So, according to another informative article written by experts, I can seemingly blame all of my weight issues on the layout of my kitchen. Marvellous – I knew if I waited long enough that some ‘ologist’ or other would identify a reason for my chunky disposition based on factors which didn’t include me eating the wrong things in industrial quantities whilst glued to the armchair watching tv. Written by an esteemed professor of something – aren’t they always – this guy seemed to want to absolve me of any responsibility whatsoever for being fat. And as always, I was ready to listen.
The piece started with a question, about whether I walked past the fruit bowl to get to the biscuit tin. Well…duh. I’m 140lbs too heavy for my 5’5″ frame, so why don’t you take your best guess..? Apparently if you ‘proudly display your bananas’ you’re likely to weigh 13lbs less. And what’s more, if you have cereal and soft drinks sitting out on your counter top, you’re likely to weigh 46lbs more. He didn’t mention more or less than what, which was a bit unhelpful. I mean it’s information we need to know – if the control subject is a moose for example, proudly displaying my bananas to shave 13lbs off seems a bit pointless, right? (But just in case, I’m proudly displaying two bananas and a tangerine…it doesn’t hurt to hedge your bets.)
Doubt about his credentials started to creep in when he went on to assert that if you only had healthy food on display and the goodies were out of sight, you wouldn’t think about eating them. Do you think he’s ever met a fat girl..? I’ve been known to defrost emergency ice cream with a hairdryer because I couldn’t wait 10 minutes till it was soft enough to get the spoon in. And let’s be honest, opening a cupboard door to get at the hob-nobs hardly requires Oceans Eleven type planning does it…no, much as I wanted to latch onto all the reasons he listed as to why my kitchen might be making me fat, it seems he was in fact talking utter shite.
But you know what, I’m kind of ok with that – there have been points in my life where I would have bought into every word, not to mention handing over wads of cash to buy the book he was selling or join the seminar he was running, because blaming anyone but myself for the size of my arse was far less painful than admitting that I’ve done this to myself. I do have thyroid issues, but I had them when I was skinny too, so I’ve stopped hiding behind that excuse. What was I thinking? I want to go back in time and shake myself, for every time I’ve gotten skinny, and voiced my determination to stay skinny this time…in between mouthfuls of cake. I did this to myself, again, and now I’m undoing it. Again.
I’ve come quite a long way in the last couple of months. A few things have happened as I’ve been writing down my thoughts and sharing them on here. I feel more accountable…I know if I tried to pull any bullshit you’d all call me on it. Giving my asshole voice a name and personality all of his own has boosted my ability to unravel lots of twisted thinking and dodge things going on in my head designed to poke holes in my willpower – finding out my asshole voice has a very large family of similar asshole voices who live with each and every one of you guys has helped even more. If I can do it, you can do it because you know what? If you can do it, so can I. There’s power in numbers.
Onwards ladies…we’re really doing this 🙂
