moment of madness I thought it might be fun to run a 5k obstacle course and haul myself over a load of giant inflatables whilst folk chuck paint at me on the way round. So I signed up to do it with a bunch of crazy-assed friends, and it’s come around rather more quickly than I expected. Like, it’s tomorrow.

The thing is, I appear to be still fat with a dodgy knee.

Fuck.

 

 

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Fighting The Good Fight

In the here & now, ,

The first week of going cold-turkey where refined sugar is concerned is always the pits. I’m hanging in there, and happy to report that I haven’t caved, despite my Asshole voice rolling out every trick in the book in an attempt to cure me of the ridiculous notion that I can live without it.

Wednesday brought its own unique brand of torture. I was working in Birmingham, and one of our recruitment partners had very kindly offered us their office space to do some interviews. The room was lovely, with tea and coffee all laid out, together with a plate of biscuits. And I’m not talking just any biscuits…these were Choco Leibniz biscuits. My favourite. There’s something about the buttery crunchy biscuit base and the thick slab of chocolate sitting on the top which makes me want to lock lips as soon as I clap eyes on them.

I could tell you now exactly how they were arranged on the plate, because for the three hours we spent in that room I was barely able to focus on anything else. There were six of them. Four were arranged down one side of the plate, chocolate side up, and two were in the middle, chocolate side down and leaning against a pile of bleh biscuits which occupied the other side of the plate.

Did you know that the long fluted edge of a Choco Leibniz has fifteen little chocolatey bumps on it? And the short edge has eleven. I fantasised about biting into each and every single one of them. Or resting my tongue in between one of those little chocolatey bumps, and resisting the temptation to lick so it’d last for the longest possible time,  just waiting for that sweet chocolate to melt and explode onto my tastebuds. Or best of all nibbling all the chocolate from around the edge first, before dunking the middle bit in my coffee. For three hours those thoughts wrestled for pole position with everything else going on in my head.

They almost drove me mad, but I didn’t have one. It was warm in the room we were using so we had the window open, and every now and again there was a suggestion of a breeze which carried the scent of them right to my nose. I could feel myself sniffing the air like a lion with an antelope in it’s sights…shit the bed I wanted one so badly. But I left all six on the plate.

And last night, I went out for dinner with three very good friends. We’d picked the restaurant carefully, and researched the menu before we went so we were all confident that we could stick to our respective food plans. And that was fine, except as we were seated, dessert in the form of baclava was delivered to the table next to us. Oh you have no idea.

I could see the crispy filo pastry ready to flake stickily as someone bit into it. I could see the crushed pistachios on the top and the gleam from layers of sticky awesomeness. I think all four of us let out an involuntary variation on ‘Mmmm…I love baclava‘ as we collectively stalked every mouthful taken by the folks who’d ordered it. Three of us are on the same journey in terms of getting the food demons under control, and we had one much-envied string bean in our midst who has to fight just as hard as we do to stay there, you know?

From my perspective, if just one amongst our group of four had voiced the words fuck it, I’m ordering baclava,  I think we all would’ve jumped on the bandwagon. I came this close. It was a bit like being in a baclava-related scene of The Voice, with me and my friends in the big chairs waiting to see who’d push their buzzer first and get first bite before we all turned our chair around. Happily none of us pushed the buzzer for baclava but just because I didn’t, doesn’t mean I didn’t think about it for the rest of the evening, or that I’m not still thinking about it now.

*Sigh*…it’s all work in progress, right? I stared temptation down twice this week, and every time I say no, it gets me a little more skin in the game.

Day five of being refined-sugar- free in the bag…come on day six, let’s see what you’ve got 🙂

 

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One Battle At A Time

In the here & now, , ,

One of the guys who I’ve worked alongside for the last couple of years moved on to start a new job last week, and although I was out and about on his last day, when I arrived at the office after the weekend, his parting gift of chocolate for the team was lying in wait on the desk as I walked through the door.

I wasn’t bothered by it on Monday. Beyond a fleeting thought along the lines of how thoughtful he’d been to leave it, it didn’t really register. Yesterday on the other hand, the same chocolate drove me to hell and back. Especially around mid-afternoon when I made a cup of tea.

I’d eaten lunch at 11.40am because the roast beef sandwich on soft wholemeal bread that I’d carefully made to bring to work had toyed with me all morning. Holding out until the clock was at least edging towards 12.00pm had been a miracle in itself given the number of times my mind had unwrapped the foil over the course of the morning. To be honest, it was lucky to survive my journey to work, because It was just one of those days, you know? The kind where your mind is constantly pre-occupied with what you’re going to eat.

I don’t often eat bread these days, maybe once or twice a week. It’s not particularly a trigger food for me – well, not unless we’re talking about warmed Tiger bread lathered with salted butter obviously – but it just always strikes me as a bit heavy on the old food budget and I begrudge spending the points. However, the cold beef left over from supper the night before had begged to be eaten as I’d done a recce of the fridge, so there it was, locked and loaded. And gone, by 11.45am.

Thing is, I can smash down a sandwich in no time. At least with my usual salad box it takes me a beat between mouthfuls to chase a shred of lettuce around with my fork. I might pause to add a little salad cream here or there, or a little seasoning. With a pre-made sandwich, there’s no messing around is there? It was like the culinary equivalent of premature ejaculation. No foreplay, and over in seconds once I’d unwrapped the foil…  yes, yes, YES…oh. Are we done?

By mid afternoon I could’ve eaten my own arm, I mean I was starving. And every time I walked back to my desk from one meeting or another I was greeted by the sight of these two boxes of chocolates. Bit by bit they started to chip away at my resolve. Surely one wouldn’t hurt? I’ve proved that I can survive without chocolate haven’t I, I mean look at me…we’re well into May and I haven’t eaten any since Christmas. I’ve got so much skin in the game it’s unreal, so surely I’d be safe with just one?

I got as far as saying fuck it out loud as my hand reached for the box, only to be stopped in my tracks by a colleague. She looked so genuinely shocked that I might be about to break my long run of resisting temptation that I put the box down and retreated back to my chair with my tail between my legs. And she was right. Of course she was right. She knew as well as I did that I wouldn’t have stopped at one. I would have had three, or seven, or maybe ten and then I’d have stopped at the store on my way home and bought some more. I’d probably still be chewing them as I write this.

Even though I know what lies in store if I awaken the beast, I almost went there. I just about clung on with my fingernails, but I’m hoping today will be easier. It’s a brand new week. My conversation with the Shitbird Scale this morning contained a few naughty words…I’m not sure this experiment about how and when I spend my points is working. I’ll stick with it for another week and then make a call.

I’ve felt vulnerable and a bit out of control these last few days, so I’m claiming yesterday as a victory. That’s how wars are won, right? One battle at a time 🙂

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