Tag Archives: binge

Knowing Where I’m At

In the here & now, , , , ,

So, Friday night was work’s Christmas doo – if you’ve been reading along for a while you’ll know that the prospect of a big night out generally makes me want to run at warp speed in the opposite direction, but for once I decided not to be an antisocial old git, and I went along. As it turns out, I had an awesome time, in fact I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much.

We’d arranged to have a pre-party face make-over, so by the time we got there I didn’t really look like me at all. We all sort of ended up with a similar version of the same thing, dark smoky eyes and a ton of face paint which I’ve got to say didn’t look half bad, right up until I got a bit warm halfway through the evening and my face started melting…it was nice whilst it lasted though. Except, I looked a bit like a panda. There were two girls doing make-up, and I think I got the rookie, you know?

Saturday afternoon was a low point. I’d woken up with renewed determination that I could kick the Asshole voice into the long grass if he started being a twat, and by 2pm I still had a full house of smart points left. Eating nothing seems to be the safest option for me, you know? I can hold out for ages, it’s stopping once I’ve started that gives me a problem. Anyway I ran a few errands, went for my nails and eyelashes done and then walked Charlie dog before I turned my attention to food.

That’s the point at which it went horribly wrong. I had a full-on binge, having decided that (wait for it, Asshole logic at its finest) since Sunday was my weigh day, and I’d actually given up trying to programme my new scales with the fancy stuff and just taken them upstairs, midnight Saturday was my line in the sand. Sunday I was back on it.

So best buy a Daim cake now because from Sunday when I woke up I wouldn’t be eating anything like that, right? So I actually went to the supermarket and bought the offending article, together with a family sized moussaka. And a large bag of crisps to eat whilst the moussaka was cooking. Not cheese balls, I wouldn’t let myself go there and strangely I didn’t even try.

Having vaporised the moussaka and the crisps, I cut myself a quarter of the Daim cake. It was gone in sixty seconds and oh my days it tasted amazing. So I cut another quarter and ate that too. I was starting to feel a bit sick at this point, but I had that now or never logic going round and round in my head…if you don’t eat it now you won’t be able to eat it at all, you’re back on the diet tomorrow…

The third quarter took a bit of getting down to be honest, but having eaten it I had to go hard for the fourth and final quarter, otherwise my boy would know I’d eaten three quarters of a Daim cake when he got in from work and I’d be too ashamed to look him in the eye. So I ate the lot, and got rid of the packaging in the outside bin before falling into a food coma and dozing in my armchair for a good couple of hours. I woke up feeling bloated and bilious with rampant indigestion.

Does that sound familiar..? It does to me. That was my life, once upon a time and I think I shocked myself at how comfortably I was able to just step back into the bad old days. And I brooded about it for the rest of the day, and into the evening. I felt so sick, which was hardly a fucking surprise.

Sunday dawned, and I didn’t feel any better. And then I stood on my new scale – which by the way will be known hereafter as the shitbird scale – and felt even worse. I wanted to know where I was at…well, let me tell you exactly where I’m at. I’m fifteen pounds heavier than I was when I set off for Cuba, that’s where. 

Knowing the damage I’ve done drove it home to me how broken my thinking has become of late…I thought I’d moved way past all that head spam, but I’m clearly not as free and clear of it as I’d thought. Mary made an interesting point on Friday when she said

…as a side note… it seems like at first naming the Asshole voice gave you power over him. Because you named him and separated him from who you were and what you want, you could say no. But lately… it feels like when you do something you didn’t want to do, it’s because you felt like you couldn’t say no to the Asshole voice. You don’t seem to have that power over him any more, the confidence that you can overrule him, that you can achieve your goal. It seems like you feel like you’ll inevitably give in, so you might as well get it over with…

Mary, you are spot on. I can’t pinpoint the moment in time where I started hearing my own voice instead of his but I’d lost sight of how quickly I can turn a deaf ear and close him down when I feel like I’m the one in control. So, that’s my homework for this week.

Back to basics. Listen for the Asshole voice, recognise him, and give him a big fat kick in the ging gang goolies every time he tries it on. One day at a time. Yesterday was a good day, once I’d got over the horror of the shitbird scale and I even went to bed last night with points in the bank. Not because it was easy, he was chewing my ear all evening as it happens…but I tuned him out.

I’ve forgiven myself for the fifteen pounds…it is what it is, and at least I know what I’m dealing with now, right? It’s time to get this show on the road 🙂

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Scraping A Two.

In the here & now, , , ,

wagon

So this last week was going to be my super-clean eating week, right? As I gazed at the week ahead last Sunday, clearly I overlooked the night-in-with-gin and the day trip to London (which, by the way was all kinds of awesome) which had the potential to make the wheels come off my plan. Keeping my shit together requires me to call out stuff like that with a big red warning triangle in my head.

I’d probably have emerged from underneath last week clutching a gold star if I hadn’t returned to the Kingdom of Pain on Thursday, to be greeted by the stern-faced man mountain inviting me to hop on the scales. I’m here to tell you there was no hopping going on…as I hoisted myself up, I felt like everything was going in slow motion, you know? I reckon it was the weight of impending doom that slowed everything right down. I’d been inactive and armchair-ridden for more than a week so the prospect of a weigh-in didn’t exactly make me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Surprisingly, I’d worried for nothing. Between Sunday morning when I drew my line in the sand, and Thursday evening, I’d somehow shaken three unwelcome pounds off my arse and that was enough to dodge the bullet which God of Pain reserves specially for folk who aren’t achieving greatness in the weight-loss stakes. Phew.

Except, in my head that gave me licence to get up to devilment this weekend. The Asshole inside my head put forward a very convincing argument that I was unlikely to be subjected to the bitch in God of Pain’s office again for at least two weeks, so I could take my foot off a little, just for my birthday celebrations and maybe the day trip to London.

Come on Dee, really where’s the harm? There’s no fire to put out…there’s no mountain looming which requires you to be a certain weight is there? So it’ll take you a week longer to get in those size twelve skinny jeans, I mean big deal…you’re at least a fucking year away from wearing them anyway so what’s another week? You can take this at your own pace, come on lighten up, it’s your birthday…

So I did. Take it at my own pace I mean. Depending on which way you look at it, I managed to be both quick and slow at the same time, like some kind of dieting foxtrot. The only thing I slowed down was my progress, and everything else speeded right up…the speed at which I said yes please to a banana and maple syrup muffin on the train for example was lightening-quick.

And once I’d got a taste for it, the speed at which I pinched my mum’s banana and maple syrup muffin bordered on indecent once I’d established she didn’t want it. There was no cooling off period where the muffin sat untouched on the tray table whilst she decided…all it took was one almost-curl of her nose and I was all over that muffin faster than she could form the words to turn it down.

The fresh fruit option got ignored in favour of strawberry yoghurt and granola as a pre-cursor to the muffin and given how good that yoghurt tasted, trust me when I say it hadn’t come out of the low-fat corner of the kitchen. So between Leeds and London I fell off the wagon. And once we were in London, I went under the wheels completely.

I ate a burger. And I don’t mean a skinny little mass-produced plastic burger, oh no…this was the real deal…a burger that knew how to be a burger, with all the trimmings. Like the fries for example.

I didn’t just order fries, I ordered fries covered in cheese and bacon bits. I’ve never tasted anything so divine in my whole entire life…do you know how long it is since I ate cheese..? Shit the bed, it was awesome. This was our pre-matinee theatre lunch. Mum’s Cobb salad looked really good, I would have been more than happy with that myself on any other day. Just not this day. This day, the Asshole voice totally knocked it out of the park.

I didn’t even leave it with the burger. I had honey and ginger ice-cream in the theatre between acts one and two, and then a sandwich and two more muffins on the train journey home.

Yesterday was Sunday. Weigh day. And oh look, I appear to have reloaded one of those pounds…what a fucking surprise, said nobody at all.

Ah well…it is what it is. I had a ball, and my net position is okay. We’re back on track and this week there are no days out or catered meals. It’s just a normal week, with no warning triangles on my calendar and I’m on it. Please God I’m on it…cross my heart 🙂

 

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I Couldn’t Outwalk My Fork

In the here & now, , ,

fork

I know you’re all expecting the next chapter of my trekking story today but I’ve got a major battle going on as I try and cling on to my place in the sweet spot so I’m afraid the contents of my head have jumped the queue…trekking day two and beyond is buffering as we speak but my woes are already lined up and ready to go. Sorry about that.

I’ve got to be honest, I’ve had better weeks. On a scale of one to ten, one being really shit and ten not being much better, the needle didn’t even get off the starting blocks. I’m in that place where I’d be grateful for a one. My boy’s been in hospital for emergency surgery so I’ve had a  couple of sleepless nights…it doesn’t matter how old they are, your babies are your babies, right?

In between all that, my website is still broken and the people who should be sorting it out are seemingly much better at apologising for the inconvenience of it all than they are at actually fixing the fucking issue. I’m seriously at the end of my rope. For all of you trying to join in with the chatter and leave a comment, I’m really sorry you’re being blocked as suspected bots. If it’s any consolation whichever gremlins have taken up residence are tarring me with the same brush and I’m also getting regularly booted out of my own website for being of suspected dodgy character.

So I’m tired and I’m frustrated, on top of suffering from the huge anti-climax of returning from the jungle with a lack of forthcoming adventures to keep driving me forward…it’s got D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R written all over it.

On Wednesday I stuck to my food plan. Yesterday I didn’t. Yesterday anything was fair game. It started well, with melon. Well, I say it started well but to be honest I’d taken melon to work to snack on throughout the morning, and I accidentally ate it all in the car before I even got there so if we’re splitting hairs it didn’t start that well. But still, the melon was the only healthy highlight in what turned out to be a dieting car crash. I ate sandwiches and chips, and cake and crisps and chocolate.

I can’t even blame it on the fact that I was stressed…on Wednesday, as my boy and I sat for fifteen hours in a waiting room at the hospital and waited for someone – anyone – to feel better and vacate their bed so he could get the surgery he needed, I was stressed to the moon and back. He was on nil-by-mouth so no naughties passed my lips at all in what I considered to be a noble and selfless show of solidarity, you know? Yesterday however, surgery safely over, son on the mend and stress levels on the downward march, my jaws barely stopped moving all day.

What’s that all about? That’s not part of the plan. Especially when you consider I had a come to Jesus moment with the God of Pain on Sunday when he clocked the fact that I’d put six pounds on since he weighed me just before I left for Cuba. I swore to him that I was back on track. Genuinely, what I ate in Cuba was heavily carb-laden and dextrose-rich and I’m cool with the effect that had – we all needed that fuel to get through the trek.

What I didn’t need was all the other stuff I ate, on those nights where we stayed in nice hotels…I dined on the excuse that I was going to burn it off but clearly I failed to out-walk my fork. I also didn’t need any of the crap I’ve eaten since we got back. So Sunday was my reboot, the day where I drew my line in the sand and picked up where I’d left off. Except the week hasn’t shaped up that way for all the reasons I’ve talked about…or, should that say all the excuses I’ve made.

There is no reason why I should’ve allowed the wheels to fall off my food plan, just a lot of excuses why I did. I’m disappointed that I disrespected all the effort I’ve put in to get to this point, but today’s a new day, right?

Today I’ll do better.

 

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Not Even Close

In the here & now, , , ,

fall-off-the-wagon

Well…where do I start. I think I mentioned didn’t I that I was anticipating the odd challenge towards the back end of last week, but I had a plan, right? I was working away Thursday and Friday, but I had it all figured out. The hotel I was staying in had a gym, blah blah blah…sadly I was accompanied on my trip by the fuck-up fairy, and it’s safe to say things didn’t go according to plan. Not even close.

But let me rewind. The week was going great, right up until Thursday morning when I left for my two-day trip. I’d completed all my planned sessions in the Kingdom of Pain, and I’d walked pretty much every day…I was on track food wise, in fact it was shaping up to be another textbook week.

The two-day meeting was a big conference-type get-together for a sixty strong team that I support and there were a few things which I knew straight off the bat I was going to struggle with. For example, there was an outdoor hog roast planned for dinner on the Thursday evening, and no word of a lie, I’d dreamed more than once in the early part of the week about that crispy salty pork crackling, and how many kinds of awesome it was going to be.

I knew how much I’d struggle to say no. I thought about how many different ways I could avoid even being within sniffing distance and I couldn’t quite figure it out so I set off knowing it was going to test me. What I hadn’t anticipated was all the other stuff.

I got to the hotel well before nine on the first morning after a couple of hours in the car, to be greeted by a massive tray of hot bacon sandwiches in the coffee area. I went through the motions of saying no, before driving myself bat shit crazy for ten minutes walking around the room chatting to colleagues, all the time furiously calculating and re-calculating the effect a bacon sandwich might have on my daily food budget. I came to the conclusion that it would make a big hole in it, as I caved in and helped myself to a plate. I estimated about twelve points out of my thirty five point daily budget. Ouch.

As soon as I walked into the conference room, my Asshole voice started doing his happy dance. There were goodies on every table…dishes of bite-size chocolate bars, chocolate-covered raisins and even bags of candy-floss to support the seaside theme. Whichever seat I’d taken I would’ve been within touching distance of all things naughty. So, did I sit and ignore it all because I’d just eaten a third of my daily food budget and I shouldn’t be even thinking about chocolate..? No, of course I fucking didn’t. I dived right in.

I started off with the intention of counting the points for everything I ate. I made a deal with the fuck-up fairy, brokered of course by the Asshole voice which meant I could take my foot off a little and have a few treats on the basis that I had some exercise points I could dip into, you know? I even wrote down what I ate so I could tot it up later on. Shall I share the list..? One toffee. Then two malteser chocolates, closely followed by two mini galaxy caramels. Then one more of those, one mini mars bar and a handful of chocolate raisins followed by seven mint humbugs.

At the first coffee break there were giant cookies on offer so of course I had one of those, followed by three mini bounties and a jaffa cake. I’d already run out of my food budget by this point although for some bizarre reason I carried on writing things down. Lunch was a buffet and trust me when I say…well, I don’t need to say it do I..? I was out of control. The hog roast didn’t live up to expectations but to be fair I felt so sick by the time  evening came, even if it had I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. But I ate it anyway. Followed by a dirty great piece of chocolate fudge cake.

I laid in bed on Thursday evening and felt like shit. I’d taken my iPad so I could write Friday’s blog post but you know what, I simply couldn’t summon any words…I was transported right back to those dark dark days of binge/food coma/self-loathing/guilt/remorse and repeat. I’d almost forgotten what it was like but hell’s teeth that was a sharp reminder.

I’d love to say that Friday was better, but it wasn’t. I wasn’t as bad but I was way off track. I ate things I shouldn’t, and I didn’t even write them down. I got home and finished the day off by eating chow mein and prawn toast from the Chinese takeaway. I mean, I’d already blown it, right?

Saturday…Saturday was better. But not brilliant. I still made some dodgy food choices but I exercised. I walked with some friends and it felt good. The Asshole voice was busy screaming start again Monday of course but actually, my weigh day is Sunday. So I picked myself up and started again Sunday.

I’ve written the last three days of my last dieting week off, and the bitch served up a three pound gain with a smile yesterday morning. I could weep, but I did it to myself, and I take responsibility for it. I deserve those three pounds.

So I’m a bit shaken if I’m honest, about how quickly I descended into anarchy. I thought I’d cracked it but clearly not. And it remains as ever incredibly hard to climb back on the wagon when I’ve taken a tumble and gone under the wheels…this morning I feel stronger, with a very good day under my belt yesterday…today it almost feels like the binge never happened. With a headwind behind me and the Gods of Skinny on my side I’ve somehow managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and I’m back on track.

This week, I’m not going to step a toe out of line. I’ve got three pounds to lose, right?

 

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Two Bad Mangoes

In the here & now, , ,

moods

I’ve always wondered at the ability of food to affect my mood one way or the other. Take yesterday morning for example, I’d mentally drafted out my food plan for the day before I even got out of bed. That often happens anyway when you’re preoccupied with food like I am, but I’m trying to be especially diligent this week due to my baboon-coloured bum and enforced inactivity. I barely managed three hundred doddery steps yesterday and I’m not holding out much hope that today will be a whole lot better.

As I shuffled downstairs, I was visualising the juicy sweet mangos that I had picked up at the weekend, which together with a handful of blueberries would provide me with an exotic point-free breakfast. Mango is my favourite fruit, so despite the lack of a big fat bacon sandwich I was approaching breakfast with enthusiasm, you know? No watery skimmed milk and MDF cereal on my watch.

They were monster mangoes, I mean a proper fat-girl pick. I couldn’t wait. However, as it turned out, both of them were rotten. I mean come on, both of them. Instead of sweet juicy mango coloured flesh, I was met with dark mushy stuff that gave off the kind of whiff that said don’t eat me unless you want to shit through the eye of a needle for a week. I was gutted. So my points-free breakfast back-up plan, having decided that an egg-cup sized portion of blueberries flying solo wasn’t going to cut it, was a tin of grapefruit segments.

Which would have been perfectly lovely, if my palette hadn’t been anticipating mango. When I’m in the mood for sharp zesty and citrus, grapefruit does the job admirably. When I’m in the mood for exotic juicy and tropical, it doesn’t. It scored an epic fail. And just like the flavours dancing on my tastebuds, my mood immediately turned from sunny to sour.

If I really think about it, food has always had the ability to colour my mood a few shades lighter, or darker depending on the situation. And I’ve always struggled with food envy, you know when you’re out with friends and they order food which is better than yours when it all arrives? Or bigger than yours, which is even more irritating.

If you read the Tapas, Anyone? post way back in the early days you’ll already know that the food element of any evening out can completely overtake any social aspects for me, as the asshole voice gets involved with an opinion, no matter how unwelcome.

And let’s not even get started on how many times the needle has moved from one end of the spectrum to the other, when I’ve been in the grip of a binge…I could easily move from anticipation and euphoria to satisfied and all the way along to frustrated, resentful, guilty and devastated…all in the space of an hour. And every bit of it was food-related.

I realise I’m probably coming across as all kinds of weird. But let’s be honest, if the relationship I’ve always had with food was on the right side of normal, we probably wouldn’t be here, right? Just to put it into context, much of this conflict goes on on the inside, and you generally get an even-tempered smiley person facing out to the world in general.

I know that the key to a life free of food-inspired mood swings is all about striking the right balance. Nutritious and tasty food with the odd treat thrown in for good measure. Creating a framework that works for me and which I get comfortable with to the point it becomes my new normal. And I guess that’s what this whole thing is about isn’t it…me finding my new normal. I know I’ve got a way to go but I’m working on it 🙂

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