Well, it’s been an interesting few days. The battle between me and the Asshole in my head has raged on and on to the point where it’s becoming old news. I’m bloodied and battered but you know what, I’m hanging in there. Yesterday was a good day. I ate clean, no naughties at all and I did two classes last night. Before you worry that you’re about to be dazzled by the light bouncing off my halo, don’t be…Saturday was shit and Sunday wasn’t much better.
So it’s been a rollercoaster, you know? It’s weird, I was off-reservation when I got back from Cuba and I’ve been sailing close to the wind ever since, as well you know but it’s fair to say that things sort of came to a head towards the back end of last week when I had to face the reality of what I was doing. I’d somehow got caught up in this whirlpool of self-sabotage for reasons known only to the voice in my head. I told you he was an asshole.
Anyway, a combination of real-life encouragement from some of my buddies and some proper wisdom and insight from you lot is helping me navigate my head to a calmer place. It was something Margaret said which provided the first reality check, in her thoughts on Friday’s post. She articulated beautifully how that first slip is a really big deal, but when the world doesn’t end the second slip feels less important, and on that sliding scale I’d reached the point where saying fuck it was pretty much part of my daily routine.
It’s a bit like boiling a frog, right? I’m not suggesting you should, but if you were to stick a frog in a pan of boiling water he’d immediately jump out screaming. Stick him in a pan of cool water and slowly turn up the heat, chances are he won’t notice how hot the water is until his legs are cooked. I didn’t notice how hot the water had got, is the long and short of it.
God of Pain provided the second reality check. I was talking to him on Sunday about how hard it’s become all of a sudden. In his usual telling it like it is way, he pointed out that I’ve got just two choices. Hate the journey for a while but stick with it anyway and reach my goals, or abandon the journey and hate the life I will inevitably go back to, and probably myself too just for good measure.
Talk about Hobson’s fucking choice, I mean both of them involve me being in turmoil and I’m miserable either way, right? But not really. Maybe right here and now, in this moment I’m pissed off because I can’t eat crap every day and lose weight. But one year from now when I’m rocking my size 12 skinny jeans I doubt very much that I’ll be pissed off at all.
So I’m sticking with it folks, even if I’m doing it through gritted teeth. I am going to do better because I am not going back to that old life. So here’s the thing. It gets harder to remember how I used to feel when I was at my heaviest. When nothing I wore felt nice, when I was so uncomfortable with a huge downer on myself because I knew I looked like a moose. I kind of felt like I needed a reminder.
Yesterday, I had to ferry my mum around to a few medical appointments, and I dressed in a pair of leggings – every lump and bump was magnified to the tune of at least a hundred, in fact who even knew it was possible for legs to be that lumpy? I’d bought them on-line, and let’s just say they didn’t look like they did on the picture when I put them on, you know? Enough said. They’d never graduated from the ‘fashion mistake but maybe when I’m thinner‘ drawer, well not until yesterday.
I teamed them with a top which is a little bit too snug, good grief it was a total car crash…there was nowhere to tuck my extra one hundred pounds into so it wasn’t on display. Never in a month of Sundays would I E.V.E.R go out looking like that…except yesterday I did. The hospital was so warm and I was sweltering but I didn’t dare take my coat off because I knew what a mess I looked underneath…it was a sharp reminder that I used to feel like that all the time. I haven’t, in a while, and I don’t want to again.
It helped. Yesterday was day one of my season two. And I’m sure it won’t all of a sudden get easier again, but I’ve chosen which miserable I’m going after…I picked the temporary one 🙂
