Monthly Archives: February 2017

My Skinny Talisman

In the here & now, ,

I set off for the office yesterday morning with a bit of added spring in my step, it being my last full day in work and all…don’t you just love that feeling when you’re winding down for holidays? I have a few bits to finish off today, before my out of office gets whacked on at lunchtime and I head off to get my spray tan and my holiday toes. Not even the thought of those paper knickers can dampen my mood, I’m too giddy for words 🙂

Yesterday was the ultimate test of my pre-holiday willpower, and as I took my place around the table at work for our full day meeting I did a quick recce to see whether the usual nibbles had been provided…who am I kidding, of course they bloody had. There was a box of flapjacks to my right, a box of marshmallow teacakes to my left, several bowls containing wrapped sweets dotted around, and in the middle of the table was a massive bowl of green bananas.

Flapjacks are my favourite. So are marshmallow teacakes, as it happens. Green bananas are not. They make my teeth squeak and my toes curl, and unless they can be dipped in hot frothy coffee (yes, I know, I’m weird) they’re to be avoided at all costs.

I’m puffing my chest out with pride as I tell you I didn’t put so much as a toe out of line. Well, in the spirit of full disclosure I did risk squeaky teeth by having a crack at a green banana, but as for the rest…not a single naughty morsel passed my lips. I wasn’t bothered, not one little bit.

Now, I’d love to tell you that this masterclass in restraint set off some kind of skinny chain-reaction, but according to God of Pain’s scale this morning I’m a pound up. On Wednesday night the same scale said I was two pounds down. His scale is clearly as barking mad as the Shitbird in my bathroom, however due to the Asshole voice’s continued hiatus I shrugged it off as some kind of normal body fluctuation and it hasn’t even come close to putting a crimp in my mood.

So, the challenge now is keeping it going, right? I am forty seven days food sober and tomorrow I am flying out to meet our ship in a land far far away, where chefs will be lying in wait around every corner with the intention of feeding me. Let’s be honest, it does have the potential for disaster written all over it. I’ve been really excited about the trip whilst harbouring a degree of trepidation about how I’m going to deal with the barrage of food opportunities. ‘Just saying no’ isn’t always that easy for a food addict.

That said, my recent steadfast occupation of the sweet spot has made me feel a lot more relaxed about the whole thing, and I’m also taking a secret weapon in my suitcase. God of Pain introduced a three month clean eating challenge back in the New Year, and various milestones of food sobriety have been rewarded with a magnetic disk. Bronze seven, fourteen and twenty eight days for month one, the same in silver for month two and gold in month three. I’m currently on silver fourteen and I’m due for my upgrade to silver twenty eight in nine days’ time…the day I get back from holiday.

If I fall off the wagon, I have to give up this hard-won badge of honour and start all over again. Over my dead body, right? So it’s coming on holiday with me. My silver fourteen will be liberated from its spot on my cooker hood and will be carried with me right throughout my holiday so it can act as my skinny talisman and help me keep my eye on the prize.

That, along with the thought of having to post a picture in here of my conversation with the Shitbird Scale when I get home, might just help me to get the balance right between eating well, and diving headlong into a week of culinary hedonism. Watch this space… 🙂

I may get chance to post a few pictures on Facebook over the next week or so, wi-fi permitting and I’ll be back a week on Sunday. Lots of love to all in the meantime and I’ll see you on the other side!

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A Perfect St Valentine

In the here & now, ,

So the nearer I get to my holiday, the more I keep expecting the wheels to come off my food plan. There are only four more sleeps to go, and generally by this point – usually way before this point if we’re splitting hairs – the Asshole voice would have kicked the pre-holiday campaign into full swing…you may as well stop now, you’re practically on holiday and you won’t lose any more weight between now and then. You’re going to blow it next week anyway so why don’t you just have a few days without having to worry about dieting and start your blow-out early…you’ve earned it.

This time..? Nothing. The food plan continues in textbook fashion, and not a murmur from the asshole between my ears.

I’m a bit baffled to be honest. Last night would have been a perfect opportunity for him to rattle his chains. I was in a proper strop when I finally got in from work, having left an hour early so I could make a 6pm class at the Kingdom of Pain only to get stuck in shitty traffic. My one hour commute turned into three hours so I missed class altogether…I wasn’t even close.

Then when I finally got home there was nothing in for supper. Well, there was, but it was all food I’m not supposed to be eating, because I rushed out yesterday morning without proper planning. So I cobbled together a fairly random and crappy supper consisting of a couple of crumpets which were past their ‘best before’ date, and a protein shake. I’m not going to lie, I didn’t get an A for effort. I couldn’t help feeling a bit envious at the thought of all those folk enjoying romantic and tasty valentine dinners,  as I sat there with my two stale crumpets and a crappy milkshake.

So the evening’s not going well, right? It was a stinker. Except in so many ways it was perfect. There was food in the fridge that my head just accepted was off-limits, so there was no debate to be had. No standing in front of the fridge whilst I tried to talk myself into it and then out of it again. No fight. Hello? That’s a first.

Then my boy came home later on with a box of seriously good chocolates that he’d been given, and normally I’d be all over those bad boys in a flash…last night, nothing. I wasn’t interested. I didn’t even smell them, that’s how immune I was. It’s not like I was grandstanding, or making a show of being good…I just didn’t want one. And let me be clear, not wanting one has never actually stopped me from having one in the past. If they were there, I could and if I could, I did. Always. But not last night.

Do you think I’m sickening for something?

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I Wish I’d Written That

In the here & now, ,

I read something really profound the other day…it was a post written by Holly, one of my favourite bloggers. I guess we all have certain blogs that we love to read, and I suppose like many of you who poke around the blogosphere I often find nuggets of wisdom from fellow travellers that help me in my own journey.

From time to time I read something and wish I’d written it myself, you know? This was one of those times. Holly wrote a blog post called Food Is My Person, (click HERE to find it) and reading her words was like looking into my own soul. It broke the surface of what I thought I felt about food, and forced me to acknowledge something much deeper. She articulated food addiction in a way that brought me to tears, and I identified with every single word, so I wanted to show it to you.

In some ways yesterday wasn’t a great day for me – it reminded me of the bad old days where a run-in with the Bitch in the Bathroom could, at the very least, ruin my whole day and often torpedo my food plan altogether. There should be some kind of reaction-cam in my bathroom so I could show you how quickly my mood changes depending on what conversation I have with the scale.

There are times when I walk into the bathroom jauntily, convinced I’ve had a good week, then punch the air and walk out just as jauntily. Other times I’ll waltz around the bathroom hopping on and off again multiple times on every damn tile before shuffling out of the bathroom like a condemned man if I can’t make it generate any good news.  I hate that this little glass square has the potential to vacuum my sunny disposition clean away and flick my happiness switch from one extreme to the other in an instant.

Yesterday, the Shitbird Scale started off by suggesting I’d gained a couple of pounds. For the first three or four step-ons it was having no part of this steady downwards trend I’ve been on so far this year. And I knew that couldn’t be right…my food plan has been bob-on and I haven’t put a foot wrong, so no way could I have gained weight.

I walked out of the bathroom with a heavy heart, trying to figure out whether I’d drunk enough water this week, whether I might be retaining fluid, whether I was overdue a poo, whether what I ate the night before might be curled up like a dormant food-baby waiting to be processed…I forensically examined my week, looking for clues as to why I might have plummeted from hero to zero in the weight-loss stakes. My mood headed south at warp speed, I mean I was sour.

I left it ten minutes, and then like a toddler picking a scab I went back in for another go, and this time the shiny glass Shitbird declared a one pound loss. So I nabbed a picture of it real quick and kicked the scale back in its box until next time but it left me feeling wobbly, and that’s stupid. And unnecessary. My input has been one hundred percent solid and my mind is focused. I’m in a good place.

I spent the rest of the day chuntering to myself. The scale has no power over me. Only I have power over me. I am forty two days food sober and I feel great. I am strong and I’m doing this, and that’s all that matters. The Shitbird Scale is a fucking psychopath. 

I might have repeated that last sentence more than once, just so you know 🙂

 

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Nothing In A Crackly Wrapper

In the here & now, , ,

Forty days. Four zero. Forty.

That’s how long it is since I ate something that I shouldn’t…I have to keep pinching myself, you know? It’s a milestone I can’t quite get my head around, when you consider how much my arse was dragging in the last few months of last year. And I’ll tell you what else…I haven’t really found it hard.

I know, right? I don’t understand it either. It’s like the Asshole voice has fallen off a cliff, because he hasn’t rattled his chains in well over a month. And I’m convinced it’s down to the fact that I’m giving refined sugar a really wide berth. I haven’t gone completely sugar-free…I’m not quite ready to go the whole hog and cut it out of my diet altogether, but to be honest I’m pretty close.

For forty days I’ve eaten no processed foods at all. No chocolate. No crisps or snacks. And that means that as I’ve been watching TV in the evenings, my viewing experience has been completely binge-free. Just me, on my own and flying solo without any treats which lead to more treats which lead me directly to hell in a hand cart. I’ve eaten grapes, or melon or a handful of nuts, but nothing which comes in a crackly wrapper.

It’s a weird thing you know…I feel like I’ve been set free. Right now, in this moment and all the moments over the last forty days I haven’t had to fight with myself over every food decision. I haven’t eaten a treat within my food budget and then taken that same budget down to the wire by having one more, then one more, all the time furiously recalculating what I might be able to eat for the rest of the week so I can eat still one more in this moment.

Those mid-afternoon cravings in the office have gone. That’s traditionally where my day took a wobble – everything up to lunchtime would be measured and planned, but whatever I put into my mouth with my afternoon cuppa would pretty much dictate how the rest of the day went, you know? Skidding home in the evening with only a sparse food budget left then spending what was left of the day driving myself mad with thoughts of all the things I wanted but couldn’t have.

Sometimes I’d cave and have them anyway, paying my Weight Watchers points forward with promises that I’d have a lean day tomorrow. Sometimes I’d just think fuck it and blow the budget then spend the rest of the week feeling guilty about the fact that I had no control, and pissed off that I’d left myself no further snacking opportunities. Whichever way, there was no respite from the food thoughts playing on a loop in my head, constantly stirred by my Asshole voice.

Imagine living that way, all the time. It’s like being stalked by some malevolent food beast that you just can’t get away from. The liberation that comes from that all of a sudden not being there is hard to describe. I remember being bullied when I was quite young and feeling like it was never going to end. My meek and gentle mum found out and raised all kinds of hell at the school, and it stopped immediately. What I’m feeling now reminds me of how I felt then, when I realised I could walk through the playground without having to worry about who was hiding in wait for me around the next corner.

Now, all that said, I’m not perfect…I am eating mountains of vegetables, and my portion sizes aren’t getting smaller…I know I need to focus on that, but at the end of the day nobody ever got fat by eating too much broccoli, right? One step at a time.

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Size Matters!

In the here & now, ,

I bought a lovely new top a couple of weeks ago, one size smaller than I’ve worn of late and my intention was to lose enough weight to be able to wear it on my holidays. I was feeling very confident as I fished it out of the wardrobe last night and tried it on. I started to sense it might be a bit too snug as I pulled it over my head and realised it didn’t contain as much elastic as I’d thought it did. I wasn’t wrong, but driven by the desire to get into something the next size down I pushed on regardless.

So, I concluded that it will look lovely when I’m another fifteen pounds down, but right now there’s not a hope in hell of me wearing it. Not if I want to move around. Or in fact breathe.

That said, at one point I thought I was going to have to wear it between now and when I’ve lost those fifteen pounds because I couldn’t actually wriggle my way out of it. The fabric had my arms in a vice-like grip and I couldn’t move them enough to reach around and pull it over my head. I  flapped around the bedroom busting moves for a good fifteen minutes before I finally managed to escape and put the offending article back on its hanger.

Now, I love the top and I’ll keep it of course…at some point over the next couple of months it’ll definitely fit me. But it dawned on me as I shoved it back in the wardrobe that I felt really fat. Which is ironic, because the only reason I tried the top on in the first place was because climbing the stairs to bed I’d felt really skinny and I was convinced my turbo-charged January meant I’d done enough to get into it.  Bugger.

I reckon it’s because I didn’t buy it from a fat girl shop. I’m wearing a size twenty now, which for my friends Stateside is a sixteen…the stuff I’ve bought in that size from fat girl shops is comfortable on me, you know? This one came from a regular store for regular girls, and as I stomped around the bedroom  last night trying to get the circulation back in my arms I hold my hands up and admit to using a few choice words about the skinny pattern-cutters who clearly want girls with bingo wings to stay the hell out of Dodge.

Having had experience of being fat through the ages, it’s definitely easier now to walk into a regular store and find stuff in bigger sizes, but it sort of defeats the object if they begrudge every extra inch of fabric. It’s like they want to tap into the fat-girl market without having to actually make them feel welcome. I imagine a gaggle of skinny designers sat around the table looking mardy with their herbal calorie-free tea debating whether they could even get away with charging more for fat-girl sizes, after all people who can afford to eat so many hob-nobs can clearly afford to pay extra, right?

Logic tells me that it shouldn’t matter what it says on the label as long as something fits and it looks nice, but I have a skinny friend who refuses to shop in a certain store because she has to pick up a ten when she’s really an eight. See, contrary to that wicked rumour, size matters… 🙂

 

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