Tag Archives: humour

The Knackered Cracker

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now, ,

crackers

So you generally read my posts a day or so after I’ve written them, for a couple of reasons, Firstly I’m left with a horror – after it happened once – that I will sit down at my keyboard, flex my fingers and then completely fail to receive any words down the pipe from my head to my fingertips. Fortunately it hasn’t happened beyond that one time, and whilst I acknowledge that some posts are better than others, generally I can hit the 500 word quota I set myself without too much of a problem…I often canter into another of couple of hundred if I’m really in the mood to chat.

The second reason is that I like to reflect on what I’ve written…I am the queen of tweaks, a word here, a bit of punctuation there. Often I can’t quite put my finger on what it is that’s not right so I’ll pop the post back in the oven to bake for a little bit longer and then serve it to you the following day after I’m satisfied that it’s done as well as it’s ever going to be. Even an armchair psychologist could identify my in-your-face ‘be perfect’ driver eh? Yessir, that’s me all over.

So whilst the likelihood is that you’re reading this on Monday, or maybe even Tuesday, in my world right here right now, it’s Sunday morning. And I love Sunday mornings…pottering around the kitchen in PJs shadowed by Charlie the dog – ever hopeful of food – rather than the Monday to Friday up-shower-dress-out rush job. It’s the one morning in my week where I really think about what I fancy for breakfast, and have time to enjoy what I choose.

So, after careful thought I decided today I would have a small tin of tuna (3 points) mixed with some low fat soft cheese (2 points) sprinkled with Aromat and spread over a couple of salty crackers (2 points) with a cup of tea. It’s going well right up to the point where I take the crackers out of the little cellophane packet, and one of them is broken. When I say broken, I don’t just mean it’s in two pieces…two pieces I could manage. If whoever baked the cracker had put it in a mortar and pulverised it with a pestle before tipping it carefully into the packet made for two it would have struggled to be in more pieces than it was. The two-cracker packet was in fact one cracker and some big crumbs.

Food rage! It was the last packet in the box.  My cheese and tuna combo was mixed and waiting in the dish ready to be spread carefully on two crackers. And I’m looking at one cracker and a pile of mush. How much do you hate it when that happens…? I ended up tipping the bits into the tuna and cheese mix and spreading the whole lot onto my one remaining cracker. Now I know that logically I’d eaten the same amount of food…except I hadn’t. I felt cheated. I felt like I’d had one cracker. The asshole’s opening gambit was to eat four, we’d agreed on two and now I’d ended up with one plus crumbs. This is not my happy face…

I have a friend who insists on eating broken food, you know she’ll even root through the cookie jar to find one with a corner knocked off. Her skinny girl theory is that she gets to eat the cookie but every missing corner is a few calories less and it all mounts up. My fat-girl wiring sees me lining up all the cookies so I can pick the biggest, or the one with someone else’s corner stuck to mine, so I can maximise the cookie experience but still say I’ve only had one.

Except I never do have just one, obviously. But that aside, comparing the two mindsets is a big fat clue in itself as to why she’s a skinny string bean and I’m not. If I’m going to think like a skinny girl, maybe I should lay off the corners too, right..?

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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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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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Let Them Eat Cake

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now,

cake

Well I have to say that The Daily Mail this week has produced it’s finest work yet in terms of a string of enlightening articles about diet, weight loss and fitness. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of their website in general…it’s free, and who wouldn’t want a running commentary on which bland-and-yet-famous person is sleeping with which other bland-and-yet-famous person. Still, far be it from me to cast aspersions on this goldmine of gossip, I can hardly diss it when I check in most days and have a flick through – besides, one of my biggest fans keeps posting snippets about us in the comments section of anything vaguely diet-related and as a result we’ve acquired some gorgeous new additions to the posse. No, it’s all good…and it just got better. Seemingly there’s a diet where you eat nothing but cake, and still lose weight. Mama I am home!

Oh. Oh dear. It seems that they missed the point a bit. How unlike them! I nearly broke my neck to follow the link and look at some sample food plans – I felt quite giddy as the webpage loaded…I’m thinking muffins for breakfast, maybe a nice victoria sandwich for elevenses…sachertorte at lunch, madeira cake with afternoon tea and how about a huge coffee and walnut wedge at teatime? Er…no. I realised that perhaps this wasn’t quite the Utopia I’d imagined when my eyes latched onto the words ‘unlimited salad’ halfway down the sample food plan.

On closer inspection, a towering tiered cake which positively gleamed with ‘eat me’ sheen appears to be made of melon. So basically a melon cut into a cake shape. I love melon…but it’s melon. Not cake. So the headline certainly captured my attention, and the photos whetted my appetite, and I’m sure there are some lovely sugar reduced cake recipes inside the book they’re selling for the princely sum of fifty five US dollars…I suspect you may even be actually be able to scoff a piece of reduced-fat-no-sugar cake daily but it’s certainly not the fat girl fantasy food plan I had first imagined. *Sigh* When will I learn?!

Ironic thing is, if they’d marketed it as ‘here’s a few cake recipes which are quite low on the ‘blow your diet’ richter scale and actually incorporate some healthy stuff too, I’d probably have been first in line to buy one – but I can’t help feeling a bit insulted when marketeers assume that to hook fat girls in, you have to fool them into thinking they can get skinny without putting in the work. That says something about the marketeers. Falling over myself to believe it..? That says far more about me.

Even now, when I’m locked in for the long game, I’m trying out of my socks in terms of sticking to my food plan and I’m basking in the glow that standing in the sweet spot gives me, were someone to offer me the option of getting skinny without changing my broken relationship with food, I’d be out of that sweet spot and all over it like a horsefly on a turd.

Note to self: it’s not possible to live on cake and get skinny. Move on 🙂

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Eat This Instead!

Biggest struggles, Freeform thoughts, , , ,

This is an evaluation image and is Copyright Chud Tsankov. Do not publish without acquiring a license. Image number: 0521-1102-1611-4613. http://www.acclaimimages.com/_gallery/_pages/0521-1102-1611-4613.html

I get very excited when someone offers me a piece of bona-fide advice which has been endorsed by people with letters after their name, especially when it claims to eradicate some of those bumps in the road which could make the wheels come off my diet. I was totally ready to be impressed yesterday when I saw an article on cravings, and how you might stop them in their tracks. Granted the article was in the Daily Mail rather than the New England Journal of Medicine, but hey it could’ve been scribbled on the back of a fag packet for all I cared, so long as it worked.

In my haste to get to this holiest of holy grails I was even prepared to pretend I hadn’t zoned in on the typo on line four which referred to the ‘sweet draw’ rather than the sweet drawer – yes I know, I’m a freak, but stuff like that really twangs my strings. Anyway, there was a team of nutritionists – a whole team mind you – who were standing behind this research, so I ignored the typo and pushed on.

And it started well…I was nodding along by line eight.  Yes, I completely bought into the fact that your body finds ways to tell you when you’re deficient in something. I remember drinking about 2 litres of fresh orange juice every day when I was expecting my son, even before I knew I had a baby on board. Totally random fact which might have nothing to do with anything, but I was relating, you know..? There was definitely an air of expectation…like this was it, I was going to learn how to get rid of all those cravings once and for all. A defining moment. I’ll run through the advice shall I..? Distill it for you and give you just the good bits, you know, the highlights…?

“If you crave something sweet, eat broccoli instead.” Yeah because that’s going to cut it. The Asshole will totally go for that.

“If you crave chocolate, have some.” Right then. Way to go to combat the craving. Did the Asshole actually write this one? He uses that line all the time.

“If you’re craving a salty snack have some anchovies.”  Are you fucking kidding me?

“If you’re craving some dirty carbs, eat some turkey instead.” And again…wtf?

I stopped reading there, having written off said team of nutritionists as skinny dimwits who had obviously never experienced a fat girl craving in their lives. I mean come on. A craving will turn your head inside out. I’ve been known to drive the 15 miles to Ikea in my slippers at warp speed, screeching into the car park at 9.55pm a whisker before they close so I can buy a Daim cake, simply because I cannot contemplate getting through the night without one. I’ve eaten dog chocolate when there was nothing else sweet in the house. If you’d offered me a broccoli floret when I was in the grip of that craving I’m here to tell you that you’d have been invited to leave with the suggestion of shoving it sideways where the sun doesn’t shine ringing in your ears.

For advice on how to combat cravings, don’t ask the experts – ask a fat girl. We might not always be able to follow our own advice, but we know better than most what might work, sometimes. I’ll give you a clue…it’s not broccoli or anchovies. For me, right now it’s toothpaste. If I’m desperate to eat something and I’ve spent my food budget for the day, going and brushing my teeth with an overloaded toothbrush takes the edge off. It’s not much, but it’s something.

No holy grail today then…ah well. We’ll all just keep plugging away shall we? 🙂

 

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