Tag Archives: determined

Full Of Good Intentions

In the here & now, , ,

So the Shitbird scale pulled a mean trick on me yesterday morning by declaring pretty much a 3lb gain. I don’t think I deserved it, and to be honest I’m not even sure I believe it but what I do know is that I’m not obsessing about it. At one point it would have ruined my whole day, but thankfully my fuck you yesterday was directed towards the scale, and not the diet.

As it happens, I didn’t have a textbook week. I set off with the intention of being above reproach after the creative accounting shenanigans of the week before. We’ve all been there, right? Sunday dawned and my intentions were whiter than white but it felt like a proper uphill slog all week. It’s not like I didn’t know trouble was coming…I even stood up and told you how niftily I was going to sidestep The Afters but I guess it’s not the first time that my intentions have been a bit more impressive than my execution.

That said, although I was at the top end of my calorie budget most days – and some days I pinched calories from Peter to pay Paul – at worst I should have maybe stayed the same. I didn’t deserve to get shunted three steps in the wrong direction so I’m writing it off as water retention or hormones or something. Stupid shitbird scale. It hasn’t dinted my determination but back-sliding does make everything feel just a tiny harder, don’t you think?

Life is slowly turning the right way up again after all the upset of the last couple of weeks. My Godmother’s funeral is taking place next Monday, which has felt like an awfully long time to wait. I’m on at least draft number ten of the eulogy that I’ll read on the day but you know what, it’s been very cathartic delving into all the memories I have of her and deciding which ones I’d like to share. It’s helped, but I’ll still be glad when it’s over.

On Friday I got the results from the MRI scan I had to have on my dodgy knee. I don’t even think I mentioned it to you, there’s been so much else going on and seriously, it feels like all I’ve done over the last few weeks is moan about one thing or another. To cut a long story short, after three months of physio I knew my knee still wasn’t right, and the MRI scan confirmed it. I have a complex tear in the cartilage which is going to need surgery, and I think it’ll be scheduled for the end of next week.

What a royal fucking pain in the ass that is. It’s the very last thing I need at the moment, but the problem is I’m not allowed to fly for eight weeks after the surgery and I have a holiday coming up in October, so the surgeon has a bee in his bonnet about it having to be done in the next couple of weeks.

I’m a bit freaked out about it if I’m honest. On Saturday I had the best time, out cycling with friends and I had no pain in my knee at all so I started questioning whether it was even necessary. But then there are so many days where it gives me hell, and there are at least a couple of classes down at the Kingdom of Pain that I’m not allowed to do because my knee isn’t strong enough, so I don’t think I have a choice really. C’est la vie. Better done and out of the way I guess, although I am shitting myself. I admit it, I’m a wuss.

I’m determined to hit this week hard. She says, having woken up this morning with two of yesterday’s nut bars pre-loaded onto today’s food budget…here we go again, with the good intentions.

Whoops 🙂

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The Killer Question

In the here & now, , ,

Do you ever shake your head in wonder at the food-related situations you find yourself in?  I do. I found myself in a face-off with a freezer full of ice-cream lollies on Saturday. My feet ground to a halt in the middle of the supermarket in what felt like an act of betrayal, and I probably stood and stared at that freezer for a good ten minutes.

Earlier in the week my friend had included a picture of a raspberry magnum amongst the holiday pictures she’d shared on social media, and I’d made a jokey comment underneath the photo about how I’d once eaten six of them in one sitting. That was true, in fact it happened during my last four day binge and if I close my eyes I can still taste them.

Now, you’ve got to remember that my head was up my arse for a significant chunk of last week, and that perfectly innocuous picture seemed to fire the starting pistol for my tastebuds. Every day since, I’ve been lusting after a raspberry magnum like a dog on heat, and fantasising about beating my personal best by going for seven, or maybe even eight. It was just one in a long line of assaults that the Asshole voice made towards my food sobriety at the back end of last week…it was relentless.

The thing is, when I’m in the grip of an urge to binge, it’s very easy to convince myself that as soon as I’ve eaten whatever it is that I’m fantasising about I’ll be okay, you know? You’re going to cave at some point, so quit with the pathetic attempts at resistance. Just get it out of the way. Fill your boots now and then you can move on…

It never works out like that though, does it? I don’t know about you, but once I’ve got the taste for something, I’m screwed. That’s why I very rarely have a one-incident binge.

How can I even describe what the urge to binge feels like, to a regular person? It’s like a massive build-up of pressure, which in that moment I am utterly convinced can only be relieved by shutting myself away and pushing all the things I shouldn’t be eating into my face. I’ve heard people who self-harm talk about how slicing into their skin with a blade somehow relieves the pressure which is building up inside, and I guess binge-eating is different but the same. It’s certainly followed by all the same emotions…guilt, shame, the whole fucking nine yards. I might not carry self-harm scars on my body per se, but I do have a double arse inside my pants for remarkably similar reasons.

In the ten minutes I stood rooted to the floor in front of that freezer, with the pressure of the last few days threatening to blow like a volcano out of my ears, I literally clung on to food sobriety by my fingertips. I even had hold of the freezer door at one point.

Is this me making a conscious decision then, to choose fat over skinny? That’s the killer question, because if I reach for that box, whether I admit it or not, I’m choosing to wake up heavier tomorrow than I am today. 

That argument swung it, in the end because…well, it’s true isn’t it? Nobody ever ate seven raspberry magnums and woke up skinny the next day. So I didn’t go there. Somehow, I let go of the freezer door. My feet started moving again, and I walked away. Isn’t it evil, the way your mind can manipulate a memory…in the grip of it, I didn’t recall the bilious bloated day-after effect because I was mentally blinkered and could only focus in glorious technicolour on how they tasted.

I did buy a box of peanut bars from the healthy snacks section, and ate every last one of them. But they weren’t raspberry magnums…they weren’t even close to being that naughty. And yesterday I rebooted, and had a textbook day without incident.

One more pound gone this week despite everything, and I can live with that… especially after an obscene amount of healthy peanut bars which, in those numbers probably weren’t that healthy at all.

I’m back at work today, and I’d be really grateful if we could all just keep our fingers crossed that this week passes without incident 🙂

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Back From The Land Of Sunshine And Guessing

In the here & now, , ,

Is it just me, or does the last week seem to have disappeared at warp speed? Time flies I guess, but anyway here I am, back from holiday and making the most of my last few days off work. I always miss you lot like mad whenever I take a break, but it does me a world of good to really switch off from time to time, and have nothing at all on the ‘to do’ pile. My batteries are completely recharged and I feel better for it, you know?

We had a fabulous holiday in possibly one of the most magical locations I’ve ever had the good fortune to visit. Did you see the photos? If not, and you’d like to look you can find them here. (Don’t let my Sunday name fool you, it’s me I promise!) I love Italy anyway, but oh my days the Umbrian region is really spectacular.

We managed to get a bit of walking in, way across the valley so we could look back at the castle we were staying in from a neighbouring hill. I rediscovered my love of swimming, which is very easy to do when you pretty much have the pool to yourself and can cut through the water with the sun on your back and the sound of bird song and cicadas as a backing track. I managed at least a hundred lengths of the pool every day and earned a few more food tokens for dinner.

I was so sad to leave, although I know I’ll go back and to be fair it’s always great to get home and see my boys. And guess what…despite all the food temptations, I never stepped a toe out of line all week. I know! I pulled it off and chose skinny, all day, every day. I’m not sure I can find the words to tell you how great that makes me feel now I’m out the other side.

Having no means to weigh or measure anything took me right out of my comfort zone, I’ve got to be honest. Don’t get me wrong, My Fitness Pal tries to make it easy by giving you the option of choosing a cup’s worth of something instead of a weight in grams, but that sets my OCD off all on it’s own.  I mean, how big is a cup? An espresso cup? A Starbucks size cup? I’ve got cups at home which are the size of a bucket and my fat eyes would try and default to those ones every time. Whaddya mean that’s too big?? It’s a CUP Your Honour!

I’ve had to pretty much guess my way through every menu I’ve looked at in the last week and that has twisted my melon big time. The irony isn’t lost on me, given that I’ve pretty much guessed and estimated my way through the last two years. It was easier somehow, when I was counting points instead of calories…there was so much free stuff that you could usually ignore half your plate for the purposes of food logging.

It’s different now. I feel like MFP is making me take accountable to a whole new level, you know? I finished splitting out a punnet of grapes yesterday afternoon into separate little carefully weighed zippy bags. There were six grapes left over at the end, and I didn’t even shove them in my mouth as a freebie…that’s how on it I am.

I’m relieved that after a few days of having to feel my way through the food minefield with one hand tied behind my back, I’ve reignited my relationship with the kitchen weighing scales without a fight and I’m right back on track with my food prep and planning…I was half expecting the Asshole voice to jump on the freestyle bandwagon and propose we continue with this guessing malarkey but he remains reassuringly quiet.

So, the acid test will be Sunday when I go toe to toe with the Shitbird scale. God of Pain’s scales confirmed last night that I’d stayed exactly the same as I was the day before I left, which is great and I suppose it shows that my guessing was pretty bob-on, but I’m not settling for that. I’m pitching for a loss…better watch this space 🙂

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A Pinch Of Common Sense

In the here & now, ,

Monday was a really fun day. My work colleagues and I escaped from the office and spent the day hanging out together doing non work-related team building stuff, and as luck would have it, our day out fell on one of the hottest days of the year. I couldn’t help thinking, as we sat in under the shade of a big tree next to York Minster, just how lucky I was.

We landed in one of the local restaurants for lunch, and as I looked at the menu I could feel myself starting to get a bit anxious. I mean don’t get me wrong, it was a fabulous menu but there was no calorie details to be found anywhere. I even googled the name of the restaurant but despite scrolling through website after website promising nutritional details of every menu in the western hemisphere, I turned up a complete blank.

You know what I’m like…stuff has to be perfect. I’m either all in or all out and there’s no middle ground, so the thought of not being able to play by the rules of My Fitness Pal by logging the exact number of calories in my lunch freaked me out more than a little bit. I had to get over myself and navigate my food choices with a pinch of common sense, you know?

Garlic mushrooms for an appetiser, and don’t eat the bread or the sauce. Chicken for main, hold the fancy potatoes cooked in cheese and cream, and just give me green beans instead. I still had to estimate calories because I couldn’t weigh anything, but it was an educated guess based on the best food choices I could make out of what was on offer. And that’s just life, right? It can’t always be perfect.

I’m going to have to get used to it in any event, because I’m going on holiday tomorrow and I’ll be nowhere near a set of kitchen scales for the next week. My friend and I are going to Umbria in Italy, otherwise known as the land of pizza, pasta and ice-cream…I mean really, shoot me now.

As I explained to a very dubious looking God of Pain before my boxing session this morning, I am going to stick to some broad principles. There’s a gym, and my exercise gear will be coming with me so I can fit an hour in every day. We’re staying on a half board basis, and I don’t know whether it’s a buffet (in which case that’s fine I can make grown-up choices) or whether we get served whatever they’ve cooked (which might be a bit more of a challenge) but either way I am planning to remain refined-sugar free and go easy on the carbs.

I’m assuming there will be Wi-Fi…if not, since the hotel is an old restored castle perched on top of a hill there should be a decent phone signal, so I can continue to log my exercise and my food in MFP based on my best guess. It won’t be perfect, but I’ll work with what I’ve got.

I can’t wait. I’m going with my oldest friend, whose company is effortless. I’ve lined up a hundred books on my kindle, and I can’t wait for the views from our terrace, or the shady spot we’ll tuck ourselves into as we people watch and drink unbelievably good Italian coffee.

I’ll be back at the end of next week but as usual when I’m away, keep your eye on the Facebook page…I may get chance to share a few pictures. Have a great week everyone and see you on the other side…

Wahoooooooooooo….holidaaaaaayyyyyy!!!  🙂 🙂 🙂

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These Are OUR People!

In the here & now, , ,

You know when you find yourself doing something that you thought people like you just didn’t do? Well that was me at the weekend. I’m really living this life, and I have to keep pinching myself. My friend Nic and I set off on Saturday with our bikes slung in the back of her car, looking for an adventure. Yes, you heard that right.

There’s a vast network of forest cycling trails about ninety minutes north of where we live, and since our recent gentle bike rides have helped to acclimatise our respective backsides to the prolonged use of a saddle, it seemed like a great idea to take it to the next level and try something different.

Apparently, loads of folk had woken up on Saturday with the same idea because the car park was bursting at the seams with athletic-looking people on bikes. One barbie-esque girl who climbed out of a van opposite our car had it all going on in a tiny crop top and painted on leggings, although to be fair she seemed more interested in checking herself out in the wing mirror and posing for selfies than she did in her bike. Mind you, as we sat in the car watching her, we were equally pre-occupied with eating our packed lunch before we’d even unloaded the bikes, so we were hardly in a position to judge.

Despite the fact that our jaws were moving at the time, as we sat there, two reformed couch potatoes surveying all these fit families and middle-aged men in lycra, Nic made a sweeping gesture with her hand and said Dee these are our people…cue a fit of the giggles but what she was trying to say in between snorts of laughter was that we were like them, you know? We’d driven for miles to partake of stuff requiring effort, of our own free will, and we shared a moment of satisfaction about our own lycra, even though it didn’t look quite like it did on Toothpickarella across the way.

The forest had a colour coded system to mark out the various forest trails…green for easy, blue for intermediate and red for difficult. We studied the map carefully and tried to fit in by pretending we knew what we were doing. It seemed sensible to  start on a green route, and then maybe have a crack at blue, so we followed the signs out of the car park and set off on what we thought was the green route.

I think we must have cycled a bit of the green route when we first set off but after we’d been climbing for around a mile on a road that seemed to get steeper by the minute we started to wonder whether we might have gone just a tiny bit wrong. I mean, I know we weren’t experienced map readers and all, but the gentle green route which followed the river at the base of the forest hasn’t seemed to suggest you had to climb a killer hill first. We weren’t actually in the forest for one thing, which might have given us a big fat clue. However, on the off chance that this was the easy route, neither of us were going to admit defeat so we carried on going. And going.

So how were we to know that the little green tree on every signpost was fuck-all to do with the green route? It wasn’t our fault that the Forestry Commission’s logo happens to be a little green tree, right? An easy mistake to make m’lud. Anyway, those nice people from mountain rescue happened to pass us after seven miles and pointed us in the right direction and then happily, finally, we made it into the forest. And it was awesome.

Awesome, and hard. It was twisty and uneven and bumpy. Really narrow paths with sharp bends where the effort of controlling a bike on top of loose sandy stones makes your shoulders scream and arms numb and your wrists tingle. Going down was hard but climbing was even harder. Trying to get enough traction to keep going whilst dropping down multiple gears and holding the bike steady was really bloody tough. I’m sure it must be easier if you’re skinny. Roll on that day.

At one point going up and round a bend, I slowed almost to a stop, realised that I couldn’t get the right gear in time then toppled sideways in slow motion onto a log, which was fine until my handlebars jabbed me in the chest and the pedal attacked my leg. Mind you, I came off a lot better than Nic, who fell off spectacularly, twice on a couple of hairpin bends…we were well into the blue route by this point having bypassed green altogether whilst we were scaling the perimeter road. Duh…

Despite all that, we were having such a great time we forgot we were exercising. It was hairy at times and really hard work but it was beyond fun and we barely stopped laughing all afternoon. We did about fifteen miles in the end, at least half of that off-road. That’s not bad going for a fat lass, eh?

To top off a brilliant weekend, yesterday, the Shitbird scale finally woke up and accepted that I mean business, awarding me 3lbs off this week. I worked bloody hard for that 3lbs, and I couldn’t be happier. This new regime is working for me and I’m more motivated than I’ve ever been.

Come on, let’s see what we can squeeze out of this week 🙂

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