It’s funny you know, the vastly different perspectives you gain as you look at your weight-loss journey from a number of different viewpoints along the way. Having emerged from the sugar haze otherwise known as Christmas, I can clearly see that’s exactly what I was surrounded by over the holidays…a sugar haze. If I have to give it my best guess, I reckon a good half of the food in my house over the festive season contained a small mountain of all the wrong things.
Now, I’ve got to take accountability for putting that food in my cupboards in the first place, I know that. I was accompanied on my Christmas food shop by the Asshole voice, like some naughty child running amok and threatening tantrums left and right unless the trolley filled up with naughties.
The scale of my muppetry was significant…bear in mind that my boy was only off work on Christmas day, my mum is the size of a sparrow with an appetite to match and I’m on a diet. The supermarkets were only closed for one day and yet despite all the above, by the time I’d unpacked my booty I struggled to close my floor-to-ceiling fridge and my cupboards were bursting. All because I lost control on that one shopping expedition.
It wasn’t even bad planning. I’d intended to write a list and stick to it, somewhere around 3am on the night before Christmas eve. I always do that given that our supermarket opens 24 hours a day and at that time it’s usually just me and the people who work there filling up the shelves ready for the last-minute onslaught. There are no crowds and checkout is painless…it’s a stroke of genius and I’ve done it for at least the last 10 years.
Except this year, I called in at a different supermarket the day before my planned trip, on the way from taking mum to a hospital appointment. I hadn’t even written my list, and I’d intended to pick up one specific item. The aisles were surprisingly free of people, the shelves were full and they were playing Christmas music…before I knew it me and my mum were in full swing, ooo’ing and ahh’ing over anything that looked tasty and gleefully lobbing it in the trolley. And it was all downhill from there.
I don’t want to re-hash the food disasters all over again, we’ve shut the door on Christmas 2016 now and it’s a shiny new year…I’m using the example only to illustrate how looking back now, from my New-Year-new-start perspective I can clearly see where the wheels came off. And on some level, whilst I must have known it spelled D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R, not to mention disrespecting all the effort I’d spent losing pounds over the preceding months, I didn’t care. In the moment my perspective was very different.
I’m going to pick at the concept of self-sabotage in a bit more detail as I make my way through January. I remember way back in the early days of my diet writing a blog post called Part Woman, Part Ostrich which resonated with such a lot of you when you read it. I don’t think it would hurt me to look back on some of the posts from around that time…I was doing a lot of writing – and reflecting – and it helped. I have form, in terms of getting so far down the road then popping the balloon of my success with a fucking big pin and watching it blow away in the wind.
Not this time…this is day 10 folks, and it’s all good 🙂
