Category Archives: Reflections on past times

Hopes and Dreams

In the here & now, Reflections on past times,

bucket

Hands up if you’ve ever seen or heard or maybe read something which resonated with you, stayed with you…I mean really rung the bell deep down inside of you and made you think YEAH!! DAMN STRAIGHT!!  I have – this is the thing that I read, 25 years ago at least, and it never left me.

I believe that we are who we choose to be. Nobody is going to come and save you. You’ve got to save yourself. Nobody is going to give you anything. You’ve got to go out and fight for it. Nobody knows what you want except you, and nobody will be as sorry as you if you don’t get it. So don’t give up your dreams.

How awesome is that – by the way you score extra points if you can tell me who said it – and how awesome is it that after 25 years of cherishing those words, I can pretty much remember them word for word. That’s powerful isn’t it, that someone can put something out there and someone else sees it, and it stays with that person for the longest time. I think the reason it fired something up in me is because I believe the sentiment behind those words you know?  100%. I read them at a point in my life where I’d already picked up a couple of bruises and realisation was dawning that the charmed life I’d pictured for myself wasn’t going exactly to plan.

Fast-forward twenty five years – am I the person I choose to be? No.

I mean on some level of course, I’m happy with the person I am on the inside. I love my grown up son and my dog, I spoil my mum and I have lots of friends who mean the world to me, and whom I’d go to the ends of the earth for if they needed me.  They would for me too, which tells me I’m getting something right, right? I work hard, pay my taxes (ok through gritted teeth at times but it still counts) and I try to be kind and generous…I’m a good person. But have I chosen to live inside this body?  Are you serious? Unless they were accompanied by men in white coats carrying a syringe with bluebirds twittering around their head, nobody would choose to live inside this body. And yet, I haven’t chosen not to…or at least I haven’t chosen not to for ever.

Nobody is going to come and save me from 300lbs of wobble, I’ve got to save myself. I get it, I know that. Nobody is going to give me the answers of how I break this game of yo-yo madness that I’ve played with myself over the years, I have to figure it out in a way that works for me…I get that too, and I’m up for the fight – come on asshole, give it your best shot. And you know what’s really true? Nobody could ever know better than I do how much I want to be free of this fat suit which gets in the way of the person I really choose to be. Would anyone else be sorry if I didn’t?  Of course not – again, down to me.

I haven’t given up on my dreams…that’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m on it 🙂

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Shall We Talk Shoes?

Freeform thoughts, Reflections on past times, , ,

LBs

I watched a documentary the other night about Christian Louboutin and it got me thinking. I do quite miss wearing heels although I’ve got to be honest I’ve never worn the kind of towering creations dreamed up by the likes of him…he doesn’t make shoes for fat girls. His perspective on shoes for those of you who didn’t see the documentary, is that the first thing a woman does when she puts on a pair of heels is to look in the mirror, and check out her own ass. The expectation being that the heels make your ass look spectacular.

Now forgive me being sceptical but it’s going to take more than a pair of heels to justify the use of the word ‘spectacular’ in association with my ass. They’re going to do what? Make it look more curvy..? Yeah cos that’s exactly what I need. Make me a pair of shoes that make it look like I dropped 5 dress sizes and I’ll squeeze my pasty feet into them all day long but till then, red soles or not you can just jog on thanks.

I did once order a gorgeous pair of boots from Jimmy Choo. I should explain, I’m all about the bags – shoes have never really been my thing – and I’d been on-line scouring the January sale to see if they had any nice bags up for grabs when these boots caught my eye. They were flatties, beautiful nude colour suede, lined with sheepskin and utterly gorgeous. Highly impractical, one rain shower or puddle would have ruined them but I talked myself through all the possible scenarios where carefully planned climate-controlled outings would allow me to show them off. I had a YOLO moment (you only live once!) and thought sod it, sod the expense, they’ve got my name all over them.

On the day they were delivered the whole experience was awesome…a box in a box in a box, wrapped with tissue paper and sprinkled with fairy dust (ok I’m lying about the fairy dust) and it was all going so well until I tried them on. Tried one of them on…it was at this point I realised that fancy designers didn’t make fancy shoes for fat feet. I thought I’d been really clever ordering one and a half sizes bigger than normal (*taps head*, up here for thinking, down there for dancing) but no sooner had my big toe passed the sheepskin tongue it became very clear that Houston had a problem. Like a bona fide ugly sister, no way was my foot going to fit into that boot. Not even close. With great sadness and not a small amount of attitude I stuffed them back into their perfect box and sent them back.

I can’t wear heels. There comes a point on the scale of fatness where it’s just not possible – if you’re in the fat club you’ll know what I mean – so for now I’m limited to flatties for fatties. I did manage to score a gorgeous pair of Chanel flip flops this summer, and I’d like to think that Coco Chanel in all her tiny perfection would have derived a certain amount of satisfaction from knowing that the shoe people at Chanel had succeeded where others had failed in making at least one pair of fat feet feel fabulous.

They didn’t do much for my ass though, in case you were wondering 🙂

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Feast or famine

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

yo-yo-dieting

Over the years I’ve probably tried every diet going. All the usual suspects – the ones where you rock up to fat class once a week, pay your subs and hop on the scales, then sit down for ‘the talk’ – some of them were quite good and the diets do work if you stick to them. The meal plans are flexible, it’s normal food, yadder yadder yadder…it’s just a bloody long slog when you have lots to lose.

And yes I know, I’m looking at it all wrong. The long game gets you into a healthy eating pattern, it’s habit forming, you learn about nutrition, get support…I get it. Only I never really did get it. I always got so far, then got stuck. Bored, impatient, call it whatever you like but sooner or later the asshole would get a lucky strike and BAM I’d come tumbling out of the naughty tree, hitting every branch on the way down. And that’d be it, goodnight Vienna, out of the game. Shackles off, bring on the buns.

Same thing with the other diets I’ve tried. I’ve existed on packs of space dust and hermetically sealed ping meals delivered to my door every week for weeks on end –  2 minutes in the microwave guaranteed to produce a tasty portion-controlled meal. Some of them were actually ok, but then considering I practically had to re-mortgage my house for portions that wouldn’t look out of place on the sodding yellow brick road, they ought to be.

Again with the boredom though…I rarely managed to see it through. The one thing I’ve never considered is weight loss surgery, because I recognise that the problem is 100% in my head. I’d be the one liquidising mars bars or finding new ways to drink fish and chips through a straw if my stomach was the size of a thimble.

Some of the diets I’ve tried have dipped into the psychology of weight loss – the liquid diet in particular came with a big element of homework and group therapy. I found it fascinating and it really did work. For a while. Mainly down to the speed of loss I think, I didn’t have time to be bored, in fact it was exhilarating. I wish I could do it again but I gag at the thought of that chalky soup now.

I guess where I’m going with this, is that despite understanding the concept of a balanced diet, the science of expending more energy than you take in if you want to lose weight and even the psychology behind identifying the triggers which set me off, I’ve spent practically my whole adult life either losing the weight, or putting it back on again. I’ve probably lost and gained around 1000lbs or more over the last 30 years. It seems knowledge isn’t power after all.

How many cycles of despair, followed by determination, hope, success, celebration, pride, self-destruct and back to despair can one girl go through in one lifetime? Lots – the answer is lots. When I hit that sweet spot, and I’m in the zone, life is good. When I’m not, I binge. For me, there’s never been a middle ground. I really want it to be different this time…to coin a phrase, I’m too old for this shit.

So anyway, just to manage your expectations…when I reach the end goal, if my victory dance is done with a donut in my left hand don’t be too surprised, and I hope you’re in this for the long haul because when I get to where I want to be, well that’s when I’m going to really going to need my support network to help me stay there 🙂

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A broken leg.

Reflections on past times,

200x200_chair

All that talk of armchairs the other day reminded me of an incident with a chair that happened years ago, when my son was little – he’s in his late twenties now but I think he was about 7 years old at the time. We were enjoying some hospitality courtesy of the Golden Arches, and as we made our way to a free table and sat down with our lunch, disaster struck.

Now you know how sometimes when you watch an accident unfold it feels like it’s happening in slow motion..? That’s exactly how it was. I sat down, and then he sat down, but he carried on getting lower and lower until he landed on the floor with a thump. To give him his due, he never dropped so much as a chip – he held onto his lunch like his life depended on it.

I assumed that perhaps he’d perched on the edge of the chair and that it had simply tipped over, but once I’d picked him up and dusted him off, on closer inspection it transpired that the front leg had parted company with the rest of the chair.

He was fine, other than being mortified that lots of people had seen him topple over and thankfully the only injury was a bruise to his pride but I was cross – he could easily have hurt himself. So, chair in one hand and chair leg in the other I set off through the restaurant and approached the counter. Now, picture if you will, the scene; very fat lady carrying a broken chair…what conclusion would you draw?

Yeah, me too actually. Well you would, wouldn’t you…but at the time it didn’t even occur to me until I was standing in front of the duty manager holding the offending chair leg aloft that he’d automatically think I’d broken it. As realisation dawned that he was about to blame me for wrecking his furniture because I was too fat to sit safely I felt like wrapping the chair leg around his chops. I resisted the temptation to do so, and we sorted it out but it’s true you know – fat people are usually the fall guy.

Only yesterday, a colleague was telling me about how he’d sat on a bar stool at the weekend and it had fallen to bits underneath him, depositing him on the floor. The bar owner had been full of apologies, they’d had a giggle about it and he got a free drink by way of apology. I can guarantee that if I’d been the one to sit on that stool only for it to collapse in a heap, first of all I would’ve died a thousand deaths, the asshole in my head would have gone in for the kill by immediately blaming me for being so fat (and screaming at me that everyone else in the bar thought so too), and I would have been the one apologising profusely for breaking the stool and offering to buy another one immediately.

Makes you think, doesn’t it…we all judge, based on what we see. But when you’re fat, you judge yourself more harshly than anyone else does, without question.

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