Tag Archives: UK Blog Awards

Here We Go…

In the here & now, , ,

dog

Well as my Grandma used to say, there’s no getting any sense out of  me now. It’s that time…me and my boy are almost ready. As we speak he’s pacing the floor and getting used to the feel of his tux – his first black tie event – whilst throwing furtive admiring glances at the mirror. I don’t blame him, he looks incredibly handsome (even though I’m not allowed to tell him that 🙂 )

I’m all ready underneath but still in pyjamas. It’s strange, my nerves have gone and I’m ready to throw myself headlong into the evening. I’ve been practising my losing face, you know so I can look as happy for the winners as those movie stars who don’t bag the Oscar. I’m in that place where one minute I think OMG IMAGINE if we WON!! and then next minute Assholio chips in with don’t be ridiculous there are people here who actually know what they’re doing, you’ve got no chance, you’re just not good enough…at least I won’t have a TV camera in my face to beam a thumbnail of my disappointment around the world if one of the proper bloggers knocks it out of the park.

You know what, it’s academic at this point, right? It’s the first time something good has come of me being fat, and whilst I won’t be content until I’m living in an average-sized body inside the Skinny Town county line, being fat and being on this journey is what’s presented me with this amazing opportunity, so in your face Asshole, I’m in a good place. Where this love of writing came from I have no idea, but when I needed it the most, there it was and I’m grateful. Who knew!

It’s funny, there have been a couple of moments in the last couple of days where I’ve bumped into the fact that I’m very much still work in progress. Driving home from the office on Wednesday evening and feeling very happy at the prospect of five days off work and all the exciting things to come, I was acutely aware of the Asshole voice encouraging me to unplug the diet for the next few days…you’re on holiday! Just take your foot off ’til after the weekend…that’s always what I did before, you know?

Same thing yesterday when James and I were talking about the train. We travelled in the posh bit since it’s a special weekend, and they give you free food, so he was thinking out loud about what might be on the menu. Let me tell you how much I would have exploited that in the past, I would have chewed all the way way to London. My boy did, in the way that you can when you stand six feet three inches in your socks and have hollow legs.

The Asshole was jumping up and down like Rumplestiltskin at the fact that I wasn’t over-indulging on free stuff. I wanted to of course and I felt the familiar blend of resentment that I couldn’t and satisfaction that I wasn’t. But I didn’t, and that tells me that whatever I’m doing is working…I’m slowly replacing those old habits.

So here we are then, it’s time…I must go get dressed. I promise pictures tomorrow but if you follow me on Twitter you may just get pictures and hot-off-the-press updates as we go…

Giddy!!!

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A Flurry Of Activity

In the here & now,

feet

I’ve just had the best afternoon ever, and I’m feeling very pampered. You’ll be glad to know that in preparation for tomorrow night there are now definite green shoots of sparkliness…my fingers and toes are a lovely shade of steel grey with a touch of silver shimmer, which will match my posh necklace. Get me, being all co-ordinated. It’s hard to believe that just a few months ago I…ah feck it let’s not go there, not today…I’m too giddy.

I don’t think the gorgeous skinny string bean who painted my toes so beautifully this afternoon quite knew what to make of me. We had some general chit-chat you know about this and that, and then she asked me what I was getting all poshed up for.

When I told her I was going to a posh doo because I write a blog about dieting she was a bit baffled, and I suppose I might have been too, in her shoes. I mean if you’re painting the toenails of a very fat lady who appears to think that she’s some kind of authority on dieting you’re bound to think what the fuck could you possibly know about that, right? To be fair she’d have a point, I don’t look like I know my way around a salad…not yet anyway.

And you know, I could probably have folded this young lady up and tucked her into my knicker drawer, so clearly if I’d tried to explain about the Asshole voice and the bitch in the bathroom I would have just dug myself deeper into weirdo territory…obviously she’s clearly never had to fight tooth and nail to stay away from the hobnobs. But she was perfectly lovely, and she perked my feet up no end.

To be honest, I’m still debating about the shoe situation for tomorrow – I did buy a pair of strappy flatties with sparkles on, but they’re about as comfortable as I imagine cheese wire wrapped around my toes might be…three toes on each foot cop for it in particular and after a few test walks they were all on the verge of turning blue. On the basis that I don’t want to leave the event with fewer toes than I had when I arrived, I might need to rethink my choice of footwear.

My boy collected his tux this morning and I’m under strict instructions not to do that dewy-eyed proud mum thing where I spend all night telling him how handsome he looks…it’ll be hard but I promised. So he’s sorted, and in all but the shoe department, so am I.

Between you and me I’m starting to feel a bit nervous. I mean it’s hugely exciting but a bit daunting at the same time you know? I was contacted by a PR company this afternoon who’ve picked out some quotes from the blog and it reads as though I’ve actually given them an interview, which felt very strange. Like, who’d want to interview me?! I’ve lived in the shadows for the last few years and I can feel a definite breeze around my ears now I’ve stuck my head above ground…it’s going to take a bit of getting used to.

Am I ready for tomorrow..? You bet your sweet ass I am 🙂

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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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Radiating Sunshine

Diet update, In the here & now, , , ,

mad cow

So I woke up this morning ready to face the music – isn’t it funny how in the night things always look very bleak? I’ve never been one to worry about stuff, and sleepless nights are an unknown concept to me but I must ‘fess up and tell you that last night whilst I was watching TV, and starving after vaporising every single available smart point by mid afternoon, I made a coffee with all milk to try and fill a hole…it’s the first time ever I’ve gone over my weekly points. I know, right?

It was the lesser of two evils – there were several items of food that had collectively serenaded me from the fridge all night and I came within a cock hair of caving in…I didn’t, but I needed something. I could have had a large glass of water but quite frankly that was never going to cut it. But although I savoured every drop, the milky coffee weighed heavy on my mind, and from the point at which I woke up for a quick tinkle at normal work get-up time then tried to go back to sleep for my customary Sunday morning doze-fest I had the most bizarre dreams.

I have this mental picture of the Asshole sitting on his buffet in the corner of my mind, furiously loading movie reel after movie reel of things designed to convince me that I’d blown it. The words start of a slippery slope were playing on a loop in my head, accompanied by moving pictures of me whizzing down a giant slide, being chased by one of the Cravendale cows who wanted the milk back. In the next scene I was laid underneath the cow drinking from its udders whilst someone blew my arse up with a bicycle pump and in the last scene I was the cow…it all got very weird at that point.

I walked the green mile to the bitch in the bathroom with great trepidation when I finally shook off the weirdness. I’d managed to convince myself that the half pint of semi-skimmed milk that I’d had over and above my weekly allowance was going to mean a gain this week. I was suitably downcast and ready to take it on the chin, until she told me that I’d lost a pound.

What?? I did my usual double-check on several tiles to make sure she wasn’t taking the piss, but sure enough…another pound gone. And immediately, I started radiating sunshine. The day looked great. I’d dodged a bullet…okay I’m being overly dramatic, it was half a pint of semi-skimmed milk, not ten litres of Haagen Dazs and a ton of cheeseballs. But, for the first time in eight months and eight days I’d stepped over the boundary…thank god the bitch didn’t clock it.

So, it’s a brand new shiny Weight Watchers week and it’s an important one. It’s the UK Blog Awards on Friday in London…I’m too giddy for words. My boy got fitted for his Tux yesterday. I’ve bought new sparkly flat shoes and I’ve totally gotten over myself about the palazzo pants.  I’ve booked Thursday off work for a little turd-polishing, and on Friday we’re doing the whole first-class-train-swanky-hotel thing…it’s going to be an epic weekend.

The week’s got off to a cracking start…I did a long walk with the furry one this morning, and I’ve finally got around to sorting out that mountain of fat clothes. No messing, I’m going to make this week count. No wobbles allowed, right? Onwards! 🙂

 

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Finding The Answer

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

answer-the-question

You know how sometimes someone asks you a question which stops you in your tracks and makes you think about something which has never even occurred to you before? Well, that happened to me this week. Let me ask you the same question.

Did you start your diet because of how you looked, or how you felt?

I’ve been mulling this over for the last couple of days and even now I’m not 100% sure about the answer. I just knew the time was right, but I’m less clear about what actually drove me to it. How I looked versus how I felt…I mean they were both awful you know? I looked like shit and I felt like shit so take your pick was kind of my first response. But the question sort of got inside my head and stuck which is generally my head’s way of flagging that I need to unpick something in a bit more detail.

If I’m working on something I like to understand why, as in what is the problem I’m trying to fix?  The idea of being able to articulate exactly what prompted me to begin this journey appeals to me…my own personal why.

I’d started to really struggle with mobility issues. On the last holiday I took with my friend immediately before I started my diet, I could barely walk from one end of the ship to the other without needing a rest…everything hurt. My back and my knee in particular felt like they were buckling under the strain of lugging twenty three stones around on my five feet five inch frame. I felt like I was lumbering, rather than walking. It was awful…it felt awful. My ankles were swollen, and my thighs chafed till they bled.

In the restaurant when I tried to squash my double arse in the elegant dining chairs, it felt like everybody was staring at me. I doubt that they were, but I felt crippled by my Asshole thoughts about what other people were thinking. Even walking through the restaurant to get to our table was torture, and I prayed the whole time that my arse didn’t add insult to injury by sweeping someone’s bread basket off their table on my way past. The Asshole voice in my head was on overdrive, and every thought landed, you know? Ha ha! Look at the fat girl in the dining room…feeding time at the zoo!

So, genuine reflections on the time immediately before I started my diet seem to be more aligned to how I felt rather than how I looked. I think I’d stopped caring about how I looked at that point if I’m being completely honest. Every night before we went down for dinner, my friend would be busy fixing her hair and putting her face on, generally making an effort you know? Me, I left my hair to dry wild and curly, and didn’t go anywhere near make-up… I didn’t even look in the mirror when I got dressed. There seemed little point and besides I didn’t want to be faced with the reality of what a hot mess I’d turned into.

It’s good to look back, in a weird sort of way…actively dredging up these memories renews my determination to get as far away from that place as possible. That was then…this is now. Now, I feel better physically…much better. Hamstring hobbling aside, I’m fitter and stronger, and I can walk without significant pain most of the time.

The biggest difference is that I’ve stopped being quite so conscious about how much space I take up in the world. I feel like I can sit on a chair without having to offer up a quick prayer that nobody skimped on the screws, you know? I no longer feel the need to try and tiptoe through my life. Oh sure, the Asshole voice still churns out a full range of self-esteem torpedoes on a regular basis, but more and more often they land a bit wide of the mark and they don’t inflict quite as much damage so that tells me I’m fitter and stronger in my head too.

So I think my answer to the question, having chatted it through with you lot is that it started out being about how I felt. Now what’s spurring me on is a mixture of both. I started putting my face on again a couple of months ago, and I’m thinking more and more about how I look, where back then I didn’t care. I’ve become strangely obsessed with what I’m going to wear to the forthcoming awards ceremony, but that’s what normal people would do, right? It’s a big deal and I want to look nice.

Just out of interest, how would you answer the question..?

 

 

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