Tag Archives: self-esteem

Picking Over The Bones

In the here & now, , , , ,

do not feed

I’m feeling more sure-footed as the week goes on, and this is day three of being back to normal and in control of my food budget. The whole episode last week has had quite a profound effect on me, in the way that I imagine a near-death experience might. And before you tell me to get over myself and stop being a drama queen (good luck with that) I’m serious.

I felt myself hurtling towards disaster with the first mouthful of naughty on day two, when I could no longer pretend I was making proper grown-up decisions from a vantage point of control. Pretty much the whole of day one was accompanied by the Asshole voice, doing what he does best. Surely you deserve a treat, you’re working so hard in fact I’m sure you can pretty much eat as much as you like because if you hadn’t ever joined the Kingdom of Pain you’d never have accrued all these exercise points, so even if you ate every extra point you’ve earned over the last two months you’re still only where you would have been otherwise…it’s practically not cheating at all…

I’d fallen asleep after Thursday’s free-for-all muttering it’s just one day to myself in a vain attempt to try and do a bit of damage limitation…my self-esteem had taken a bit of a battering like it always does when you realise that you’re not as good as you think you are. But obviously tomorrow was going to be better, right? Only it wasn’t, and that’s what shocked me the most.

Friday was like groundhog day, you know? Same tables, same set up. I remember looking around and observing with interest how all the edible goodies seemed almost like wallpaper to most of the people in the room. Unnoticed. Not everyone was salivating , or distracted from the agenda by all those individual foil-wrapped pieces of heaven…just me then. I felt like a freak as I tried to wrestle my head out of the goodies and focus on the job in hand.

I’m still not sure what miracle fished me out of the naughty pond at the weekend. In past times, breaking the diet always meant the end of the diet…just another failed attempt lining up with all the others. One bad day always led to two, then to five, then a week and a month…I caught a hold of this one two and a bit days in. Miracles do happen.

Picking over the bones of it all and trying to analyse why it happened has led me to a couple of things. Firstly, I need to accept that my relationship with food is different to that of normal folk. It’s not normal, to be so distracted by the promise of chocolate that you shut out the life that’s going on around you. But it’s my normal. And I will learn how to deal with it…that, or I’ll die trying.

Secondly, you lot were front and centre of my mind as I clawed my way back from the edge. I could almost hear the collective sigh of relief on Saturday when I hooked up with my friends and started walking away from the slippery slope. I imagined Fleury fist-pumping the air, and Susan cheering, and Mimi doing her happy dance…Tracey and Autumn and Jo and Natalie and Margaret high-fiving each other as the fuck-up fairy left town and life returned to normal. It makes more difference to me than I can tell you, knowing that you’re all in my corner. And I’m accountable to you…you’re my support system.

It’s probably three months until the next conference-style meeting…I’m thinking of hanging a sign around my neck like the one at the top of the page. Either that or accessorising my outfit with a little duct tape over my chops…what do you reckon? 🙂

 

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I’d Rather Be Dodgy…

In the here & now, , , , ,

dodgy

It’s weird you know, I’m fifty years old and I’d like to think I’ve learned a few valuable life lessons along the way. I’m still learning, in fact this journey in particular over the last few months has peeled away a lot of layers and revealed things about me to myself that I don’t think I ever knew. If someone had told me at the very start of this journey that that would happen it might have spooked me a bit, I mean it could have had disaster written all over it, right? We all know about Pandora’s box.

Happily, as I’ve uncovered stuff, talking it through with you lot has helped me to work through it, in fact it’s been like six hundred words of therapy every day. I’m more grateful than I can tell you for the fact that you all listen to whatever comes out of my head, and then empathise, and relate, and chip in with your own perspective.

I must admit, I’m totally unguarded on here, and I’m sure occasionally I’ve been guilty of over-sharing, but I’d hope my words come across to you as authentic. It’s my journey, as seen through my own eyes, and whilst I might crack a joke or two, those of you who’ve sussed me out will understand that’s my default way of dealing with difficult, you know?

So I had an email yesterday morning from one of my most loyal supporters who was absolutely outraged that someone had awarded a ‘poor’ rating to something I wrote a couple of days ago. And bless her, she even felt the need to apologise on their behalf. I was so touched at the way she had my back, but to be honest until she pointed it out, I hadn’t actually noticed.

See, I don’t think too much about the star ratings widget…it’s useful in the way it allows me to see which posts you enjoy the most, and I love that it generates a favourite posts list – new folk who wander into the blog tend to poke around in there, and it gives them a good flavour of what we’re all about. I’ve never really thought about it in the context of people passing judgement on my writing, daft as that might sound.

I’ve got to be honest, I didn’t like the fact that someone thought my words weren’t up to scratch, but I wasn’t especially worried about it. And this little storm in a teacup demonstrated perfectly to me just how far I’ve grown in the last few months. At one time I would’ve been absolutely gutted.

I would have read, and re-read the post, trying to pinpoint the exact bit which sent someone’s opinion of me plummeting downwards. I would’ve chewed myself up about it and then probably headed straight to the Hobnobs. I wasn’t good enough, look it’s there in black and white, I’m officially rubbish. POOR!! I need a hobnob immediately to make me feel better.

This time, I re-read it once and thought you know what, it’s probably not the most entertaining post I’ve written but actually, it helped me. And let’s not forget, I write for me. Writing my thoughts down on that day in the way that I did helped me to find a link. And the links I’ve gathered over the past ten or so months are the reason I’m still here, sashaying along on this road to Skinny Town.

So I’m happy with those words even if they weren’t to someone else’s taste…they served me well. They had a purpose. And if I tried to be funny when I wasn’t feeling funny, that’s when I stop being authentic, right?

I don’t much fancy getting another ‘poor’ though. Ever. So I changed the descriptions, ‘cos I can do that. ‘Poor’ is now a bit dodgy, and ‘awful’ is now a steaming pile of shite. I sincerely hope nobody ever thinks that, but at least if they do it’ll make me chuckle, and I’d rather be dodgy than poor any day of the week..!

Have a great weekend everyone…see you on the other side 🙂

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The Sun Has Got His Hat On…Oh Sh*t

In the here & now, ,

sun

Hasn’t it been a gorgeous day today..? I’ve been too busy at work to enjoy much of it but I did nip out at lunchtime and it was glorious. Everyone I saw looked very summery and rumour has it this warm snap is going to continue over the weekend. So, on the face of it that’s awesome, and as it happens I’m away this weekend so even better. Except. Despite losing a chunk of weight I’m still not really built for a summer wardrobe.

Actually there’s no not really about it…I’m not, period. Summer wardrobes involve light fabrics and floaty little numbers which do absolutely nothing to try and fool the world at large that underneath these clothes I am in fact a size twelve.

Drawing on years of fat experience, I’ve found that black pants and a longish loose-fitting top with some sort of handkerchief hemline is the most effective ensemble when it come to disguising the worst of my lumps and bumps. My wardrobe is full of such items, and to be fair, whilst they don’t leave anyone under the illusion that there’s skinny action going on underneath, I don’t feel exposed, you know? I’m reasonably comfortable, like I’m making the best of a bad job.

So it’s not really the tops I’m worried about.  It must be twenty years since I did sleeveless, and probably six or seven since any flesh above the elbow saw the light of day but lot of mine have three quarter sleeves and that’s practically arm naked in my book so I’ve sort of got summer covered for my top half.

The bottom half is a completely different story. I feel like a complete tool wearing black trousers on a hot sunny day, but it’s literally all I possess in my fat wardrobe. I mean I have a variety of them…black pinstripe for work (three pairs which have been worn in rotation for at least the last two years Monday to Friday) and plain black the rest of the time.  And generally it works fine, except when it’s seventy odd degrees outside and everyone else has got their legs out for the summer…I feel completely out of place, like a proper numpty.

Skirts are not an option until I’m at least another two or three dress sizes down from here. I have horrible memories of severe chafing incidents and I’m not risking that…once it’s there even trousers don’t stop the burn, right? So it has to be pants. The warm weather has kind of caught me unawares, I thought I could give it another month before I needed to worry about a summer wardrobe. Bugger.

I seem to remember buying some elasticated navy palazzo pants with white spots on for the cruise last summer but they made me look like Coco the clown so I never wore them. Maybe I’ll try and dig them out from wherever I flung them in disgust and see whether almost seventy pounds off makes me look less like I’m missing a red nose and a hat with a flower.

On a slightly more positive note, whilst I was walking around Marks and Sparks this lunchtime I did have to keep pulling up said black pinstripe pants…I’m not filling them quite as well as I once did, and they are very stretchy so they’ve kind of flexed with my shape but pretty soon they’ll be consigned to the old life pile. Happy days.

This time next year I will be embracing every single sunny day, and telling you all about how awesome it felt to blend in…I can’t wait 🙂

 

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Getting Ready To Sparkle

In the here & now, , ,

awkward

Well that’s it! No more work until next Tuesday. I’ve booked a couple of days off and tomorrow will be pamper central as I hand myself over to my friends at the beauty salon in the hope that they can perform miracles and get this fat old body ready to sparkle. As much as anything it’s going to be lovely actually to just have a few days off work…I haven’t had any time off since January and I’m so ready to chill out.

I was thinking about Friday and the Blog Awards, and you know it’s the first time in ages that I’ve really looked forward to a night out. In my younger days I was a very sociable creature, but in more recent times I’ve formed an alliance with the Asshole voice in finding excuses not to accept invitations to pretty much anywhere, especially if it was going to involve hanging out with a bunch of folk I don’t know.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not shy at all, and I can work a room with the best of them, but anyone who’s ever been ashamed of the way they look will completely understand where I’m coming from. How I look, and more especially what people think about the way I look never quite loosens its hold over me, so no matter how deeply involved in conversation I am with someone it’s…well, it’s just there.

I’ve found myself desperate to maintain eye contact for all the wrong reasons…it’s less to do with me being really engaged, and more to do with the fact that if their eyes leave mine for a second they might notice the rolls of arm fat poking out of the bottom of my sleeve, or the fact that I have sausages wrapped around my gin and tonic rather than fingers.

Even when I’m out with friends, I never completely disconnect from that feeling. I’ve got several friends who don’t come in a standard size and it would never even occur to me to judge them because their muffin top is making a bid for freedom, in fact I probably wouldn’t even notice. And yet, because my body doesn’t conform to what I regard as attractive I convince myself that other people will mind somehow, and I’m ill at ease no matter how good the company.

Letting go, getting hammered and dancing like a loon would just as likely get me laughed at as a skinny girl, but somehow ha ha look at that girl dancing sounds nowhere near as bad as ha ha look at that fat girl dancing…it’s like being fat triples the comedy value, so as a fat girl I’ve always been wary of opening up the window of opportunity for someone to take the piss.

This Friday, it’s different. They’re expecting fat. In fact, if you think about it I’m only here and writing this blog because I’m fat. If I’d been a skinny string bean I would have been far too busy doing skinny string bean things to even pick up a pen in the first place. Given that I’m so excited, and this blogging malarkey has opened up such an awesome new world to me and brought me so many new friends, it seems I should almost be grateful for the size of my arse.

Hmmm…I’m not sure about that. However, I do know there are very few people in the world I’d swap places with right about now, and it’s a long time since I’ve felt like that 🙂

By the way, thanks for all your messages about not being able to write a review on the Kindle store about my blog – it seems it’s only possible to review it (or subscribe) using a desktop/laptop computer or an actual Kindle device…mobiles and tablets are not supported by Kindle blog. As if?!!

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In Search Of Magic Beans

Reflections on past times, , , ,

beans

I felt a bit embarrassed today when I got a visual wake-up-call about how my pre-occupation with food might look to other people. Yesterday I forgot to bring the containers home that I’d taken my lunch to work in, so today my feet were fighting for space under the desk with a double helping of airtight boxes. There were six altogether, plus two large plastic cups which I use to chug my blended smoothie of the day on my morning commute.

On top of my desk, nestled amongst actual work stuff you would have found a punnet of plums, a bottle of salad cream, some emergency crackers and a tin of soup. In the bin behind me were a couple of banana skins and an apple core. It must have looked like I’d been under siege for a month, for God’s sake.

I did do a quick recce on everyone else’s desk and I was slightly reassured to find that there was the odd snack or two kicking around other corners of the office but put it this way, if the entire HR team had been kidnapped by aliens, when Mulder and Scully rocked up to investigate they would have known immediately which desk belonged to the fat girl.

It puts me in mind of a conversation I had with my doctor twenty odd years ago. A friend of mine had been to her doctor because she wanted to lose weight, and he’d handed her a prescription for pills to supress her appetite. I wanted to get me a piece of that action so I made an appointment to see someone at my own surgery with the intention of getting my hands on some of these magic beans. It seemed like the perfect answer.

It transpired that my doctor was a little less accommodating. Actually, he was a twat. He sent me off with a flea in my ear and a long lecture about how fat people were unnaturally preoccupied with food and basically I needed to get over myself. He even illustrated said lecture with a story about his own fat friend, who had joined him recently on a skiing holiday and had taken sandwiches ‘for the journey’, which he used as an example of how fat people were different to normal people, and couldn’t bear not to have food within touching distance. Judging by the way he said it he didn’t mean different in a good way.

I’d give anything to have that same conversation with him now, with my additional twenty five years’ worth of life experience and a slightly lower tolerance for being mugged off. I doubt I’d be able to resist commenting on how lucky his fat friend was to have such a supportive chum, you know? I mean, with the 20/20 vision of hindsight I was trying to go about it the wrong way, but I was reaching out, you know? He could have helped me, if he hadn’t been so busy judging me.

It’s the first and last time I ever talked to anyone about how much I was bothered by being fat. Well, until you lot of course. And I’d like to think that I’d get a more supportive response if I went to chat to a healthcare professional about it these days. I wouldn’t, of course…I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than have that conversation. But still, I hope they’d at least give me some leaflets and a bit of advice.

All joking aside, my jaws have barely stopped moving today – I’ve only grazed on low point healthy stuff but I know I need to give some attention to this phobia of hunger pangs. God forbid one might sneak up on me, right?

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Before I go, I have some hugely exciting news, and I need your help please! Break Out The Skinny Girl is now available on Kindle Blogs, I mean come on!! We have arrived! It’s become available today in the Kindle Store through Amazon…if you read and enjoy Break Out The Skinny Girl, would you do me the honour of leaving a review on your thoughts about the blog? You can find it HERE  It can’t be done on mobile devices only computers or Kindles (no idea why) but thank you, your support as usual means the world to me 🙂

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