Tag Archives: craving

This Too Will Pass.

Biggest struggles, In the here & now, , ,

hamster

Oh boy…where do I start with this one. So I’m having a really bad day. Actually no that’s not entirely accurate, my day was fine, it’s more my evening that’s gone to shit. I’ll spare you the detail, but safe to say I’m in the middle of one of the toughest weeks of my life. I’m dealing with the aftermath of someone else’s bad choices, not my fault but a massive strain nonetheless and under normal circumstances I’d have vaporised at least a couple of packets of hobnobs as soon as I got in from work.

It’s a familiar pattern and I know you guys will get it. Right now, as I type this I’m locked horns with the asshole in my mind who, unhelpfully keeps drawing my attention to the five packets of freeze dried sour cherries dipped in dark chocolate which are sitting in the door of the fridge. 15 points per pack, 5 points per 8 cherries. An occasional treat. Up to now, no problem. I can’t always get them, they’re a luxury that I adore and when I saw them I bought in bulk…after all I’m in the sweet spot right? They’ve been in there a month at least. No worries…until there’s cause to worry. I’ve come to bed, because I’m on the ropes after taking a proper battering from the asshole tonight.

I’m so used to eating my feelings. Strangely, I couldn’t eat what I’d cooked for dinner – slow braised pulled beef with broccoli. The dog got lucky, in fact he probably thinks it’s his birthday. He’s full fat and happy, snoring beside me on the bed as I write this. I reckon I’ve got an hour before the effects of  him eating human food work their way through his furry little pipes so I’m hoping I fall asleep quickly tonight. You know the way that cows are threatening the ozone layer by emitting regular bursts of methane..? My dog makes them look like rank amateurs. If I were a betting woman I’d put money on his ozone hole being considerably bigger than theirs. And given his insistence on spooning me on top of the duvet as I sleep, it’s safe to assume it’s going to be a stormy night.

So I had no appetite for dinner, but all I want to do now is to go eat my own bodyweight in freeze dried chocolate dipped cherries. I’m weathering the asshole-driven tornado for now…I came to bed, brushed my teeth twice and started writing. I’m in lockdown, but it’s the double-cheese-and-spring-onion sandwich dance all over again. I know it’ll pass, but right now the desire to throw my PJs back on and go downstairs to eat every last one of them is intense. I’m laid in bed fantasising about the bitter chocolate melting on my tongue and the way in which the sour cherry would make my ears laugh.

But I’m also thinking about  how shitty I’ll feel if I cave in. It might even tip me right out of the sweet spot…who knows if I’d be able to climb back in again. And, I’d have to tell you I’d done it.

I can’t do that. You’re making me accountable, you rotten lot.

Thank you. Because I’m not sure I’d be this strong without you 🙂

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The Three Second Rule

Freeform thoughts, Reflections on past times, , ,

cake1Let’s talk about the three second rule – for the un-initiated, the three second rule applies when you drop a piece of food on the floor…if it stays there for less than three seconds, it is deemed acceptable to pick it up and eat it after first blowing on it or wiping it with your sleeve. It’s a rule most fat girls have in their kit bag,  along with toddlers who don’t care who dropped what and when, if it’s on the floor it’s fair game.

Like any rule worth it’s salt, it can be ignored…I mean obviously if you dropped something sticky in a pile of freshly mown grass you’re probably going to look at it and decide to bow out gracefully. But as a fat girl with a broken food filter, if I can possibly make the rule apply, I will.  The rule can even be extended or amended under the right circumstances. In my house for example, it’s a two second rule, because I have a three second dog and if you snooze, you lose.

Now, at first look you think, hmm…it largely depends on where you drop it. If you drop it at home, where you know it’s clean or at least you know which bits of the floor are clean, it’s a safer bet. At the very least, there are fewer folk likely to look at you with a combination of pity and disgust as you scrat around on the floor chasing after the morsel of whatever it is that you’ve dropped. Outside the home might be a bit more…icky.

What made this spring to mind was a recent incident on my trip. Bearing in mind, bar the odd birthday cake-related dilemma I had been really bloody careful with my food choices (evidenced by a one pound loss whilst I was away, I forgot to mention that yesterday in my haste to have a rant about the gremlins!) and so when we arrived at the airport to come home I’d mooched perfume and stuff in the duty free shop but avoided any goodies which might have been too hard to resist. My skinny string bean friend on the other hand had bought a massive bag of cheese flavoured crispy bugle thingies which under normal circumstances would have been right up my alley.

I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said I covertly watched every one of those little pieces of paradise pass her lips in the same way that my pooch sits in his bed and quietly drools his way through human suppertime whenever we’re eating. She offered the bag around…a couple of people took a handful, one or two people declined, and then it was my turn. Would you like some..?

Hell would I! What I wanted to do was to take the bag out of her hands, straighten it up, tip it up and pour the entire contents down my neck. What I really wanted to do, encouraged by the asshole in my mind was to run back through the departure lounge, go into the shop and empty their shelves of these orbs of cheesiness, shoving them all into my hand luggage so I could munch them for the entire duration of our ten hour flight home.

But no…I was in control. Adjusting my halo, I took one. Said thank you and admired the way it looked…smelled it in anticipation.  It smelled so cheesy my mouth was twitching. And then I dropped it. On the floor. In the departure lounge, where lots of people had walked, trolley wheels had criss-crossed the carpet tiles all day long, and there were bound to be nasties lurking in their hundreds of dirty thousands. The moment had gone…the offered bag had moved on, and my cheesy bugle sat there on the floor just crying to be eaten. I shit you not I could have wept at the injustice of it.

In the three seconds I had to react, I looked, in what felt like slow motion at all the people buzzing around…had anyone noticed? Would anybody notice if I picked it up off the floor and put it in my mouth..? If they did, what would they think? And then I saw her…the skinny-string-bean-glamour-puss flight attendant who looked like she’d never eaten a cheesy bugle in her life. She saw. So it had to stay there. I kicked it under my chair with a casual sweep of my foot, looking for all the world like it was nothing.

And you don’t need me to tell you that I thought about that cheesy bugle all the way home 🙁

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A Dollop More Codswallop

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now, , ,

dollop

So, according to another informative article written by experts, I can seemingly blame all of my weight issues on the layout of my kitchen. Marvellous – I knew if I waited long enough that some ‘ologist’ or other would identify a reason for my chunky disposition based on factors which didn’t include me eating the wrong things in industrial quantities whilst glued to the armchair watching tv. Written by an esteemed professor of something – aren’t they always – this guy seemed to want to absolve me of any responsibility whatsoever for being fat. And as always, I was ready to listen.

The piece started with a question, about whether I walked past the fruit bowl to get to the biscuit tin.  Well…duh. I’m 140lbs too heavy for my 5’5″ frame, so why don’t you take your best guess..? Apparently if you ‘proudly display your bananas’ you’re likely to weigh 13lbs less. And what’s more, if you have cereal and soft drinks sitting out on your counter top, you’re likely to weigh 46lbs more. He didn’t mention more or less than what, which was a bit unhelpful. I mean it’s information we need to know – if the control subject is a moose for example, proudly displaying my bananas to shave 13lbs off seems a bit pointless, right? (But just in case, I’m proudly displaying two bananas and a tangerine…it doesn’t hurt to hedge your bets.)

Doubt about his credentials started to creep in when he went on to assert that if you only had healthy food on display and the goodies were out of sight, you wouldn’t think about eating them. Do you think he’s ever met a fat girl..? I’ve been known to defrost emergency ice cream with a hairdryer because I couldn’t wait 10 minutes till it was soft enough to get the spoon in. And let’s be honest, opening a cupboard door to get at the hob-nobs hardly requires Oceans Eleven type planning does it…no, much as I wanted to latch onto all the reasons he listed as to why my kitchen might be making me fat, it seems he was in fact talking utter shite.

But you know what, I’m kind of ok with that – there have been points in my life where I would have bought into every word, not to mention handing over wads of cash to buy the book he was selling or join the seminar he was running, because blaming anyone but myself for the size of my arse was far less painful than admitting that I’ve done this to myself. I do have thyroid issues, but I had them when I was skinny too, so I’ve stopped hiding behind that excuse. What was I thinking? I want to go back in time and shake myself, for every time I’ve gotten skinny, and voiced my determination to stay skinny this time…in between mouthfuls of cake. I did this to myself, again, and now I’m undoing it. Again.

I’ve come quite a long way in the last couple of months. A few things have happened as I’ve been writing down my thoughts and sharing them on here. I feel more accountable…I know if I tried to pull any bullshit you’d all call me on it. Giving my asshole voice a name and personality all of his own has boosted my ability to unravel lots of twisted thinking and dodge things going on in my head designed to poke holes in my willpower – finding out my asshole voice has a very large family of similar asshole voices who live with each and every one of you guys has helped even more. If I can do it, you can do it because you know what? If you can do it, so can I. There’s power in numbers.

Onwards ladies…we’re really doing this 🙂

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Keeping The Wheels On

Biggest struggles, In the here & now, ,

wheelI mentioned in a post recently about scrubbing my teeth with an overloaded toothbrush when I was wrestling with a craving, and I got a flurry of messages from various people in the posse who were keen to share their own tips in terms of some of the little things that work for them in the daily battle to keep on the right path. So I thought it might be a useful idea to put a couple of those things out there – I’m really quick to poke fun at things that strike me as ridiculous, so it’ll make a nice change to actually promote some of the things that work for some of you guys. Kind of like a public service but without the accompanying photo of a smug string bean who wants everyone to know why she’s so fabulous.

I guess the toothpaste thing was rooted in the fact that when you have the taste of peppermint in your mouth, things you love taste different. Me, I love a nice cup of tea, but if I have a mouthful of morning tea when I’ve just surfaced and brushed my teeth it tastes like crap you know? Quite a few of your suggestions worked on the same principle. Unless you live alone and are incredibly disciplined when you’re doing the supermarket run it’s not always possible to avoid having naughties in the house so any coping strategy is worth a try, right?

One of the notes I got was from a lady (hi Suzanne 🙂 ) who found it really hard not to binge on her daughter’s creamy yoghurts after she’d put kids to bed – until that is, she mixed a teaspoon of vinegar into one of the little pots and forced herself to eat the whole thing. Now when she thinks about that yoghurt, the raspberry and vinegar combo is what she tastes in her mind and given that it was disgusting, no more craving yoghurt and no more binges. Simple, but brilliant.

Pat (hi Pat 🙂 ) said she stomped all over her craving for fish and chips which regularly made the wheels come off her diet by putting them on a plate and putting the plate in the fridge until they’d gone clap cold and were really greasy with congealed fat, and then taking a few mouthfuls – she said they tasted rank, she could feel the cold grease sticking to the roof of her mouth and she’s never fancied fish and chips since.

Changing the memory of the way something tastes in your mind seems to be something that works well. It’s definitely filed away in my ‘useful things to know’ drawer although for me, depending what’s driving my binge it’s often not the taste as much as the need to just eat something and often anything.

I’ll chuck another one into the mix if I may…one of the things that my hookie spooky magic lady encouraged me to do when I was being taunted by the asshole in my mind and fighting the urge to binge, was to write down four things.

The first one, what was the asshole in my mind telling me to do right in that moment? His ‘pitch‘ you know? How was he selling it?

The second one, what about someone who really loved me, cared about me, wanted the best for me. What would they advise me to do in this moment?

Thirdly, someone I really looked up to, who I perceived as having it all figured out, in control of their life…someone I wanted to be like…what would they do? How would they act in that situation? (I picked Davina McCall – might seem a bit random but she’s had addiction issues of her own, way in the past now, and that girl really knows how to dig deep. I adore her – she’s faced down her own asshole and totally blown him out).

She told me to then re-read those three things, before writing down the fourth thing, which is what I decided to do, after weighing up all the advice, considering the options and understanding the consequences of each. Write down my decision, good or bad with the reason why…and own it.

It might work for you, or it might not. For me it has, once or twice but I didn’t do it enough times to really embed it as a strategy. But either way, it was interesting to look back after the event and look objectively at what was going on in my head at the time because generally you forget, when the moment has passed.

Anything’s worth a shot out there on the battlefield, right?

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The Sandwich Dance

Biggest Triumphs, In the here & now, , , ,

sanger

It was all going so well. Don’t panic, it still is, I’m just being a drama queen.  Today…plain food sailing from the minute I opened my eyes. Porridge, pointed, tick. Lunch, prepared at home and taken to work, pointed, tick. I even ate lunch at lunchtime, not mid morning, that’s how much I was on my game today. Over-ripe banana masquerading inside a greenish banana skin, cheeky knacker can’t fool me – bin – so no mid afternoon snack, but that’s ok. I wasn’t hungry. Until someone offered me a free sandwich and suddenly I was starving. And I said yes, to the sandwich. Well strictly speaking I didn’t, I opened my mouth and actually formed the word ‘no’, but somehow yes came out instead. Along with my hand, to take the sandwich. Judas!

Lunch, for a big meeting going on down the corridor had been catered apparently, and there was stuff left over. They must have been fairly important visitors, I mean this wasn’t just your ordinary sandwich, this was an epic sandwich. And somehow it was now sitting on my desk. Staring at me. Being all….seductive.

It was a large round soft brown bread roll, with double cheese, spring onion and mayo inside, all wrapped up in a little cellophane bag. It could at least have had the good grace to be a sandwich I wasn’t struck on, but that sandwich just happened to be my favourite.  I love cheese. And you know what else..? It was as heavy as a brick. I mean that sandwich was made by someone who knows how to make a sandwich…bursting at the seams, chock full of filling, not some mean-fisted measured spoon’s worth. I picked it up and when I felt the weight of it, I felt proud of the guy who’d made that sandwich, in a fat-girl-strikes-gold kind of way, he’d knocked it right out of the park.

The asshole in my head sprang into action immediately. Go on…it’s your favourite. And you’re practically on holiday now, so it’s ok. You’ve done really well but you can take your foot off for a few days, you don’t want to be worrying about points. You’ve probably got enough points left anyway and if you did eat it, you could go without dinner later, it’s six and two threes…go on, it’ll be fine…it’s cheese! Mmmmm….cheeeeeeese….

That sodding sandwich flirted with me for the rest of the afternoon. You know the score…every time I looked at it, it was looking right back at me. I moved it off to the side, next to my bag, but I could still see it out of the corner of my eye where it seemed to be almost dancing to get my attention. I tried and better tried to concentrate on the piece of work I was doing but all I could think about was how that double cheese and spring onion combo would taste as it burst onto  my tongue and how my taste buds would explode at the sharpness of the cheese.

But I didn’t eat it. I brought it home. It was a helluva fight…me and the asshole in my mind both battered bloody and bruised. But now it’s like I’ve stuck the pin back in the grenade…it’s lost it’s power. I brought the sandwich home so my boy can take it to work for his lunch tomorrow.  It’s sitting in the fridge right behind me as I type this, still soft and brown and heavy and very very cheesy…but I’m over it.  The craving passed.

Me: 1 – Asshole: 0. Again.  Let me hear you say YEAH!

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