Tag Archives: motivated

Doing My Typical Thing

In the here & now, , ,

trainers

I found myself shopping on line last night for new trainers in anticipation of this new exercise-filled life I’m going to be living. That’s so typical of me, I mean at that point I hadn’t even spoken to the bloke, you know? I had no idea what kind of footwear I might need, because it’s a fitness studio not a gym, and in any event I’m hardly lacking in the trainers department, given that I bought a new pair back in January in honour of the hurt machine moving in.

Turns out that me and the hurt machine get on better when I’m barefoot so I don’t even use them for that. To be fair I have worn them a lot…mainly for dog walking. They’ve lost that just out of the box look, but they’re not exactly battered, in fact I would imagine that Nike designed them to withstand far more rigorous activity than they’ve ever seen on my feet.

I suspect my need to accessorise is driven by the fact that somewhere in my head lurks the conviction that if I look the part, I’ll be able to pull it off, in a sort of fake it till you make it kind of way. I’ve always been the same. I remember once in my later teenage years having the hots for a bloke who I knew was really into playing squash, so I tried to pretend I was too. I even bought a squash racquet so it could lean casually in the hallway when he popped round for a coffee.

My ruse worked, right up to the point where I ran out of excuses not to join him in a game, which unsurprisingly didn’t go well. He more or less stayed in the same spot on the squash court for a full hour whilst my chunky legs made a heroic effort to propel me around, chasing a ball I was never going to catch…by the end of the session I couldn’t even speak, in fact I was on the verge of needing an iron lung. It wasn’t the biggest surprise in the world when I never heard from him again. But despite the epic failure, throughout the nightmare I dripped Slazenger from head to toe.

I’m not quite sure what a fitness studio does if I’m honest..? I just know this bloke comes highly recommended as a trainer. Let’s not forget I’m a child of the eighties, so I’m seriously having to put the brakes on and stop myself running out to buy a headband and legwarmers which in my head is what everyone will be wearing. I’ve got my feet sorted out but I’m feeling slightly nervous that I’ll stick out like a sore thumb because I don’t have the right uniform.

Logic tells me it shouldn’t matter a monkey’s chuff what I’m wearing, as long as it covers the flesh and holds in a bit of the wobble. But then, if my life was remotely governed by logic I wouldn’t have gotten myself into this pickle in the first place, would I..?

So, I’m going for my assessment tonight, and tomorrow it starts. And you know how I’ve struggled with the thought of fitting everything in..? My weekend away with its enforced technology withdrawal demonstrated perfectly that it’s not all going to turn to ratshit if I don’t post every single day.

I’m going to force myself to cut back a bit and post four times a week, instead of daily…that’s going to feel very weird especially at first. But freeing up time to get serious about my fitness supports my longer term goal and I’ve got to be honest with myself… it’s the only way I can juggle all the things I need to do.

I’m thinking I’ll try and post on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. Seems to make sense,  the blog is quieter over the weekend anyway. I hope that works for you guys.

You won’t all desert me, will you?

Promise..?

I can’t do this without ya 🙂

 

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So Go On, Ask Me..!

In the here & now, , ,

FUF

I can’t believe that just over a week ago I was skipping out of the office with a whole week’s worth of lovely things stretching out ahead of me and as of around 5.15am this morning when the alarm went off I came right back down to earth with a bump. I love my job, but I’ve got to be honest, I’ve loved pottering around at home even more. Sigh…I guess all good things have to come to an end.

Still, when I set off for the office this morning I was wearing a new top, and that’s always nice, right? I felt good, and even better still…go on, ask me what size it was..? Only a size twenty…I KNOW!! That’s a size sixteen to my friends over the pond I think, and I’m here to tell you I felt positively slinky as I got into the car, even with my one pound gain this week.

So that’s now four dress sizes lower than when I started. Let me hear you say YEAH! I seem to have been stuck in a size twenty two for ages, and I’ve kept on trying the next size down but you know what I mean when I say it fastened but it didn’t feel quite right..? Today, it did. Today, I was all over that bad boy. So the twenty is hard won and very satisfying, especially when people noticed, and commented…you don’t need me to tell you how wide my grin was every time someone did 🙂

It’s come just at the right time. I’m still a bit raw from being outsmarted by the Asshole voice before the weekend but there’s nothing quite like going down a dress size to give you a boost, right? I suspect my efforts this week will be turbo charged, and you know what, so they should be. I fully intend to make up lost ground, and this is the week that I’m going to pull my big girl pants on and join a gym.

I’m not looking forward to it, in fact I’m already wearing my not-impressed face at the thought of taking that first step. And all the steps that come next, as it goes. Even so, I’m doing it. A friend of mine has made a recommendation and I’m speaking to the guy tomorrow, but if for any reason it doesn’t pan out, I’ve already got a plan B…that’s how serious I am.

Tomorrow marks nine months since I started my diet. That’s a lot of skin in the game, you know? And it hasn’t all been perfect like it was in the early days. I spent a lot of time worrying that if I slipped and spoiled my perfect record it would all turn to shit but you know what, life’s not perfect. The life skill of being able to pick myself up again when things don’t go my way applies every bit as much to my journey to Skinny Town as it does to life in general. That’s what makes me a survivor in life, and that’s what’s going to get me over the Skinny Town county line.

If I pull my sensible head on for a minute, I can see it clear as day. The bumps in the road that I’ve encountered are giving me the opportunity to practise the things I need to be able to do easily if I’m going to make this stick. They’re not nice when they’re happening but without them, I’m missing an important bit of the learning. It’d be a bit like learning to drive without reverse parking being part of the test, right? I might get my license but if I ever needed to get out of a tight spot, I wouldn’t know how if I hadn’t learned that bit.

So I guess my wobbles left and right are serving a purpose, even if they don’t feel like it at the time. It’s good to know that when the fuck-up fairy visits she leaves a nugget of wisdom behind for me to find in the aftermath, and they all help to move me forward 🙂

 

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Weeding Out The Fat

In the here & now, Reflections on past times, ,

struggle

So much for having a relaxing time of it whilst I’m off work this week…I’m skidding sideways into today’s post in a very last minute dot com kind of way because I got busy this morning having a bit of a sort out and I’ve only just nicely come up for air.

I have to hold my hands up and admit that having surveyed pretty much every fashion choice I have made over the last, I dunno maybe four or five years, I need locking up and the key needs to be thrown away. Immediately.

On the face of it, I had a clear out not that long ago, and it’s not that I’ve gone down another size since then or anything exciting like that…I just had a nagging feeling that I didn’t quite do it properly the first time. I sort of scratched the surface, but I knew if I looked there would be more stuff to go through and sure enough, today I not only did a second lap of the wardrobe but I went through all my drawers and the under-the-bed storage too.

I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count all the items I’ve unearthed where I’d bought  something without trying it on, in the hope that whatever I’d brought home would make me look nice, only to ball it up in disgust and shove it in the bottom of my wardrobe or the back of a drawer when it actually made me look like the back end of a bus. The thing is, what I really wanted to look was skinny. That’s what I mean when I said nice…I meant skinny. There’s no wonder nothing much lived up to my expectations.

I never try stuff on in the shop. I think my aversion to changing rooms stems right back to my teenage years where it was all the rage to have communal ones. They’d be filled with skinny girls, looking effortlessly chic in whatever they tried on, and I’d be the fat one in the corner avoiding eye contact with anyone whilst I tried to force my spare tyre into whatever I’d managed to find in size large. Please God let something fit…I just want to carry a bag that says Top Shop…

I vividly remember getting so hot and bothered that no matter how much I’d managed to tame my unruly mop of hair before hitting town with my friends, by the time I emerged from the fitting room it would be wild and curly, sitting on top of a chubby red face which would never really recover for the rest of the afternoon. It was traumatic.

I struggled to find my groove, you know? I found it really hard to carve out my style as a fat girl, and desperate as I was to follow fashion and copy the kind of looks I saw in Jackie and the other teenage mags, it was nigh-on impossible. Other than the asymmetric layering styles that I’m fairly fond of nowadays, I still think that very few people can design great clothes for fat bodies. Scaling up skinny clothes doesn’t work. And most designed-for-fat clothes tend to be created with my mother in mind.

As I see it, shopping as a fat girl is sort of a Hobson’s choice situation…it’s on that basis that I’m prepared to overlook some of the very questionable purchases I’ve made and then buried over the last few years. It wasn’t my fault m’lud. I wonder how many folk will get their garment of choice home from the charity shop when I’ve dropped this lot off in the hope that it will make them look nice, and then ball it up in disgust and shove it in a drawer…

I’ve got to say though, all in all it’s been a good day. I’m feeling really organised, I’ve got a fair number of auctions running on eBay and about ten massive bags for the charity shop. Best of all, I’ve uncovered some old friends, in fact I’m wearing a shirt right now that I’ve not been able to get into for at least three years, and that’s a good feeling 🙂

 

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Safely Delivered From Old Ladyville

In the here & now, , ,

old ladies

Well we’re home after a scorchio weekend…for fat flesh which hasn’t seen the sun for years it’s all been a bit traumatic. It’s a good job I went and bought a couple of pairs of lightweight pants before the weekend, I mean I’ve wilted in the heat even with my backside wrapped in linen so I don’t even want to think how bad it would have been swaddled head to toe in black.

We’ve had a great time, despite the whole weekend being geared towards entertaining a pair of octogenarians.  We went to the Beamish museum yesterday which is like the ultimate theme park for wrinklies. The whole place is set up like it’s one hundred years ago, and of course being in their eighties the pair of them spent the whole day reminiscing as we rode around on trams and poked about in  shops and houses and a school straight out of Georgian times.

I couldn’t help reflecting as we trundled around how being really fat is mostly a 21st century luxury. I mean I know I’ve dropped some weight and all, but crap, no way could I have coped with being even this size back then. As the golden girls were prompted at every turn to talk about how life was, back in the day, I looked at how physical the chores were, and how restrictive the clothing was – no elastane woven into fat-girl clothes back then – and thought how thoroughly bloody awful it must have been if you were carrying an extra arse in the early nineteen hundreds, especially on a hot day like yesterday.

There were quite a lot of pictures of ‘stout’ women dotted about the houses and they all looked as miserable as sin…I’m not surprised.

So the weekend passed with the integrity of my food budget 100% intact – don’t get me wrong I did have one or two naughties but I tracked every single one, and I earned them too which meant I enjoyed them even more. And today, which was the day I was most worried about, passed uneventfully due to a little bit of divine intervention. Well, you could call it that…that, or just plain old lady contrariness.

There are some world-famous tea rooms not too far from where we were staying, and we’d more or less decided to have a late lunch there before heading home. It’s mega expensive so it was going to be a real treat, kind of like the cherry on top of a perfect weekend.  I was a bit worried, I mean their cakes are the stuff of legend and I’d mentally worked my way through every one of the Asshole voice’s possible tactics to get me to fall over and face plant into a plate of fondant fancies.

We arrived in the town, which is gorgeous, with plenty of time to have a look around and work up an appetite for lunch, and all was going to plan until one of our gloriously bonkers wrinklies insisted on going in straight away to get a table before the lunchtime rush. I mean, the day was only just nudging its way out of mid morning. It seemed easier not to argue, but as we all sat and looked at each other over the menu, our breakfasts still weighing heavy on our collective stomachs,  it became apparent that nobody actually wanted to eat anything so we literally just had tea. No lunch, and no cakes.

On the face of it it’s a shame that we all missed out on what would have been a real treat, but the reality is it saved me a monumental battle with myself, so in the grand scheme of things, old-lady foibles saved the day. Mission accomplished, with points in the bank for next weekend.

Happy days 🙂

 

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Happy Fat Girl

In the here & now, ,

image

It’s so lovely to get away from it all…the reality is we are only an hour away from home but the hotel has acres and acres of grounds and it’s a bit off the beaten track so now we’ve unpacked and had a couple of Pinot Grigios in the wood-panelled bar, home feels a million miles away.

This is a treat for our mums, both of whom are less independent than they used to be. As we speak, the wrinklies are having a little siesta and my friend has his nose in a book so I’m just going to grab ten minutes with you guys before going for a nice long walk around the grounds, then maybe a swim. Heaven.

We stopped and had lunch in a gorgeous little market town on the way here. The cafe was rustic and quite small, and as we walked in my heart sank when I realised the only free table was tucked right away in the far corner. As the skinny string bean in an apron grabbed the menus and indicated I should follow her as she glided in and out of the tables (which were packed in as tightly as sardines in a tin) I stood rooted to the spot, desperately trying to think of a reason why we couldn’t possibly eat there. No way was there room for me in that corner. I couldn’t even get to the table.

And yet, I did. And there was room for me. I didn’t knock anyone’s lunch off on the way either, and nobody had to move their chair so the fat girl could get through…who knew. And then, get this…as we had a post-lunch poke around the lovely little town, I saw the most gorgeous sweater in the window of a boutique.

Im not sure why I went in, I mean I’m used to my eyes not even bothering to linger on clothes in non fat-girl shops. Little independent boutiques, forget it, I mean seriously. They had a lot of layered look stuff which tends to be free size anyway, but there’s free size and free size you know? Not usually my size.

But today I was lucky, both the sweater and a pair of co-ordinating pants were up to the challenge! I think the lady in the shop was a bit taken aback when I hugged her, but I was just so bloody happy I couldn’t quite help it.

I’m reminded daily how awesome it feels to be plain fat, rather than the kind of fat that I was before. Everything I’ve done this perfect day wouldn’t have happened just a few months ago, and remembering little fist-bump moments like this on days where I’m struggling is what’s going to get me over the line, you know?

Right, I’m off for my walk…have a great weekend all ?

 

 

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