Tag Archives: blowing the budget

Oh, Do The Hokey Cokey…

In the here & now, ,

image

So. Excuse the brief hiatus, it’s been a busy few days and the asshole voice has scored a couple more direct hits since that confident proclamation that I’ve got this now because I’m back in the zone. Back in the zone my arse. I’m in the zone in a very Hokey Cokey kind of fashion since I’m in, out and then I’m fucking shaking it all about.

Four good days followed by two bad, followed by two good and three bad…that’s kind of how it’s panning out. I’m shitting my pants about having to stand on the scales and look God of Pain in the eye next time I’m summoned into the back room for a chat, because I know I’m going to get the bollocking I deserve. What’s wrong with me??

How can I be so solid in my resolve one minute and then throw it all away the next? Thursday last week was a classic example of fucked-upness. I’d had a good day, then I’d been to the gym and done an hour’s circuit training yet all the way home in the car I was wrestling with myself over whether I should, or should not eat a Mars Bar. I was desperate for one, and annoyingly I had to pass the corner shop on the way to my house.

I’d convinced myself I was going to pull over right up until the moment I approached the bend in the road where the shop is, and somehow I managed to keep the pedal to the metal and drive past. Victory, right? Yeah, you’d think. I can’t have been in the house ten minutes before I texted my boy and asked him to pick me up a Mars Bar on his way home. Like an ejit.

Friday was a really bad day, Saturday was less so but not perfect and yesterday was also not perfect…that was a blow given that Sunday’s are my reboot day. I did avoid a lot of temptation – I’ve been away this weekend staying with my friend and it was the Living North Christmas fair which I’ve talked about with you guys before.

I managed not to eat my own body weight in samples from the food hall, and I found these awesome treats which were a bit like skinny walnut whips just without the walnuts. The lady on the stall made a big fuss about the fact there was only seventy calories in each one, and that’s great you know, except I ate six of them. So, not that great then.

Today I’ve woken up feeling cross with myself and frustrated at being a week beyond my ‘it’s all okay now’ post and clearly still very much not okay but I do have renewed determination that it will be. Again. I’ve been trying to write the blog post about crossing the finish line in Cuba but my words are getting stuck and I can’t seem to do the moment justice.

So you guys lucked out eh? Instead of getting the last instalment of my epic story you’ve ended up listening to me banging on about what a shit few days I’ve had…sorry about that. I’m standing in the naughty corner, thinking about what I’ve done.

I haven’t given up. I’m totally hanging in here. Stick with me, I need you lot more than ever right now ?

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This Wasn’t Part Of The Plan

In the here & now, , ,

fuck-dog

Well, yesterday’s post really struck a chord with you lot, and I’ll tell you what else, it reconfirmed to me that I’m not alone in this journey. I’m not the only one who has an asshole living inside my head and just because I argue with myself about whether I should or shouldn’t go/do/eat/work out it doesn’t make me a freak of nature. I’m normal. It’s irritating but it doesn’t mean the men in white coats need to come and cart me off.

Back in the early days when I first started writing, I remember feeling a bit guilty because my growing band of subscribers weren’t getting much drama out of my journey. I was locked and loaded into that sweet spot, and temptation crumbled to dust once it hit my orbit…it barely even registered in the early days. I ignored naughties of all descriptions whilst I was busy tipping out the contents of my head for examination. Life was easy, you know?

Now it feels like all you get is drama. I’m walking a tightrope and to say I’m wobbling all over the place is an understatement. I felt less isolated and a lot less scared once I’d talked about my post-trek struggle to stay focused because so many of you reached out to say it’s okay…it’s a thing. I felt reassured, but to be honest that’s starting to wear a bit thin now…I’m still wobbling and it’s pissing me right off.

Take yesterday for example – I’d arranged to meet a colleague at the motorway services so I could leave my car there and travel with him to a team meeting. I nipped in to pay for my parking and the lady behind the counter offered me a big bar of chocolate for a pound. As I was shaking my head and saying no, I noticed it was Daim chocolate and my pound was in her till before my head even had time to process the fact that I’d walked out with my parking receipt in one hand and a bar of chocolate in the other.

All the way down to the meeting I convinced myself that I’d offer the chocolate to everyone else and by the time I’d gone around the table there wouldn’t be enough left for it to put a significant dint in my diet. So boys and girls, let’s have a pop quiz.

How many squares of chocolate did my team eat? No Squares. And how many squares of chocolate did I eat? All the fucking squares. I know. That wasn’t in the plan. Neither was the posh fish finger sandwich at the local pub at lunchtime, accompanied by my second lot of cheesy chips in a week. I did have the good grace to go to bed without supper last night but I’m very sure that I weighed more when I went to bed than I did when I woke up yesterday morning. Two steps forward and two steps back again.

The thing is, this time last year, you couldn’t have paid me enough money to make me take a square of chocolate, and I would have faced a firing squad before considering a cheesy chip. I would have happily sat there and watched all my team eat cheesy chips without batting an eyelid, because I was on the road to Skinny Town and nothing was knocking me into the ditch, right? My resolve was cast-iron, rock-solid, and at least ten times more watertight than a duck’s backside. Now..? Now I’m a pushover in the battle for supremacy between me and the asshole in my head…I feel like I’m on the ropes.

And I’m terrified. What if I’ve lost it? I mean I know I’ve lost it momentarily, but what if I can’t find it again? This wasn’t supposed to happen. I can live with the odd bit of drama but for fucks sake there are limits…it’s turning into an almost daily occurrence.

I get lots of mail from people who’ve hit the skids and don’t know how to claw their way back into that sweet spot. I hear you sistahs…I’m right there in a heap with you. We’ll just have to help each other figure this shit out.

I’m not giving up…not in this lifetime. Today’s a new day and anyone who tries to wave a cheesy chip under my nose is going down. That is all 🙂

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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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Too Easily Persuaded

In the here & now, ,

sweating

Hands up who’s ever made a prosecco-related decision which turned out not to be your smartest move? Yeah, me too. I had a lovely evening on Saturday, you know one of those unplanned evenings that springs up out of nowhere and turns into something unexpected..? There was a beer and prosecco festival in the next town that a few of my friends had been involved in arranging, and having been invited along my intention was to go and have a couple of scoops late afternoon and then head home for my usual Saturday evening in front of the TV with my four-legged fur baby.

It certainly wasn’t my intention to drink my own bodyweight in prosecco before leading the charge to a local Indian restaurant where I proceeded to work my way through their menu. That wasn’t on the cards at all when I left home. But…well, that’s what happened. The prosecco flowed until after dark, everybody left  except me and one of my friends and a bunch of her friends who I’d met for the first time that evening, and when someone said I fancy some food, my tipsy asshole voice was on it like a car bonnet. Indian! Let’s go for Indian food! 

Actually if it’d come into being on the back of a solid week I could probably have got away with it, but for some reason last week it was a tough dieting week so my fizz-fuelled decision to throw caution to the wind and nosh my way through poppadoms with a full pickle tray, onion bhajis and a chicken korma with pilau rice didn’t strictly correspond to the number of smart points I had available in my food budget. Like, not at all.

Saturday night is the very end of my dieting week remember, so it was down to the wire…I’d left home with 12 points available to me, which probably equated to three glasses of prosecco. I definitely had at least six of those after trying the local cider which nearly took the enamel off my teeth, and my ability to keep a count got a little compromised after that so there may have been more if I’m honest.

So, philosophically speaking I don’t regret the evening at all…it was fun, we laughed a lot and it was good to meet some new people. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Sunday morning however, well that was a different story. I wasn’t hungover as such, to be honest by the time I got in on Saturday the food had pretty much soaked up the prosecco. But I felt sluggish. Like I’d eaten a big rich meal just before bed…oh, hang on a minute that’s because I did eat a big rich meal just before bed. Doh.

Safe to say then that an hour of circuit training followed by an hour of boxing didn’t appeal much when I opened my eyes. Or at all. But you know what, I went. I dragged my sorry ass around those circuits through gritted teeth, because it was the start of a brand shiny new week and I’m on it. God help those poor people who had to witness me sweating turmeric out of every pore…I thought I was going to die.

I don’t know why last week was a difficult week, food wise…I think perhaps front-loading my points didn’t help. Last Sunday I had a bit of a blow-out so I had to manage my food budget pretty carefully for the rest of the week, which is guaranteed to make me want to rebel… I know this, it’s not like it’s new news but I guess there are some lessons that need to be learned over and again before they’re baked in, right? The whole week felt like an uphill slog, and I struggled to keep focus so the Indian meal on Saturday was sort of king turd of turd mountain as far as dodgy food choices were concerned.

I’m determined this week will be different. According to the bitch in the bathroom I lost no weight last week, but I didn’t gain any either, so I’ve dodged a bullet and I’m pulling out all the stops. Lets see how much of this arse I can offload in the nineteen days before we set off for Cuba, eh?

Onwards 🙂

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