Tag Archives: Asshole

Consistent Inconsistency

In the here & now, , ,

consistent

When I was little, my mum used to call me Contrary Mary. She always said it in a jokey way of course but she wasn’t fooling me, there was definitely an occasional undertone of you’re now getting on my last good nerve… I think what frustrated her was how the child who was placid and easy-going one day could do a good impression of the devil child the next. I’m not moody, in fact I don’t have a moody bone in my body. That’s never been the issue…I’m just inconsistent, and my normal can differ from day to day.

I can see how annoying that would be to someone who’s not me…to be fair I’ve driven myself nuts over the last few months especially with the way I’m never quite sure what frame of mind I’m going to wake up in from one day to the next. I’ve noticed it far more since I’ve been dieting, but that’s probably because I’m more tuned in to what’s going on in my head. I’m getting fairly adept at separating my own thoughts from my asshole voice, although knowledge isn’t always power, right?

As soon as I open my eyes in the morning I can generally suss out whether I’m going to sail through the day, or whether I’m going to have to navigate a pathway through the thorns. It’s been a bit of a mixed bag this weekend just gone, in fact Saturday and Sunday were like night and day – Saturday I struggled. God, how I struggled. It seemed like I was locked horns with the asshole pretty much all day, due to fatpantsgate.

Yesterday was completely different, I mean it was effortless. I ended up going to bed last night with one smart point left unspent. Shall I say that again, in case you missed it the first time..? I had leftover food budget that I chose not to spend. I mean what’s that all about? That never happens. I always wring every last drop out my food budget to ensure I get maximum possible chewage, and yet yesterday I left a point on the table. Maybe I’m coming down with something.

So that’s the frustrating thing, right? Why can’t every day be like yesterday? I mean I’d have this cracked in a heartbeat if I didn’t have to waste time arguing with myself. The inconsistency definitely makes it harder to deal with, because after a couple of really good days the asshole voice can take me unawares. If he’s chewing my ear constantly it’s easier to tune him out.

Oh my…I think I might have just put two and two together in my head as I was writing this. Saturday was the last day in my dieting week…there were scant points available as a fallback position when the asshole voice gained a bit of ground. The pressure was on, and I freaked out. Sunday was different…the start of a new week, a whole week’s worth of new points to go at if I so pleased, therefore no pressure and no problem. Give it your best shot Asshole, come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough…

Interesting. In order not to face the kind of pressure that freaks me out I need to have points in the bank right up to the very last minute of my dieting week. You know, make sure I have enough for an emergency hobnob at all times.

Noted 🙂

 

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Sleeping Downhill

In the here & now, , ,

bed

When I was talking yesterday about the cruise holiday that I enjoyed with my friend just before I took my first hesitant steps towards this new healthier life, it put me in mind of an embarrassing incident from that same holiday that I’d buried somewhere at the back of my memory bank. I actually broke the bed.

Yes, seriously. I was mortified. My friend and I had twin beds in the same cabin, and a couple of days into the holiday, I fell out of mine. The actual incident itself was too funny…I can’t even pretend that the sea was rough, in fact we were in a fairly sheltered bit of the baltic at the time and the water was as calm as a millpond.

I was also relatively sober, having only had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner but somehow, in the middle of the night as I heaved my bulk and attempted to turn over I managed to forget that I wasn’t at home in my superking-sized bed…as my full weight neared the edge of the lightweight single bed, it tipped me off and I went over the side.  Not only that, I managed to grab hold of the mattress on the way down in an attempt to save myself from falling, and pulled it down on top of me as I went.

I ended up with my head wedged between the tipped-up bed base and the bedside cabinet, with the mattress and duvet on top of me, dazed and half asleep wondering what the fuck just happened. And then, obviously, I got a fit of the giggles. My friend, who’d been asleep in the other bed, woke up at that point to utter carnage.

It didn’t occur to me as I tipped everything the right way up again and reassembled the bedding that I might have broken it, but I had a vague feeling of disorientation as I went back to sleep, and for the next couple of nights…it was only when we called maintenance to change a lightbulb in the bedside lamp later in the week that it became apparent that I had in fact been laying downhill ever since, off to one side and with my head lower than my feet.

There was nothing wrong with the bulb, turns out it was the plug which had come adrift from the wall as the bed had knocked it. And it seemed that one of the legs at the top of the bed had obviously buckled under my weight as it tipped over. As the little Philippino maintenance man emerged from underneath the wonky bed in what felt like slow motion with the un-needed light bulb in one hand, and a bed leg in the other, I couldn’t quite meet his gaze. I couldn’t bear to see the fat lady broke the bed written all over his face. I was mortified.

They swapped out the base of course, and in their polite customer-orientated way they avoided any conversation about how or why it might have happened. But you don’t need me to tell you how many times the Asshole voice whispered to me about how the entire crew would be laughing at how the lady in cabin L201 was so fat she broke the bed…or how I didn’t get a proper night’s kip until I got home because I was too scared of it happening again.

This year is going to be so different 🙂

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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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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 🙂

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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.

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