Tag Archives: skinny

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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Skinny on Purpose

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now, , ,

bulb

I can’t remember which blog post it was, but a few days ago I alluded to some of the homework I’d done when I was seeing my hookie spooky magic lady, and it prompted me to look back through some of the sessions we did and the reflections she always encouraged me to write down afterwards.  I was fairly self-aware even before I started talking to her, but I genuinely had some real light-bulb moments during the times that we sat and chatted back and forth about…well, stuff.

One of the biggest revelations to me was that skinny people weren’t generally skinny by accident. I mean yes of course you always get the odd smug string bean here and there who takes great delight in telling you that they can eat what they like without putting on a pound…I don’t know about you but I always want to enquire whether they’d like to chew on my fist, that being the case. But generally skinny people are skinny because they choose to be skinny.

Which basically means that if they eat out in a restaurant, they might look at the menu (just like I do), and immediately start salivating over the calorie-tastic menu options (just like I do) but after mentally calculating how many calories are in the dish they most like the look of (I don’t do that) they decide against it in favour of a skinny girl option (I don’t do that either 🙁 ). Up to that point, I hadn’t given much thought to how the mind of a skinny person operated, because even at the points in my life where I qualified as a string bean, I wasn’t there long enough to really settle into the mindset of being a skinny person.

I mean yes, for swathes of my life I’ve been in the sweet spot and almost evangelical about the food choices I made because I was on my way down the sizes, but in terms of it just being something I did naturally, unbidden when I wasn’t actually on a diet…no. It would never have even occurred to me to participate in such madness.

It was a revelation, genuinely a light switching on in my head. It made me accept that I had to be accountable for my choices, be they good or bad you know? Every choice has consequences and being a grown up means understanding and accepting the consequences before you make the choice. I could no longer bemoan the fact that I put weight on easily when all these people *sweeping motion of fat arm* could eat what they liked without getting fat. The light bulb switching on made me realise that the reason they didn’t get fat was because making the choice to be skinny was a constant in their life where it never had been in mine. Who knew!

I’d love to say that following that realisation I immediately started making all the right choices and from there it’s been plain sailing…of course it hasn’t.  I’ve talked a lot over the last few weeks about finding the sweet spot, and if you’re not there, you’re not there. Knowledge doesn’t even come close to equalling power if your head’s not in the right place. Ask any fat girl about the theory of losing weight and they can almost certainly reel off more info than your average skinny string bean expert. Putting it into practise is something entirely different though mm?

But I’m there now. I’m making those choices now. And per my BHAG, when I arrive into skinny town, instead of throwing caution to the wind, I’m going to carry on making grown-up-accept-the-consequences skinny choices, because now I get it. I know have to.

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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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Big Hairy Audacious Goal

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now, ,

bhag1

Don’t you think it’s funny how you find inspiration in the most unlikely places? I recently had to attend a workshop on business strategy, and whilst it was all quite interesting, one bit in particular really captured my imagination – I was introduced to the concept of the ‘Big Hairy Audacious Goal’. Apparently the phrase has been kicking around in the business world for ages, and it’s all about creating a clear and compelling goal which serves as a focal point, no matter how unrealistic it might actually be – kind of a cheeky knacker statement of intent.

How I have existed in business up to now without crossing the path of a BHAG I don’t know, but now the cat’s out of the bag I’m all over it…I am busy working on my very own big hairy audacious skinny goal. To be fair, many of my goals over the years have been pretty bloody audacious, long before I discovered that someone had coined this phrase so whilst I can’t claim the idea as my own, I’m certainly going to say I’m a natural when it comes to shooting for the moon.

For example, I might say that my BHAG is to walk into Victoria Beckham’s boutique this time next year, only for the sales lady to shake her head sadly and apologise that all their dresses were too big for me. *Falls on the floor laughing* – well it’s definitely audacious, given that right now I’d more likely be wrestled to the floor by a gaggle of skinny string beans before I’d even crossed the threshold…God forbid that I actually make it inside and dare to be fat amongst the skinniness of it all.

How about this one then…I could say my BHAG is to stick to my food plan and point every single thing I eat and drink for the rest of my life. Hells teeth that’s a scary thought. That’s a more scary thought than the Victoria Beckham one to be honest, because it’s a BHAG that is completely within my gift.  I could actually do that one. Well, when I say I could do that one, I mean it’s do-able. I’ll have to park this one for a minute, I’m developing a nervous twitch. Lets go back to Victoria Beckham, it’s easier to be flippant when I’m talking about that one.

Can you imagine…I mean don’t get me wrong – I love Victoria Beckham, love her family, love her work ethic and I even like some of her clothes. But can you imagine the horror on her face if she had to design a dress to flatter a non-string beany kind of girl? I mean I fully intend to be skinny as well you know, but even when I am I’ll still have to tuck my belly into my big girl pants and disguise my bingo wings, my wrinkly knees and my turkey neck. Just the thought of all that fabric would drive her to go and have a lie down with a glass of extra strength coconut water.

Much as I hate to say it, and much as it scares me, I think my BHAG has to be number two. The one that scares me shitless. Would it stop this cycle of yo-yo madness that I’ve been on for at least the last thirty years..? Yes. It would. Am I likely to lose the will to live, get bored weighing and measuring and counting for the rest of my days..? Yes, I am. Till I scream. Do I have to face facts and realise that if I don’t plan for this, commit to it and JFDI I’m going to live out the rest of my days on that ever changing axis..? Yes.

Number two it is then.  Posse, meet my BHAG…

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Waiting to be Skinny

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now, ,

thin

Have you ever felt like your life is on hold, whilst you dream about all the things you’re going to do once you’re skinny? I have. There are places I really want to see, and experiences that I really want to have but somehow the prospect of doing them as a fat girl is nowhere near as appealing as the way I imagine they’d pan out if I experienced them as a skinny girl. And I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that way.

I can even articulate the reason why – being fat preoccupies me. With alarming regularity, the fact that I’m fat muscles in on everything I do. When I’m walking the dog and my ankles ache from the heroic effort they have to make with every step to transport all this timber, I nod and agree with the asshole in my head when he comments that if I were skinny they wouldn’t hurt. On holiday recently when I was reclining on my sun lounger reading my book and I fancied a drink, I decided to just stay thirsty because the thought of hauling myself off the sun lounger was just too much of an effort – it was low to the ground with arms at the mid point, and swinging my legs over the side and hopping up in an easy fluid movement would have been impossible. It would have been a ten point manoeuvre, and wholly inelegant, which people might have noticed and even laughed at…look at the moose, she could do with a hoist, has anyone got a crane hahaha…of course the asshole is front and centre of driving all these thoughts but still, they exist.

So I don’t want to experience the things that I’ve dreamed about, or the things that I aspire to as a fat girl – I want to experience them as a skinny girl and live in the moment, with nothing on my mind other than how much I’m wringing every ounce of enjoyment out of each and every one of those moments.  When I swim with the dolphins I don’t want to spend the run up to it worrying about what on God’s green earth I’m going to look like in a wetsuit. If I snorkel off the great barrier reef I don’t want to be preoccupied about what the person snorkelling behind me is thinking as my arse completely obliterates his view…imagine the postcards he might send, Shamu is alive and well and currently on holiday just off the coast of Australia. As I board the Orient Express in Paris or the Rocky Mountaineer train in Canada and realise a lifelong dream, I don’t want my experience ruined by a seat that’s too small, or feeling that I’m spilling over and spoiling someone else’s experience. And if I’m lucky enough to ever ride an elephant in Sri Lanka I’d like folk to be able to tell us apart 🙂

As a really fat person it’s so tempting to put your life on hold and just dream instead about the life you’ll live when you’re skinny. I know, I’ve done it…I’m not doing it any more and I’ll tell you what else, I’m not waiting till I’m skinny either. As soon as I have just one X in front of my L, I’ll be ticking things off my bucket list with gusto. So there!

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