Tag Archives: weight loss

I’ve been thinking.

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now, , ,

fat

It’s a Bank Holiday weekend and I’ve got nothing planned. I might do some exercise.

I’ll just put that out there and let the words settle a bit, experiment you know with how they sound as I read them back. Hmm. They say diet and exercise together is the way to do it, but I hesitate for no other reason than really, who wants to see a proper fatty exercising?  Well when I say for no other reason, that’s not strictly true…there’s at least one other reason – I’m so unfit I’m afraid it might actually kill me.  In recent times I’ve been inclined to go and have a lie down if I’ve felt some exercise coming on.

Remember my skinny knees..? I was so fit at that time. I don’t mean fit as in phwoaaar fit, I mean fit as in fit.  I went to the gym pretty much every day and exercised for at least an hour, and I had bags of energy all the time. I’ve got to be honest, I didn’t enjoy it, in fact I hated it – always have – but in my newly slim and determined to stay slim body I was almost evangelical about it. I’d be beavering away on the cross-trainer and all the time I’d be muttering through gritted teeth about the injustice of not being born with a metabolism that laughed in the face of calories and screamed ‘come and have a go if you think you’re ‘ard enough’ at whatever junk I threw down my neck. But in spite of that I was pretty disciplined, because I had both feet planted firmly in the sweet spot – I was in the zone. And not looking out of place in a room full of other sweaty slim people helped.

I didn’t exercise so much when I was losing the weight, it was something I started doing once I’d pretty much reached my goal weight.  There’s something about fatties exercising that just…well, it’s a car crash isn’t it? For everyone that looks at you and thinks ‘go on lass, good for you’ there’ll be ten others who can’t wait to tell someone about the munter in the gym who was giving it large on an exercise bike, which by the way was threatening to buckle under the strain.  ‘Hahahaha you should have seen the state of it’…and for me that’s like going back in time, standing in front of that class being compared to a pig.

Perhaps I’ll stay clear of the gym until I can blend in a bit more easily. I’ll settle for pushing myself to walk a bit further and a bit faster with my pooch, who’ll think all his Christmases have come at once, bless him. Never mind that my knee will give me hell…no pain, no gain eh?

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The diet, 11 days in.

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

addictionIt’s going well. Bit light headed today but I suspect that’s because I’ve been busy, and didn’t have chance for any lunch. Other than the inside scrapings of a quiche and a couple of squares of dark chocolate I didn’t eat much yesterday either. I’m following a carb-free regime, and once the alchemy has happened and your body’s switched its fuel source to burn stored fat you don’t really feel hungry.

I’m not gonna lie, in the past, when (usually thin) people have said they forgot to eat lunch I’ve written them off as freaks, on the basis that forgetting to eat was so alien to me as a concept that they were clearly weird. Dizzy’s not good though, need to just watch that. I woke up this morning feeling thin. A bit bizarre when you consider I probably have around 140lbs of excess baggage but still, this morning before I got out of bed, I felt like Kate Moss.

When I did the all liquid diet, I loved the speed with which the weight fell off…my god once I got into my stride there was no stopping me. I stuck to it rigidly for 8 months and it really truly worked for me. There are side effects of course – how could there not be. Drinking 4 litres of water every day takes its toll, I’d never peed as much in my life. And going for a poo was a revelation, if Gillian McKeith had been presented with a bag of my poo she would have drawn the conclusion that I’d eaten Orville, it was practically luminous. Bizarre when you consider I was only drinking watery beige soup and eating the odd beige MDF diet bar.

But I’ve tried a couple of times since and I just can’t find my stride with it again, at all. Just the smell of a ketogenic soup or shake makes me want to hurl so I think that ship has sailed. Which is a shame, because I’d be far less likely to fall off the wagon if I could cut out food altogether and see results at warp speed.

I am a compulsive over-eater. A food addict if you will. I have a thyroid problem too which adds to the complexity but I estimate that my slow metabolic rate is responsible for maybe 10% of my weight problem. Hoovering up food like the world will be on short rations from tomorrow accounts for the rest.

Addiction is a funny thing. If you’re addicted to cigarettes, or drugs, or alcohol you have the option of going completely cold turkey and whilst of course I’m not suggesting it’s easy, it can be done. Sure, you’ll spend the rest of your life battling the urges, and the temptation, sweating it out and working hard to stay clean but it’s possible to go through life never again taking into your body the substance to which you’re addicted.

However. One cannot live without food, so on a daily basis a food junkie has to ‘use’. And for an addict, that’s a big problem 🙁

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Hitting Rock Bottom

In the here & now, ,

You know what I mean when I say ‘the sweet spot’, right?  It’s the holy grail.  It’s that rock solid, cast iron will which clicks into place and acts as a shield, protecting you from cake. When you find the sweet spot you no longer have to argue with yourself for a good hour at least about whether eating the cake is a good idea or not.

Any food junkie worth their salt will know that even if you manage to gag the asshole voice in your head and win the argument with yourself, that cake continues to flirt with you from a distance.  It stares right into your soul…your mouth waters as though you’ve already taken a bite. It doesn’t matter what else is going on in the room, all you see is the cake. It’s like a magnet with its own force field, and you keep on having the should I/shouldn’t I conversation with yourself in a loop, right up until the point someone else eats it.

But none of that applies, if you’ve found the sweet spot, and you’re in the zone.  If the magic happens, you’re somehow immune. Nonchalant even…cake, what cake? No thanks (wrinkles nose), I don’t really like cake…do you have any lettuce?

It’s elusive.  The more you dig deep, the harder it is to find. I have a theory actually…I think perhaps the sweet spot is a finite resource that you’re only able to truly tap into a handful of times in your life. Kind of like a cat has 9 lives…maybe you’re even born with an allocation and once you’ve used it up you’re destined to be a salad dodger for the rest of your natural life.

I don’t think there’s a formula for finding it, or holding onto it. It’s irrelevant how much you want to find it, or even how much effort you put in to trying to find it. But one thing’s for sure…without it you have zero chance of sticking to your diet, because the asshole in your mind will always win the argument about cake.

My rock bottom moment happened just over a year ago when I had to buy one of these…

Essential holiday accessory
Essential holiday accessory

Passport, check. Tickets, check. Sunglasses, check. Airplane seatbelt extension, check. The ultimate indignity…well, it’s a 9 on the 1-10 scale. 10 would be having to ask the string bean in a cabin crew uniform if you can borrow one of theirs. Having your own mitigates the shame down to a 9 but even so.  If that’s not rock bottom I don’t know what is…yet still I continued to argue with myself, and eat cake.

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Still practising…

In the here & now, ,

diary

Never having been one to keep a diary – well except for during one angst-ridden teenage year which I still have and which is both amusing and painful to read, in equal measure – I don’t know how easily I’ll take to committing a regular download of my thoughts into this place.  I’m the Queen of unfinished projects, so I’d hazard a guess that I will take to it with gusto and throw myself in wholeheartedly.  To start with anyway 🙂

I’ll kid myself that I’m being sufficiently guarded, when in actual fact I’ll probably be far too honest.  I’m likely to forget that I’m not just keeping a diary for my eyes only, which means I’ll completely forget to deploy my filter and share far too much information without realising I’m doing so. It wouldn’t be the first time that my big mouth has landed me in hot water.

But I’m guessing as risks go, it’s a fairly small one in the grand scheme of things…after all who would really be that interested in the musings of a middle aged woman who’s just looking for a bit of non-judgemental company on her journey from fat to fabulous.  If you’re on your own journey it might even be interesting to compare notes.

So that’s it…home page written, first 2 posts posted. I’m sure at some point as I play around with all this stuff I’ll figure out how to do pictures, and add interesting stuff to supplement my ramblings.  I’m excited…seems a far more creative outlet than therapy!

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Here..?

In the here & now,

LPI type here..? Right then.  I’m new to all this. My first blog post…how exciting. There are several hurdles to get over yet – I’m not even sure I’m doing this right (I’m looking at a list of instructions which may as well be written in Swahili) but what I lack in understanding, I make up for in curiosity so I’ll just keep plugging away until it works.

But this first entry has to be sort of brief – just in case I need to write it two dozen more times before the words materialise in the right place. To be fair, for as long as I’m writing this my hands are a) occupied and b) not in the biscuit tin, so every hole’s a goal eh?  Let’s just agree it’s work in progress and I promise to do better next time.

So, I wonder what I press to make it stick?

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