Monthly Archives: October 2015

So What Makes The Cut?

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now, , , ,

casesLordy, where do I even start with this one. So I’ve been busy over the last couple of days getting my stuff ready for my forthcoming trip. (What do you mean you hadn’t realised I was going away, didn’t I mention it?) And the fact that I’m only going for four nights is in no way proportional to the size of the bag I’m taking with me, in fact folk might well suspect I’m emigrating when they see me setting off.

I’ve mentioned the wardrobe situation before haven’t I, in a post a few weeks ago – my skinny clothes reside inside those closet doors whilst my fat clothes are relegated to the laundry basket/ironing pile merry-go-round. I bought quite a few new outfits before my last holiday, but I’ve got to be honest I don’t think I possess one single fat garment that I would choose to wear as a skinny girl. So what makes the cut, and gets to come on the trip? I think probably everything. I have to account for the asshole factor you see.

In the few times in my life that I’ve achieved the hallowed skinny girl status, I’ve gone mad buying clothes…lots and lots and lots of clothes. Most of which sit in my closet still, with the tags attached. Were I travelling as a skinny girl, given that we know our itinerary I’d have a carefully selected outfit for each day, each evening and maybe one or two spare things. I’d unpack, hang them up and wear what I’d planned to wear, when I’d planned to wear it and beyond that, I wouldn’t  give it much thought.

Travelling as a fat girl, with the asshole in my head in tow, it’s a different proposition. Whilst I’m packing, he’ll tell me yes that looks fine…he’ll say that about everything, pretty much. But when I’m there…different story you know? You’re really wearing that? It makes your bum look like two puppies fighting in a sack. Your arms are on display and it’s too tight…it doesn’t look right, doesn’t fit right, you look twice as big as you really are if that’s even possible…I know I’m getting better at ignoring him, but I sort of feel like I’ve got to take twice what I actually need you know? Kind of like fat girl insurance.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s no pity party going on here…it is what it is and I’m buffeted from the barbed comments he’ll sling in my direction by the deep rooted confidence that I’m on a clear path from fat to skinny, so next time I can set off with a pair of clean knickers and a toothbrush rattling around in my bag because the rest of my holiday duds will be waiting for me in the boutiques lining the malls that I’m going to pillage whilst I’m there.

There’ll definitely be shopping this week…you know the score. Maybe a bit of jewellery…a handbag perhaps…scent, yes definitely scent…fat girl accessories, but clothes, no. I don’t need fat clothes, I have them and besides they’ll have limited shelf life since I’m on the road to skinny town 🙂 And I have all the skinny clothes I need, I’m just waiting for my buns to shrink.

I have everything I need…I’m in a good place  cocktail

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The Sandwich Dance

Biggest Triumphs, In the here & now, , , ,

sanger

It was all going so well. Don’t panic, it still is, I’m just being a drama queen.  Today…plain food sailing from the minute I opened my eyes. Porridge, pointed, tick. Lunch, prepared at home and taken to work, pointed, tick. I even ate lunch at lunchtime, not mid morning, that’s how much I was on my game today. Over-ripe banana masquerading inside a greenish banana skin, cheeky knacker can’t fool me – bin – so no mid afternoon snack, but that’s ok. I wasn’t hungry. Until someone offered me a free sandwich and suddenly I was starving. And I said yes, to the sandwich. Well strictly speaking I didn’t, I opened my mouth and actually formed the word ‘no’, but somehow yes came out instead. Along with my hand, to take the sandwich. Judas!

Lunch, for a big meeting going on down the corridor had been catered apparently, and there was stuff left over. They must have been fairly important visitors, I mean this wasn’t just your ordinary sandwich, this was an epic sandwich. And somehow it was now sitting on my desk. Staring at me. Being all….seductive.

It was a large round soft brown bread roll, with double cheese, spring onion and mayo inside, all wrapped up in a little cellophane bag. It could at least have had the good grace to be a sandwich I wasn’t struck on, but that sandwich just happened to be my favourite.  I love cheese. And you know what else..? It was as heavy as a brick. I mean that sandwich was made by someone who knows how to make a sandwich…bursting at the seams, chock full of filling, not some mean-fisted measured spoon’s worth. I picked it up and when I felt the weight of it, I felt proud of the guy who’d made that sandwich, in a fat-girl-strikes-gold kind of way, he’d knocked it right out of the park.

The asshole in my head sprang into action immediately. Go on…it’s your favourite. And you’re practically on holiday now, so it’s ok. You’ve done really well but you can take your foot off for a few days, you don’t want to be worrying about points. You’ve probably got enough points left anyway and if you did eat it, you could go without dinner later, it’s six and two threes…go on, it’ll be fine…it’s cheese! Mmmmm….cheeeeeeese….

That sodding sandwich flirted with me for the rest of the afternoon. You know the score…every time I looked at it, it was looking right back at me. I moved it off to the side, next to my bag, but I could still see it out of the corner of my eye where it seemed to be almost dancing to get my attention. I tried and better tried to concentrate on the piece of work I was doing but all I could think about was how that double cheese and spring onion combo would taste as it burst onto  my tongue and how my taste buds would explode at the sharpness of the cheese.

But I didn’t eat it. I brought it home. It was a helluva fight…me and the asshole in my mind both battered bloody and bruised. But now it’s like I’ve stuck the pin back in the grenade…it’s lost it’s power. I brought the sandwich home so my boy can take it to work for his lunch tomorrow.  It’s sitting in the fridge right behind me as I type this, still soft and brown and heavy and very very cheesy…but I’m over it.  The craving passed.

Me: 1 – Asshole: 0. Again.  Let me hear you say YEAH!

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Let Them Eat Cake

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now,

cake

Well I have to say that The Daily Mail this week has produced it’s finest work yet in terms of a string of enlightening articles about diet, weight loss and fitness. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of their website in general…it’s free, and who wouldn’t want a running commentary on which bland-and-yet-famous person is sleeping with which other bland-and-yet-famous person. Still, far be it from me to cast aspersions on this goldmine of gossip, I can hardly diss it when I check in most days and have a flick through – besides, one of my biggest fans keeps posting snippets about us in the comments section of anything vaguely diet-related and as a result we’ve acquired some gorgeous new additions to the posse. No, it’s all good…and it just got better. Seemingly there’s a diet where you eat nothing but cake, and still lose weight. Mama I am home!

Oh. Oh dear. It seems that they missed the point a bit. How unlike them! I nearly broke my neck to follow the link and look at some sample food plans – I felt quite giddy as the webpage loaded…I’m thinking muffins for breakfast, maybe a nice victoria sandwich for elevenses…sachertorte at lunch, madeira cake with afternoon tea and how about a huge coffee and walnut wedge at teatime? Er…no. I realised that perhaps this wasn’t quite the Utopia I’d imagined when my eyes latched onto the words ‘unlimited salad’ halfway down the sample food plan.

On closer inspection, a towering tiered cake which positively gleamed with ‘eat me’ sheen appears to be made of melon. So basically a melon cut into a cake shape. I love melon…but it’s melon. Not cake. So the headline certainly captured my attention, and the photos whetted my appetite, and I’m sure there are some lovely sugar reduced cake recipes inside the book they’re selling for the princely sum of fifty five US dollars…I suspect you may even be actually be able to scoff a piece of reduced-fat-no-sugar cake daily but it’s certainly not the fat girl fantasy food plan I had first imagined. *Sigh* When will I learn?!

Ironic thing is, if they’d marketed it as ‘here’s a few cake recipes which are quite low on the ‘blow your diet’ richter scale and actually incorporate some healthy stuff too, I’d probably have been first in line to buy one – but I can’t help feeling a bit insulted when marketeers assume that to hook fat girls in, you have to fool them into thinking they can get skinny without putting in the work. That says something about the marketeers. Falling over myself to believe it..? That says far more about me.

Even now, when I’m locked in for the long game, I’m trying out of my socks in terms of sticking to my food plan and I’m basking in the glow that standing in the sweet spot gives me, were someone to offer me the option of getting skinny without changing my broken relationship with food, I’d be out of that sweet spot and all over it like a horsefly on a turd.

Note to self: it’s not possible to live on cake and get skinny. Move on 🙂

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Weekly News Round-Up

Diet update, In the here & now, ,

news 1

I’m running very fast this week to try and get ahead of myself.  It’s a clever little devil this WordPress thingamabob, I can write posts up ahead of time and schedule them to appear as if by magic, so in the unlikely event that my girlfriends do arrange for me to be ravaged for 24 hours straight by that dream boy I was dropping hints about, or if I’m actually trapped in the bathroom with a tiger, our posse should still have fresh reading material on a daily basis whilst I’m on holiday, or at the very least most days. Too cool for school eh? I will have some time whilst I’m away (an eleven hour flight for example!) and I adore writing this so I’m hoping to grab a bit of time here and there, but I like to be prepared just in case.

And, stand by for exciting news – we now have our very own Break Out The Skinny Girl Facebook page! If you’re on Facebook, please come and make friends…I’ve been sharing the daily blog posts via the BOTSG Facebook page and you guys can share or post stuff to the page too if you like…get in on the action you know?

I know in the context of the world wide web we’re really small potatoes but so far this month we’ve had almost fifteen thousand page views for the blog from almost sixteen hundred different folk…that’s purely down to you lot telling your friends about BOTSG, so thank you, I think you’re all beyond awesome! The subscription button that I introduced last week has proved really popular and now lots of people are getting Skinny Mail direct to their inbox daily, and feedback has been great…I’ve scratched my head in bewilderment more than a few times and just thought, you know, how has this even happened?!  I dared to dream. And here we all are.

In other back-of-the-net news…everybody in the office ate Chinese food at lunchtime yesterday. Except me! LOOK at my halo shining! I’d taken my lunch, which I’d pointed, and I ate that and left the noodles to them and it didn’t bother me a scrap. And today, I picked my son something up from the chippy whilst I was getting my holiday money, and despite the fact that it smelled divine, I buzzed in and out, picking up lunch for him and nothing for me, and what’s more it didn’t bother me one bit…I felt normal! To a skinny string bean that’s nothing…only a fat girl will get the magnitude.

So I’ve not engaged with the bitch in the bathroom this week, (for those of you who are new to BOTSG that’s code for the bathroom scales!) nor do I plan to until after my trip. Maybe then I’ll propose a truce once a month or so just to keep a watching brief. I should really pull my big girl pants on and deal with the trauma once a month you know? But I feel skinnier…that’s good enough for me. Twice this week I have worn shirts for work which have been too snug to wear up to now, and now they’re not. Do I need to explain the width of this grin..? Nah, course I don’t…you get it!

Anyway, I hope you’ve all had a great week – I don’t actually head out until Tuesday, but let me apologise in advance for any posts that don’t make sense after that…yes, probably too much champagne 🙂 🙂

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Selfie Esteem

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now,

turd_polish

So preparations are underway for the big trip…four more sleeps till I hook up with my friends, and one further sleep before we all jet off for five days of girly time. To say I’m excited is a bit of an understatement, after all we’ve been planning the trip for about a year. This weekend will be mainly about doing all the holiday things like picking up holiday money, and packing. I feel energised, and I feel in control. I’m not stressing about the diet, which is going well and is flexible enough for me not to have to deny myself the odd treat. We’re cool, I’ve got the food plan down and I’m totally ready to keep hitting it straight whilst I’m away.

I’m not stressing about the asshole (who is busy packing too, he is of course coming with me) and I’m not stressing about the flight (seat belt extension, check)…I’m not even stressing about the fact that whilst I’m pretty sure no klaxons will sound when I check in for the helicopter flight and step on their scales, I’ll almost certainly have to pay extra dollars for my extra arse. I’ve lost weight but I don’t think I’ve lost enough. We’ll see, but whichever way up nothing’s crimping my mood right now.

Except the selfies, dammit. Now I’ve spent the last two weeks rubbing out the ordinary and installing the bling. I’ve got my false eyelashes in place…individually glued on in plenty of time for me to get used to navigating through them to put my contacts in. Nails manicured, with added holiday sparkle. Hair has lost it’s ‘just cut’ look and grown long enough to cover any rogue pubic-looking hairs which might suddenly sprout out of my neck at warp speed whilst I’m away and have my eye off the ball temporarily. I’ve even got some new fat-girl-clothes. It’s fair to say the turd is well and truly polished…this is as good as it gets. So in the grand scheme of things, I should be ready for all the holiday selfies, right? You’ve got to be kidding.

There’ll be phones out every five minutes taking photos in every location, capturing every moment for posterity…me included of course. I love these girls to the moon and back, they’re my people, you know?  Of course I want lots of memories to look back on, and so will they. They don’t care that I’m fat, we all go back years and years and we work perfectly as a six pack. We laugh together, cry together…fit together. They’ve seen me fat-skinny-fat-skinny and they don’t give a rats ass. But I’m still not ready for the cameras.

I have strategies, of course…if we have to have a group shot taken I’ll find a way to be on the back row. Hide my bulk behind someone else and just flash a big smile. Selfies might work if there’s just head shots and if I’m really clever I might get just the one chin in shot…no body shots allowed obviously. But what happens to all the pictures..? Facebook happens…the asshole in my mind has been chewing at me all week about that.

Friends of friends might see me. And I was probably skinny the last time they saw me…because fat photos don’t make it onto my Facebook. With the exception of one photo taken by my friend which caught my head at just the right angle so several chins were all but invisible, I think the last photo of myself I put on line was probably at least 5 years ago. As far  as my on-line life is concerned I’m the carefree skinny girl I was before life stopped mirroring art and I disappeared underneath the weight of my own body.

Friends of my friends, who know me too, if they recognise me at all will think Crap! Would you look at that! And that’ll be it, my skinny on line cover blown. And that’s a real mood hoover. Apparently it’s a recognised phenomenon. Lots of people have on-line lives which are far more shiny and happy than their real lives…they just edit out the bad and display their shit in the best possible light for other people to ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ over.  I’m not saying I do that – I don’t. I’m genuine, and I don’t mislead…I just hide instead. I post words. Pictures of my dog, pictures of places I’ve been…witty soundbites of my life…just no photos of me.

So girlies, if you’re reading this…what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, right? I don’t mind waking up with tigers in the bathroom or one of the dream boys in my bed (let me just say that again in case you didn’t hear it the first time, I don’t mind waking up with one of the dream boys in my bed 🙂 ) but NO TAGGING ME IN PHOTOS Y’HEAR?!!

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