Monthly Archives: April 2016

Pressing Pause

In the here & now, , , , ,

pause

On my commute into work this morning I was kind of half listening to something on the radio in between pondering my ‘to do’ list and trying to ignore the Asshole voice who was busy trying to persuade me that 7.15am would be a good time to eat my lunch, which was on the passenger seat behind me.

My ears were tuning in and out of the radio intermittently, and I caught the tail end of something which sounded interesting enough to prompt me to reach for the remote control so I could rewind it…duh, I immediately realised of course that the car radio doesn’t come with that option. How annoying. I could go on iPlayer at some point I suppose, but the moment has kind of passed and I can’t even remember now what it was I thought I’d heard.

I’m just so used to being able to pause the TV, or rewind and re-listen when my ears have been multi-tasking and I’ve lost the plotline, you know? I don’t know however we used to manage before that sort of technology existed… I love the way that everything can fit around me, rather than the other way around.

A good friend of mine takes that approach to her diet. She knows she needs to lose weight, and she really wants to, but her diet gets paused every time something more interesting comes along. She has the ability to just step in and out of it at will, and I’m beyond envious of her ability to do that. No way could I ever make that work for me, with my default all-or-nothing psyche.

I almost feel like I’ve paused everything else, to focus on this, you know? It just feels more important than anything else I could be doing right now. It’s my time.

My friend and I both have plans this weekend…she’s having a weekend away with a bunch of friends, and then immediately setting off on holiday for a week. Once I’ve finished writing this I’m heading up to spend the weekend with one of my besties. It’s the spring version of the craft and foodie fair that I’ve mentioned before, so I’m going to be bombarded with temptations at every turn.

I’m busy thinking about strategies to stay on the straight and narrow, where my friend can hardly wait to hit stop on her working week and throw caution to the wind so she can dive into the prosecco and hand the flight controls over to her Asshole voice…she knows he’ll probably crack on and do his worst, and she’s kind of okay with that. When she gets back from holiday, she’ll un-pause her food plan and get right back on track.

I wish I could press pause this weekend…I’d sell my granny to be able to sashay around the food hall accepting samples of whatever anyone wanted to give me like I have in the past. There will be cheeses and oils, and artisan breads begging to be dipped. Cupcakes and fudge and a hundred different flavours of cookie, and that’s before we’ve even gotten started with the cookery demonstrations. I’m going to be all kinds of torn.

The thing is, if I were to press pause, it’d be pretty much game over. Fact. Not a cat in hell’s chance of me waking up on Monday with the Asshole willing to relinquish control and move back to the jump seat…I know that. I’m just going to have to say no, and mean it. Not the kind of no which really means yes. The kind where the word no comes out of my mouth and passes a piece of fudge on its way in. Short of having my jaws wired together, willpower is my only option.

I’ve bought sugar-free chewing gum so I can fill my sinuses with peppermint to combat all the awesome smells. I’ve promised myself a really nice piece of jewellery in exchange for not allowing the Asshole to talk me into anything, and I know I’ll have to ‘fess up to you guys if the wheels come off.

I think I’ve got all bases covered, dammit 🙂

Like it..? Tell your friends!
 

A Bag Of Contradictions

In the here & now, , ,

recipe

Over the years I’ve gotten to know myself quite well, you know? I mean all this wrestling my head into the skinny zone stuff is different and new, but I’m fairly au fait with the way my mind works in the other bits of my life. Non food-related situations if you like. Unsurprisingly, it’s far less troublesome when the Asshole voice doesn’t have a view.

Having said that, I do confuse myself if I stop and think too hard about it. For example I’m not good with change, which is ironic when you consider that much of my professional life is spent up to my eyeballs in managing change. On a personal level, I don’t like it at all. I know what I like, and I like what I know. And yet. I have the lowest boredom threshold ever. Routine is anathema to me, and when I’m bored I get destructive, which often doesn’t end well.

Seriously, the joke’s on me, right? Easily bored but doesn’t like change…wtf am I supposed to do with that? Good job I’ve got a sense of humour.

So anyway, I can feel myself starting to get a bit bored with my menu choices, so in order to head destructive off at the pass, I’ve just bought a new recipe book. I’ve decided that it’s time to get a bit more adventurous with the food I’m preparing, so I can stop feeling uninspired, which in turn means I’m less likely to get tempted to go play out on naughty street. That’s good planning, right?

If you’re anything like me, there comes a point after a while where no matter how much you love a wide variety of food, you keep returning to the same tried and tested handful of meals. There’s comfort in familiarity…you know the points value, it’s easy and you know it works, as in I ate this last week and I lost weight…but I recognize that I need to up my game in order to keep my head interested.

Why that involved buying a new recipe book, I have no idea. I must have a dozen recipe books. Low fat, low carb, low GI…Weight Watchers, Slimming World, Atkins…it’s like Barnes & Noble in one corner of my kitchen. And to be honest, beyond a quick flick through to admire the pictures when I first bought them, it would be fair to say they haven’t seen a great deal of action. Wait, that’s not strictly true, one time when my friend visited with her grandson and he couldn’t reach the table we sat him on half a dozen of the largest ones, but it’s fair to say not many of the pages are splashed with wayward ingredients.

So, that’s my latest challenge to myself. I have no delusions that I’m about to turn into some kind of domestic goddess, and I already struggle with a pitiful amount of spare time. But this whole journey has been about finding ways that I can do stuff, rather than making excuses as to why I can’t, right? Once every week, most likely at the weekend, I am going to pick out a recipe that’s interesting, nutritious and which isn’t going to bust my food budget, and I’m going to try it out.

My boy would tell you this has disaster written all over it but if it keeps me out of mischief I’m game… 🙂

Like it..? Tell your friends!
 

Degrees Of Light And Shade

Diet update, In the here & now, , ,

whoops

I think I hit the 60lbs milestone last weekend. At least that’s my best guess…I’m still kicking myself for not getting weighed right at the start of this journey, but let’s just say back then my relationship with the bitch in the bathroom wasn’t in a good place. If you’ve been reading along you’ll know I’ve encountered a buggeration factor or two in recent weeks, so I ended up treading water for a bit. Annoying but hey, if you’re treading water at least you’re not sinking, right? But, I’m on the move again and 60lbs off is pretty awesome, if you’ll forgive me a big fat happy dance.

When I started this diet, like every one before it my intention was to hit it completely straight – no weeks where my weight stuck, no weeks where one of those minxy little pounds snuck back into my pants when my back was turned, and certainly no close encounters with my trigger foods. Hmm. I am at least having the good grace to look a bit sheepish but you know what, life just isn’t like that is it? And I’m actually starting to appreciate the degrees of light and shade that I’m encountering on this journey.

Every time I’ve stumbled, I’ve done a bit of a post-FUBAR debrief, and what I’ve realised is that most times where I’ve struggled a bit, I’ve gained a soupçon of insight that maybe I didn’t have before. That’s helping me. And more importantly that that, I’ve come to understand that struggling is different than failing. Now all of you might know that already, but it’s taken me a while to catch on.

It used to baffle me when folk talked about enjoying something more if they’d sweated their cahoonies off to get it. It always struck me as far too much like unnecessary hard work, you know? Working overtime for six straight months with no treats and no new handbags in order to pay for your holiday didn’t mean you’d enjoy it more than if you’d banged it on a credit card and saved the bill for Ron, surely?

Similarly I’ve fantasised often about what it would be like to just wake up one day in a gorgeous skinny body. I mean like go to bed fat and wake up skinny. Instant skinniness…it’s every fat girl’s dream. But I can tell you exactly how that fantasy would have played out…by the end of week one my skinny pants would be a bit on the snug side and within weeks those sleek smooth limbs would start to resemble a lumpy old pillow. Because that’s what would’ve happened if you’d attached this head to a perfect body…they wouldn’t match.

So, my journey so far has been about as straight as a dog’s hind leg. It doesn’t look like I intended it to when I set out but you know what, the degrees of light and shade are making it stick. Instead of perfect-perfect-perfect-fail-the end, it looks more like try-try-succeed-whoops-yes!-celebrate-scratch head- try-try-happy-pissed off-try-lightbulb-try-succeed-try-shit-happy…not straight, but beautiful in its own way.

That’s why I feel sure that eventually, when I do wake up in my skinny body – my hard-won long awaited skinny body – all these learning opportunities mean it’ll be attached to a wise old head who cherishes it and treats it well, and no matter how hard the asshole voice nags, deprives it of cheese balls until the end of time.

Here’s to the next 60lbs…onwards! 🙂

Like it..? Tell your friends!
 

Everything I’m Not

In the here & now, , , , ,

eyes-belly

I woke up with a familiar sickly feeling this morning, and I have to say it served as a sharp reminder about both how far I’ve come, and how far I still have to travel on this journey to Skinny Town. It’s my own fault for handing over the control of all food-related decisions to the Asshole voice after I got in from work yesterday…he was on form, as always and I can’t even pretend that I put up a fight.

I’d been very organized before I left in the morning, throwing liver and onions in the crock-pot to slow cook all day, so by the time I got home there was a divine smell. My boy, who would rather stick pins in his eyes than go anywhere near liver and onions threw a dirty look at the crock pot and fixed himself a pizza. Obviously I wasn’t going to fall out with that…more for me, right?

So I’d worked out the Smart Points value in the morning and there was only ten in the whole thing. Which to be fair would have comfortably fed three people…three normal people. People who didn’t eat as though their food supply was about to be turned off for a month. My eyes lit up like a Christmas tree when I lifted the lid.

The Asshole voice was all over it. There’s only ten points in the whole thing so you’ve got more than enough to cover it. And it’s liver…you can’t re-heat liver and it’s too awesome to go to waste. Yes, I know the dog’s almost having a heart attack trying to let you know he’d be happy to share but it’ll give him gas and then we’ll ALL suffer. You can manage that, come on you’re hardcore! It’s only ten points!!

I’ve got to admit, it was a challenge fitting it all on the plate, along with the mountain of vegetables, but purleease…as a fat girl who’s built many a salad bowl in a dish the size of a thimble at pizza hut over the years, I know how to build a plate so nothing escapes. And I ate it…all of it. It was only ten points at the end of the day.

I was fit to pop, so stopping there might have been a smart move, right? Ahhh…isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing. I just fancied something to finish with, and there he was again. Yes I know it’s true that you’re practically about to burst, but chocolate cherries hardly take up any space at all, and you’ve got eight points left! You can’t keep them in the bank, use them or lose them, you know the rules…

So I ate eight points’ worth of chocolate covered cherries.

Then, having got the taste for them I finished the bag using exercise points accrued and some of my additional weekly points for good measure. The last three that I put in my mouth took some effort…I was starting to feel a bit sick to be honest. And yet. I had points to cover them, and I was on one.

This morning when I woke up, I knew I’d over-stepped the boundary. I just felt bilious and that familiar prickle of guilt was there, even though technically I was within points, if you don’t mind a bit of creative accounting. But I wasn’t within normal. Normal folk wouldn’t have done that.

For some reason, I was thought about my Grandma. I have no idea why, but something she used to say started rattling around in my head. Don’t apologise for the things that you’re not…instead, shout about the things that you are. Okay then.

I AM A MUPPET.

Like it..? Tell your friends!
 

Unleashing The Skinny Wrath

In the here & now

Snake-Oil-Salesman

So, it’s about a month since I tinkered around with the blog, and started displaying a couple of advertising banners down the right hand side. Eventually, of course I’d like to get to a place where I can earn even a little bit of revenue from all the hours of love I pour into the blog, and so this was my first attempt at exploring the art of the possible.

I think it’s fair to say it hasn’t been a rip roaring success, mainly down to the fact that the adverts have largely been shit. I mean, I’m not allowed to click on my own advertising banner, so I have no way of knowing what lays beneath the headlines. However, when I look at a cartoon picture of a badly drawn banana, accompanied by the suggestion that I should avoid this and four other fruits if I wish to preserve my levels of testosterone, I have to say I probably wouldn’t fall over myself to make further enquiries even if I was allowed.

Nor would I have been tempted by the advert for Metal Supermarkets, Government solar panel funding or some file converter free download thingy. Yesterday they even had the cheek to offer a click-through opportunity to meet  Russian singles, I mean come on. All I needed was an advert for Snake Oil and I would have had a full set of dodgy. There’s clearly work to do, and I don’t think even the most persuasive marketeer could convince me that these morsels were hand picked to tempt my discerning readership.

Hardly surprising then, that over the month I appear to have earned the princely sum of 47p. It seems my dreams of imminent retirement were a little premature, dammit. So, I started looking around, and thought maybe I’d give Amazon a try. I mean that’s a reputable site, right? They sell pretty much anything and their affiliate programme is supposed to be quite good, so I decided to can my first attempt and write my 47p loss down to experience.

Thirty minutes after I submitted my details to Amazon I got a polite thanks, but no thanks. I quote:

I have reviewed your application. When selecting Amazon.co.uk Associates Programme participants, we try to determine why a customer would seek out the website in question.

The programme is not set up to simply advertise Amazon.co.uk and third party links within websites, or make mini Amazon websites.

Since your website does not appear to be finished, we encourage you to resubmit your application after creating a unique site with original content.

Chuffing cheeky knackers! I lost it at that point…original content??? I’ll give them original bloody content…how about the blog posts I’ve written every single day for the last 8 months? There’s one hundred and fifty thousand words’ worth of original content right there for starters. I was beyond mad. So, they got a Dee special email by return… 🙂

Anyway, it turns out when they bothered to look again that I’m welcome after all. Sorry Dee, human error. Yeah whatever, I felt like telling them where to shove it to be honest, out of principle and sheer bloody-mindedness but I’ve never been one to cut my nose off to spite my face, so I didn’t. Anything’s got to be better than the dross we’ve been served by the other guys, right? So that’s how come you’ll start to see Amazon branded ads…I’m mixing it up a bit to see whether it works any better for me, and of course for you guys.

Better..? 🙂

By the way, just in case any of my subscribers are wondering why your skinny mail appears to have stopped, there was apparently some bug in the system but I’m assured you’ll start getting them again from tomorrow. I just don’t have much luck with subscription feeds do I?!

 

Like it..? Tell your friends!