Monthly Archives: August 2015

If I had a pound…

Reflections on past times, Worst memories, ,

£

…for every pound in weight I’ve lost over the years I could probably give Bill Gates a run for his money. I can’t remember the first diet I ever went on, but I do remember the moment it occurred to me that I didn’t have the same kind of Bambi limbs as most of the other girls at school.

It was sometime around top class in infants, when we were doing a topic about farms – I even remember the teacher who first alerted me to the fact that I was a porker under construction, she was called Miss Baume, and I remember her looking like an extra from The Liver Birds. She called me and another fairly chunky little girl out to the front of the class, and waving her arm in our direction announced that the two of us together probably weighed the same as an adult pig.

Yes, I’m serious, she really did that. I was 7 years old and the utter humiliation of that moment was the first time I recall feeling ashamed of the way I looked. I mean AS IF you would ever, ever, ever say that? I ran home after school in tears and my mum gave me a kit kat to make me feel better.

Fast forward a few years, to around the time that the film Grease came out in 1978. I was 13 at the time, and having watched the film at least 10 times and spent god knows how many weeks coveting a pair of shiny black leggings, (which were obviously going to transform me in the same way they’d transformed Sandy), I nagged my poor mum half to death. She clearly knew this purchase had disaster written all over it but eventually I wore her down – leggings duly purchased, I was very very pissed off when they didn’t in fact make me look like Sandy at all.

I’m still not sure whether it was because my legs were a foot shorter than hers, or because my arse was at least a foot wider – it might even have been down to the fact that the only thing I had to team them with was a pair of sensible Clarks’ sandals and a poncho (stop laughing, ponchos were all the rage at the time).

But if my memory serves me right, the school disco didn’t end with me making sweet music with the year nine stud muffin. Or even the year 9 munter to be fair…I think what was in those pants on that night scared all of us, and there are several people who probably still have a phobia of lycra to this day.

Things could only get better from there, right?

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Relocation

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now, , ,

Tonga-Island-Picture

I’ve often thought that maybe I’ve got it all wrong. Instead of dieting, perhaps I should just relocate to the South Pacific –  on the island of Tonga for example, to put it bluntly, fat women are where it’s at…if you’re fat, you’re in. And did you know, in Mauritania,  there’s even a ‘wife fattening farm’ – imagine that.  Rumour has it that stretch marks are a major turn-on for Mauritanian blokes…I must nip down to WH Smith and order the Mauritanian edition of FHM, just to have a look. The ultimate body shape in that neck of the woods (I shit you not) apparently comprises cascading stomach flab, overlapping thighs and a neck with ripples of fat. I mean come ON…it’s clearly my spiritual home.

In the same magazine article, which I found in Marie Claire (the irony wasn’t lost on me) they referenced a young woman who was using dodgy under-the-counter medication to increase her appetite because she was desperate to be bigger.  It seems that wherever in the world you live, your self-esteem takes a battering if your body shape doesn’t conform.

Not that I’m banging the ‘big is beautiful’ drum. To some people it may well be…my best male friend for example is particularly partial to a well built lady. He’d be more likely to fantasise about a hippo swinging on a grape over Miley Cyrus  on her wrecking ball, but I’m not in that space at all. I don’t especially want to be a size zero – given my years of yo-yo dieting I’d end up looking like a shar pei puppy if I took my clothes off.  But normal, average, medium sized…yes please.

So, where do I sit right now..? On the scale of thin – slender – slim – average – curvy – cuddly – large – extra large – fat knacker – sumo – mobility impaired – needs a crane to leave the house, I’m definitely a decent fat knacker with one foot in sumo. My knee hurts, all the time.  My feet ache, my back aches, and I can’t walk up a flight of stairs without being really out of breath. I can feel my backside following me when I walk and I’ve even got a spare tyre on my spare tyre. I’ve woken up more than once in a cold sweat, after a night terror where I’ve seen myself living out my days with my belly tucked into a pair of trackie pants, chins flapping in the breeze as I pootle around on a mobility scooter.

But I’m not going there. I’ve decided I’m going the other way.  And in the last 9 days, every step has been in the right direction. For now, I’m still in the game 🙂

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Hitting Rock Bottom

In the here & now, ,

You know what I mean when I say ‘the sweet spot’, right?  It’s the holy grail.  It’s that rock solid, cast iron will which clicks into place and acts as a shield, protecting you from cake. When you find the sweet spot you no longer have to argue with yourself for a good hour at least about whether eating the cake is a good idea or not.

Any food junkie worth their salt will know that even if you manage to gag the asshole voice in your head and win the argument with yourself, that cake continues to flirt with you from a distance.  It stares right into your soul…your mouth waters as though you’ve already taken a bite. It doesn’t matter what else is going on in the room, all you see is the cake. It’s like a magnet with its own force field, and you keep on having the should I/shouldn’t I conversation with yourself in a loop, right up until the point someone else eats it.

But none of that applies, if you’ve found the sweet spot, and you’re in the zone.  If the magic happens, you’re somehow immune. Nonchalant even…cake, what cake? No thanks (wrinkles nose), I don’t really like cake…do you have any lettuce?

It’s elusive.  The more you dig deep, the harder it is to find. I have a theory actually…I think perhaps the sweet spot is a finite resource that you’re only able to truly tap into a handful of times in your life. Kind of like a cat has 9 lives…maybe you’re even born with an allocation and once you’ve used it up you’re destined to be a salad dodger for the rest of your natural life.

I don’t think there’s a formula for finding it, or holding onto it. It’s irrelevant how much you want to find it, or even how much effort you put in to trying to find it. But one thing’s for sure…without it you have zero chance of sticking to your diet, because the asshole in your mind will always win the argument about cake.

My rock bottom moment happened just over a year ago when I had to buy one of these…

Essential holiday accessory
Essential holiday accessory

Passport, check. Tickets, check. Sunglasses, check. Airplane seatbelt extension, check. The ultimate indignity…well, it’s a 9 on the 1-10 scale. 10 would be having to ask the string bean in a cabin crew uniform if you can borrow one of theirs. Having your own mitigates the shame down to a 9 but even so.  If that’s not rock bottom I don’t know what is…yet still I continued to argue with myself, and eat cake.

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Born chewing..!

Reflections on past times
Proof, if any were needed that I was born with a love of food!
Proof, if any were needed that I was born with a love of food!

I look at that photo, and smile. There’s no doubt I was loved – my mum and dad tried for 12 years to have a baby and it just didn’t happen. They adopted me at 6 weeks old, and never had a baby been so loved…or so well fed! I’ve dipped in and out of therapy over the years to try and understand this weird relationship I have with food and there’s no doubt in my mind that some of the way I’m wired stems way back to my formative years. Feeding me was my mum’s way of showing love. If I skinned my knee, or fell out with a friend, there was a ready supply of edible treats to make me feel better. Bad times, good times, difficult times, tears…all medicated with food.

Back then I’m sure I was regarded as a bonny baby – nowadays my mum would probably be hauled in front of social workers screaming about childhood obesity and food abuse…and on balance I guess they’d have a point. Looking at the picture, the space-hopper physique isn’t a million miles away what I see right now as I look down at the rolls of fat on my arms and the dimples on my knees (although let’s not forget there are some seriously foxy knees buried under all of that). I do speak from a position of certainty though when I say nobody’s going to look at the adult space-hopper and say ‘Awww…’ in quite the same way.

In many respects, as an obese adult, the bigger you are the more invisible you become.

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My skinny knees, admiring the view.

Reflections on past times
Maldives, 2007.
Maldives, 2007.

Well, that answers that then…that’s how I attach a photo. Yey, go me.

I feel wistful when I look at this picture…I spent hours in that spot, contemplating life, love, all the usual stuff. I was full of optimism. My job was coming to an end but I knew I’d be ok so I wasn’t too worried. I’d just met a new bloke and was in that lovely heady place of being constantly giddy (he didn’t work out, they never do but lets not even get started down that particular road) and I was away with my best friend.

Best of all, I was slim!! I’d just spent 8 months or more on a drastic VLC liquid diet and I’d dropped around 8 stones. I felt like a million dollars. This time – that time – I was going to keep the weight off…no doubt about it. I did too, for around a year…sadly I’ve spent the last 7 years putting it all back on again, and then some. Once my finger finds the ‘self destruct’ button, it’s over.

Today, those skinny knees are in here somewhere (admire if you will the square kneecaps…they’re an object of beauty don’t you think?) but they’re buried under layers of dimpled lumpy topsoil and currently sitting above chunky middle-aged cankles. I’m one week into my quest to find them again.

It’s probably the tenth or so such attempt since I returned to the ranks of being a fat knacker but you know what…this time, eh? I’m just back from another holiday and I could weep at the difference between me now, and me then. More of that later…for now, think positive. Baby steps, but still…steps are steps, one leads to another and this week at least they’ve all been in the right direction.

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