Who the hell was I kidding when I thought it’d be easy getting back on the wagon? Myself, apparently. It’s never been easy, getting up from a fall but this time it’s proving harder than ever. It’s killing me, and I’d love to say I’m winning but a high-calorie lunch and at least a dozen refresher chew bars yesterday afternoon tells a different story.
Those things are just pure sugar…cheap and nasty candy that I don’t even particularly like, so what on earth was I thinking? It was there in the office one minute, in a carrier bag in the corner after someone brought it back from a training course, and then all of a sudden there was a little stockpile of it in my top drawer. My hand kept snaking its way in every five minutes for the rest of the afternoon and my jaws never stopped moving.
And I haven’t been swimming since Sunday either, although In my defence, I’ve been too full of this crappy head cold to make it to the pool. I still feel pretty grim, although I’m better than I was. My cold broke good and proper on Wednesday and all I’ve heard from the Asshole Voice since my nose started running is feed a cold…feed a cold…FEED A COLD!!!
Fine, if I was feeding it with the food of sick people, right? Chicken soup, or a bit of broth or rice pudding. Not cheap Halloween candy that nobody else wanted…whoever coined the phase sure as dammit didn’t intend for cheap candy to be the foodstuff that would ward off bugs and help me feel better. I was so wired by the time I’d done with the onslaught of sugar in my system that I went down like a sack of spuds when the sugar crash happened.
As luck would have it, I was home and laid back in my armchair by then, so I dozed for forty five minutes…for fuck’s sake, would you listen to me. I’m describing the life I used to lead and I’ve worked so fucking hard to step out of those shoes.
I don’t know about you, but it colours the way I think about myself when I’m wildly off the rails. Last week was different, I mean I could justify my food fuckery as a conscious choice. A normal thing. I’m on holiday therefore I choose to enjoy everything on offer and suspend diet-related activity until I go home. Lots of people do it, and this year I’ve chosen to be one of them. It’s okay, permission granted, go fill ya boots…I slept easy at night, and accepted the shitbird scale would have something to say about it when I re-joined the real world.
This week is different. Completely different. I took the Shitbird’s damning assessment of my time in paradise on the chin, squared my shoulders and got right back to it. Only I didn’t did I, not really. On the days where I’ve managed to stay within calories, my food choices have been dodgy to say the least. And then I go and eat a spur-of-the-moment calorie-laden lunch and dive off the high board into a bag of pure sugar for no good reason whatsoever other than it was there and I wanted it.
That makes me feel weak, out of control and worthless. In reality I’m only one of those things, but the Asshole voice pulls all three out of the bag because past experience tells him that a complete character assassination is a more effective way of keeping me under his influence.
I know it’ll turn the right way up again if I keep plugging away. In the meantime it’s all just a bit of an uphill slog.
One foot in front of the other, and repeat, right? 🙂
