Category Archives: Reflections on past times

Weeding Out The Fat

In the here & now, Reflections on past times, ,

struggle

So much for having a relaxing time of it whilst I’m off work this week…I’m skidding sideways into today’s post in a very last minute dot com kind of way because I got busy this morning having a bit of a sort out and I’ve only just nicely come up for air.

I have to hold my hands up and admit that having surveyed pretty much every fashion choice I have made over the last, I dunno maybe four or five years, I need locking up and the key needs to be thrown away. Immediately.

On the face of it, I had a clear out not that long ago, and it’s not that I’ve gone down another size since then or anything exciting like that…I just had a nagging feeling that I didn’t quite do it properly the first time. I sort of scratched the surface, but I knew if I looked there would be more stuff to go through and sure enough, today I not only did a second lap of the wardrobe but I went through all my drawers and the under-the-bed storage too.

I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count all the items I’ve unearthed where I’d bought  something without trying it on, in the hope that whatever I’d brought home would make me look nice, only to ball it up in disgust and shove it in the bottom of my wardrobe or the back of a drawer when it actually made me look like the back end of a bus. The thing is, what I really wanted to look was skinny. That’s what I mean when I said nice…I meant skinny. There’s no wonder nothing much lived up to my expectations.

I never try stuff on in the shop. I think my aversion to changing rooms stems right back to my teenage years where it was all the rage to have communal ones. They’d be filled with skinny girls, looking effortlessly chic in whatever they tried on, and I’d be the fat one in the corner avoiding eye contact with anyone whilst I tried to force my spare tyre into whatever I’d managed to find in size large. Please God let something fit…I just want to carry a bag that says Top Shop…

I vividly remember getting so hot and bothered that no matter how much I’d managed to tame my unruly mop of hair before hitting town with my friends, by the time I emerged from the fitting room it would be wild and curly, sitting on top of a chubby red face which would never really recover for the rest of the afternoon. It was traumatic.

I struggled to find my groove, you know? I found it really hard to carve out my style as a fat girl, and desperate as I was to follow fashion and copy the kind of looks I saw in Jackie and the other teenage mags, it was nigh-on impossible. Other than the asymmetric layering styles that I’m fairly fond of nowadays, I still think that very few people can design great clothes for fat bodies. Scaling up skinny clothes doesn’t work. And most designed-for-fat clothes tend to be created with my mother in mind.

As I see it, shopping as a fat girl is sort of a Hobson’s choice situation…it’s on that basis that I’m prepared to overlook some of the very questionable purchases I’ve made and then buried over the last few years. It wasn’t my fault m’lud. I wonder how many folk will get their garment of choice home from the charity shop when I’ve dropped this lot off in the hope that it will make them look nice, and then ball it up in disgust and shove it in a drawer…

I’ve got to say though, all in all it’s been a good day. I’m feeling really organised, I’ve got a fair number of auctions running on eBay and about ten massive bags for the charity shop. Best of all, I’ve uncovered some old friends, in fact I’m wearing a shirt right now that I’ve not been able to get into for at least three years, and that’s a good feeling 🙂

 

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In Search Of Magic Beans

Reflections on past times, , , ,

beans

I felt a bit embarrassed today when I got a visual wake-up-call about how my pre-occupation with food might look to other people. Yesterday I forgot to bring the containers home that I’d taken my lunch to work in, so today my feet were fighting for space under the desk with a double helping of airtight boxes. There were six altogether, plus two large plastic cups which I use to chug my blended smoothie of the day on my morning commute.

On top of my desk, nestled amongst actual work stuff you would have found a punnet of plums, a bottle of salad cream, some emergency crackers and a tin of soup. In the bin behind me were a couple of banana skins and an apple core. It must have looked like I’d been under siege for a month, for God’s sake.

I did do a quick recce on everyone else’s desk and I was slightly reassured to find that there was the odd snack or two kicking around other corners of the office but put it this way, if the entire HR team had been kidnapped by aliens, when Mulder and Scully rocked up to investigate they would have known immediately which desk belonged to the fat girl.

It puts me in mind of a conversation I had with my doctor twenty odd years ago. A friend of mine had been to her doctor because she wanted to lose weight, and he’d handed her a prescription for pills to supress her appetite. I wanted to get me a piece of that action so I made an appointment to see someone at my own surgery with the intention of getting my hands on some of these magic beans. It seemed like the perfect answer.

It transpired that my doctor was a little less accommodating. Actually, he was a twat. He sent me off with a flea in my ear and a long lecture about how fat people were unnaturally preoccupied with food and basically I needed to get over myself. He even illustrated said lecture with a story about his own fat friend, who had joined him recently on a skiing holiday and had taken sandwiches ‘for the journey’, which he used as an example of how fat people were different to normal people, and couldn’t bear not to have food within touching distance. Judging by the way he said it he didn’t mean different in a good way.

I’d give anything to have that same conversation with him now, with my additional twenty five years’ worth of life experience and a slightly lower tolerance for being mugged off. I doubt I’d be able to resist commenting on how lucky his fat friend was to have such a supportive chum, you know? I mean, with the 20/20 vision of hindsight I was trying to go about it the wrong way, but I was reaching out, you know? He could have helped me, if he hadn’t been so busy judging me.

It’s the first and last time I ever talked to anyone about how much I was bothered by being fat. Well, until you lot of course. And I’d like to think that I’d get a more supportive response if I went to chat to a healthcare professional about it these days. I wouldn’t, of course…I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than have that conversation. But still, I hope they’d at least give me some leaflets and a bit of advice.

All joking aside, my jaws have barely stopped moving today – I’ve only grazed on low point healthy stuff but I know I need to give some attention to this phobia of hunger pangs. God forbid one might sneak up on me, right?

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Before I go, I have some hugely exciting news, and I need your help please! Break Out The Skinny Girl is now available on Kindle Blogs, I mean come on!! We have arrived! It’s become available today in the Kindle Store through Amazon…if you read and enjoy Break Out The Skinny Girl, would you do me the honour of leaving a review on your thoughts about the blog? You can find it HERE  It can’t be done on mobile devices only computers or Kindles (no idea why) but thank you, your support as usual means the world to me 🙂

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Shouting About The Hard Stuff

Reflections on past times, , ,

shouting

Blimey, yesterday’s post provoked quite a reaction from you lot. I’ve had a ton of messages about it, to the point where I actually feel a bit fraudulent accepting all this love for being brave enough to talk about something so cringe-worthy. You all totally get how embarrassing it was.

At the time it happened, I wrote about falling out of bed on my personal Facebook page, much to the amusement of my friends. I made sure to leave out the bit about actually breaking the bed though…that was never going to make it into print. Until now, right?

I didn’t feel particularly brave yesterday when I was writing the post, in fact it’s a very weird thing…I felt detached, almost like I was writing about someone else.  Don’t get me wrong, I can remember exactly how I felt as I stood there in front of the bloke holding the bed leg, with the hot flush of shame creeping slowly up my body, desperately wanting to be anywhere but there.  And yet, talking to you guys about it yesterday didn’t worry me at all, I even smiled to myself as I wrote down the words and imagined you all reading the bit about getting my head stuck…it was funny.

That person, the one who was 62lbs heavier than the person inside my pants today seems like a stranger to me. She’s me, obviously, but at the same time she’s not me. It’s so hard to explain, but I think it’s got something to do with the way in which I’ve peeled away layers and layers of stuff over the last few months and laid it all out for examination. Between us, we’ve picked over the bones of all manner of crap, and every time I’ve taken a step forward, I feel one step further removed from the girl who broke beds and lumbered her way through life.

In doing all that, I’m conscious that I’ve sort of become a bit de-sensitised to some of the painful stuff. I can only liken it to having a baby, you know? You start your pregnancy feeling like your body is a private thing, with intimate places which are off limits to most. By the time you push the baby out you’re so used to folk faffing around with your tuppence that you barely look up from your crossword whilst they’re having a poke around.

I’ve talked about it all so much, it’s lost the power to hurt me. To bother me.  I mean, I still remember the pain and the humiliation but I don’t feel it any more, I’m just reporting the facts about how life used to be. And besides, it’s all just between you and me, right?

You’d have laughed the other day. I had to provide some information for the people my boy works for – long story, he doesn’t exactly work for MI5 but it would take too long to explain why they need it. The form asked for my build, so I wrote fat. He was peering over my shoulder as I wrote down my details and he was horrified…mum you can’t write that!  I hadn’t even given it a second thought. I pointed out the fact that I was only being honest, and quick as a flash he said yeah well under the question about facial hair you wrote NONE…if you’re all about being honest…

Cheeky twat.

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Finding The Answer

In the here & now, Reflections on past times, , , , ,

answer-the-question

You know how sometimes someone asks you a question which stops you in your tracks and makes you think about something which has never even occurred to you before? Well, that happened to me this week. Let me ask you the same question.

Did you start your diet because of how you looked, or how you felt?

I’ve been mulling this over for the last couple of days and even now I’m not 100% sure about the answer. I just knew the time was right, but I’m less clear about what actually drove me to it. How I looked versus how I felt…I mean they were both awful you know? I looked like shit and I felt like shit so take your pick was kind of my first response. But the question sort of got inside my head and stuck which is generally my head’s way of flagging that I need to unpick something in a bit more detail.

If I’m working on something I like to understand why, as in what is the problem I’m trying to fix?  The idea of being able to articulate exactly what prompted me to begin this journey appeals to me…my own personal why.

I’d started to really struggle with mobility issues. On the last holiday I took with my friend immediately before I started my diet, I could barely walk from one end of the ship to the other without needing a rest…everything hurt. My back and my knee in particular felt like they were buckling under the strain of lugging twenty three stones around on my five feet five inch frame. I felt like I was lumbering, rather than walking. It was awful…it felt awful. My ankles were swollen, and my thighs chafed till they bled.

In the restaurant when I tried to squash my double arse in the elegant dining chairs, it felt like everybody was staring at me. I doubt that they were, but I felt crippled by my Asshole thoughts about what other people were thinking. Even walking through the restaurant to get to our table was torture, and I prayed the whole time that my arse didn’t add insult to injury by sweeping someone’s bread basket off their table on my way past. The Asshole voice in my head was on overdrive, and every thought landed, you know? Ha ha! Look at the fat girl in the dining room…feeding time at the zoo!

So, genuine reflections on the time immediately before I started my diet seem to be more aligned to how I felt rather than how I looked. I think I’d stopped caring about how I looked at that point if I’m being completely honest. Every night before we went down for dinner, my friend would be busy fixing her hair and putting her face on, generally making an effort you know? Me, I left my hair to dry wild and curly, and didn’t go anywhere near make-up… I didn’t even look in the mirror when I got dressed. There seemed little point and besides I didn’t want to be faced with the reality of what a hot mess I’d turned into.

It’s good to look back, in a weird sort of way…actively dredging up these memories renews my determination to get as far away from that place as possible. That was then…this is now. Now, I feel better physically…much better. Hamstring hobbling aside, I’m fitter and stronger, and I can walk without significant pain most of the time.

The biggest difference is that I’ve stopped being quite so conscious about how much space I take up in the world. I feel like I can sit on a chair without having to offer up a quick prayer that nobody skimped on the screws, you know? I no longer feel the need to try and tiptoe through my life. Oh sure, the Asshole voice still churns out a full range of self-esteem torpedoes on a regular basis, but more and more often they land a bit wide of the mark and they don’t inflict quite as much damage so that tells me I’m fitter and stronger in my head too.

So I think my answer to the question, having chatted it through with you lot is that it started out being about how I felt. Now what’s spurring me on is a mixture of both. I started putting my face on again a couple of months ago, and I’m thinking more and more about how I look, where back then I didn’t care. I’ve become strangely obsessed with what I’m going to wear to the forthcoming awards ceremony, but that’s what normal people would do, right? It’s a big deal and I want to look nice.

Just out of interest, how would you answer the question..?

 

 

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A Debt-Free Easter Monday

Reflections on past times, , ,

eggsI couldn’t help thinking as I came downstairs this Easter Monday morning to find no plundered Easter Egg boxes with I owe you notes hastily scribbled and stuck to the side, how different this year has been to many in the past. To be fair, my boy didn’t have any Easter Eggs this year – he’s not overly bothered by a desire to eat chocolate and I figured that not having any in the house was safer. He’s in his late twenties now so the fact that the Easter Bunny didn’t come calling isn’t going to send him to therapy in later life, you know?

When he was little I was in a particularly bad place where my relationship with food was concerned. I mean, I’d grown up as a fat child and my mum had regularly applied edible band-aids to anything that hurt me, so medicating with food was par for the course. However, in my very early twenties I found myself alone with a new baby having escaped from an abusive marriage, and at times it felt like food was my only companion.

We had a tiny family, even back then. Just the two of us and my mum, who lived nearby, and a handful of extended family who lived much further away. I had a bee in my Easter bonnet about my boy not ‘suffering’ from a lack of Easter eggs due to the fact that our family unit was so small, so I remember buying Easter Eggs for him from long-gone family members…here you go son, this one’s from your great grandma and that one’s from your old Uncle Donald…even I didn’t remember too much about Uncle Donald, who was my mum’s second-cousin-once-removed and who’d been pushing up daisies for a good twenty years before my boy was even born. And he must surely have wondered in his two or three or four-year-old little head who the hell all these relatives were, who sent Easter eggs but never came to visit.

So on Easter Sunday there was always an impressive array of chocolate eggs for my boy, hand delivered by the Easter Bunny. If I’m being completely honest, some of them were the second or even third replacement of the original purchase, depending on how many times I’d been caught in the grip of a binge in the month or so leading up to the big day. And lets not even get started on the post-Easter binges, which were all very well until he got the hang of sums. Then it became a bit more difficult to get away with. But I had four left Mummy and now there’s only three…

I became really adept at fashioning the fancy foil in an Easter Egg sort of shape and arranging them in their boxes on top of the dresser until I had chance to replace them, so he could count them not realising they were empty. And then when he was older, and sussed that out I’d scribble an I owe you, and promise two eggs to replace the one I’d accidentally eaten.

On the surface of it, it’s amusing. Except it’s not, not really…since when is it amusing to lie to your child, and steal from them..? I mean, I know it’s only chocolate but still. That’s the behaviour of an addict, right? I didn’t recognise it back in the day, it’s only now that I can look back retrospectively and feel that hot flush of shame when I realise how messed up it all was.

This year, there is no carnage, not a single creative foil sculpture, and no I owe you notes. Mind you, these days I’d be far more likely to get greeted by an infuriated man-child holding an empty box hollering I can’t believe you’ve eaten my fucking Easter egg again…a bit like me, he calls a spade a spade. But I’m here to tell you that waking up chocolate-debt free on the day after Easter is a good feeling 🙂

 

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