Category Archives: Biggest struggles

This Too Will Pass.

Biggest struggles, In the here & now, , ,

hamster

Oh boy…where do I start with this one. So I’m having a really bad day. Actually no that’s not entirely accurate, my day was fine, it’s more my evening that’s gone to shit. I’ll spare you the detail, but safe to say I’m in the middle of one of the toughest weeks of my life. I’m dealing with the aftermath of someone else’s bad choices, not my fault but a massive strain nonetheless and under normal circumstances I’d have vaporised at least a couple of packets of hobnobs as soon as I got in from work.

It’s a familiar pattern and I know you guys will get it. Right now, as I type this I’m locked horns with the asshole in my mind who, unhelpfully keeps drawing my attention to the five packets of freeze dried sour cherries dipped in dark chocolate which are sitting in the door of the fridge. 15 points per pack, 5 points per 8 cherries. An occasional treat. Up to now, no problem. I can’t always get them, they’re a luxury that I adore and when I saw them I bought in bulk…after all I’m in the sweet spot right? They’ve been in there a month at least. No worries…until there’s cause to worry. I’ve come to bed, because I’m on the ropes after taking a proper battering from the asshole tonight.

I’m so used to eating my feelings. Strangely, I couldn’t eat what I’d cooked for dinner – slow braised pulled beef with broccoli. The dog got lucky, in fact he probably thinks it’s his birthday. He’s full fat and happy, snoring beside me on the bed as I write this. I reckon I’ve got an hour before the effects of  him eating human food work their way through his furry little pipes so I’m hoping I fall asleep quickly tonight. You know the way that cows are threatening the ozone layer by emitting regular bursts of methane..? My dog makes them look like rank amateurs. If I were a betting woman I’d put money on his ozone hole being considerably bigger than theirs. And given his insistence on spooning me on top of the duvet as I sleep, it’s safe to assume it’s going to be a stormy night.

So I had no appetite for dinner, but all I want to do now is to go eat my own bodyweight in freeze dried chocolate dipped cherries. I’m weathering the asshole-driven tornado for now…I came to bed, brushed my teeth twice and started writing. I’m in lockdown, but it’s the double-cheese-and-spring-onion sandwich dance all over again. I know it’ll pass, but right now the desire to throw my PJs back on and go downstairs to eat every last one of them is intense. I’m laid in bed fantasising about the bitter chocolate melting on my tongue and the way in which the sour cherry would make my ears laugh.

But I’m also thinking about  how shitty I’ll feel if I cave in. It might even tip me right out of the sweet spot…who knows if I’d be able to climb back in again. And, I’d have to tell you I’d done it.

I can’t do that. You’re making me accountable, you rotten lot.

Thank you. Because I’m not sure I’d be this strong without you 🙂

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Hug Your People Close Today

Biggest struggles, ,

France

As I sit down with my morning coffee to write today’s post I just can’t find it in myself to be my usual bright, breezy and curious self having woken up to the tragic and senseless news coming out of France this morning. It’s hard to make sense of something I just don’t understand, and when I think about how much I wrestle with the relatively uncomplicated issues which make my wheels wobble one way or the other, comprehending what lies beneath something of this magnitude isn’t something I can even hope to wrap my head around.

All I know is I want to hug all my important people close today and tell them just how much they are loved. It makes me more determined than ever to wring every last drop of joy and hope  out of this life, chase down every dream and fulfil everything I hope to achieve. Make a difference where I can, and embrace every opportunity that I’m lucky enough to be given. Life is precious, and I hope that the despicable bastards who took all those lives yesterday, or were in cahoots with, or in support of those who did, see only a strengthening of the human spirit.

It reminds me of a very dark time in my own life. In my early thirties I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and there was a period of time, maybe eight weeks or so between two of the surgeries I needed where nobody could tell me whether or not it was too advanced to treat. I’m here to tell you that you work through an awful lot of shit in your mind when you’re staring your own mortality right between the eyes. Most of my thoughts of course were about my boy. Who would love him as much as I did, watch him grow into a man…always have his back and be in his corner no matter what. God, the tears are flowing freely even as I write this, just remembering how that felt.

Thoughts turned also to the regrets I had about my life at that point. It’s worth noting that all those regrets centred not around any of the really daft stuff I’d done in my life, or mistakes I’d made…every one of them related to missed opportunities that I hadn’t grabbed with both hands because I was too busy, or too scared of how it might turn out, or just too ready to believe that I had all the time in the world. It’s the biggest cliche to say that some three years later, when I could breathe easily again knowing that I’d won the fight, the grass seemed greener, the sky bluer and the air lighter and sweeter than ever. But it’s true.

My thoughts today are with all the people personally affected by what happened yesterday. In honour of them, my determination to live the richest life I can is renewed. It’s rare that I make two posts in one day, but in addition to the scheduled post, I wanted to reach out and send love, support and gratitude to everyone in our BOTSG community…for me, it’s that kind of day x

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Not Freaking Out

Biggest struggles, In the here & now,

long road

I suppose like anyone who’s quite near the start of a really long term weight loss journey, when I really stop to consider the size of the task ahead of me, it’s quite daunting. In fact, scrap that – clearly I’m trying to win today’s prize for the world’s biggest understatement…terrifying is a better word. I mean, I’m doing ok – the positive mindset has taken root, I’m standing in the sweet spot and I feel like I’ve come a long way, not to mention picking up a whole posse’s worth of company as an amazing support network. So my foundations are really solid..I can almost hear the ever-increasing sound of marching boots (and flip-flops, eh Fleury!) as more and more people fall in behind us and beside us on the road to Skinny Town…we’ve totally got this.

In terms of the size of the task though, I’m barely off the starting blocks. Right now, as documented by my encounter with the bastard in the bathroom last weekend, I need to lose 144.5 pounds. I mean, that’s a lot of pounds, right? It’s a whole other person’s worth of pounds. And I know I’m sort of breaking it down into bite sized chunks, our recent trip was my first short term goal and hitting New Year’s day as a size 22 is my next…there will be others after that.

But I’m trying to get two steps ahead of the asshole in my mind, build a solid strategy you know..? Just in case he wheels out the big guns and starts trying to freak me out by getting in my face about just how far away Skinny Town is. Several of you are much further down the road than the rest of us, and some have started from even further away and so your journey is even longer than mine. If any of you want to share your own thoughts on how you’re sidestepping the ‘freak out’ button in the face of this epic journey we could all pick out the bits that we like and line them up ready to pull on as required.

Despite being a fat girl with form – as in I’ve been up and down the sizes multiple times before – I’d struggle to articulate exactly what kept the momentum going for me in times past, because most of the diets I’ve done in my life were started with blind enthusiasm and I just hoped for the best. Twice in my grown up life I’ve sashayed through the gates of Skinny Town to great fanfare, and plenty of other times I’ve seen it on the horizon, camped in the suburbs for a while but somehow I’ve ended up heading back to Mooseville on the fucking bullet train without stepping so much as a toe over the town boundary.

I have no idea what makes the difference between seeing the journey through right to the end, and not. Each time I’ve set off it’s been from a little bit further away and that bothers me, a lot. I totally fall in line with the statistics and that offends me, given that I like to consider myself as unique. My big hairy audacious goal has to work…I don’t want to be a statistic any more. Any nuggets of wisdom would be most welcome, from those in the posse who’ve already found the secret to keeping the momentum going long term.

I’m not leaving anything to chance this time 🙂

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Gremlins In The System

Biggest struggles, In the here & now,

gremlinsAnybody who’s been in my general vicinity over the last day or so may well have learned a few new words. Naughty words. I think the asshole has been on a recruitment drive and he’s drafted in reinforcements to help support the ‘get Dee back on the cake’ campaign. He’s flooded my widgets with technical gremlins who are getting right up my nose, and pushing me to that place where in times gone by I would have had a big fat tony bear tantrum followed by a packet of hobnobs.

I’m the world’s least tolerant person when it comes to stuff that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do – especially when there’s no logic to it. If I drop something for example, and it stops working, I get it. I might not be happy about it, but I can see the cause and effect, and I understand why it broke. When something just plain old stops working for no apparent reason, well that’s like a personal challenge…I can’t leave it alone.

And lets just imagine that it relates to something I don’t really understand to begin with – I’m thinking technology – and I am that person, the one who pushes the button in a dozen different ways thinking it will have a different outcome before the penny drops that it has in fact gone kaput. For no reason.

I’ll press it softly. Then a bit harder. Then I’ll push it whilst holding down another random button. I might get the instructions out at this point just to check I’m pushing the right button to start with, even though I’ve been pressing the same button in the same way since I got it, without a problem. Then as the red mist descends I’ll push it several times in quick succession, by which time I’ve usually started muttering under my breath too in a kind of pincer-movement multi-tasking kind of way.

So now I’ve set the scene, you’ll begin to understand just how easy these gremlins are finding it to twist my melon. For those of you who have subscribed to my blog and have noticed that the daily email notifications have stopped appearing in your in-box..? Blame the gremlins. It makes no sense. Nothing has changed. No settings, no code, nothing at all…except I now have a flatteringly long list of people who like to ponder the latest post subject when it goes live.

Of course it worked fine when there was just half a dozen of my friends who were being supportive and who agreed to be guinea pigs for me. It even lulled me into a false sense of security by working fine for the first two weeks of being ‘live’ as the list was growing. Now? Lets just stop working for no reason at all. AAARGH!!!

However, did I reach for the hobnobs right away..? No. My strategy was to outsmart the asshole and his band of merry men by finding a workaround. So I sat, for an hour and a half, and copied the list of individual email addresses one by one into an email from my BOTSG email programme, figured out how to drop in a link to today’s post, composed a little ditty and pressed send, without one hobnob being consumed. Satisfied smile, take that asshole.

Aw Shit. After a succession of ‘pings’ into my inbox it became apparent that the asshole still held the winning hand. Because I’ve promised not to share anyone’s details and I’m uber-cautious about doing so, I had sent the email to myself, and copied every email address into the BCC field, so nobody could see who else had had the email. And in doing so had managed to convince my own email programme that I was in fact trying to SPAM you all so every single email was sent back to me with its tail between it’s legs. FFS!!!

So I must beg your patience, posse…I am working on it, and I’m sorry that your promised BOTSG nuggets aren’t reaching you on quite the regular basis I promised…I’ve just had a rather encouraging ‘ticket’ from a charming chap on the help desk of my web host who seems to be wielding his spanner and tinkering with stuff as we speak, so I’m still living in hope that I can beat the asshole at his own game and send the gremlins to annoy someone else.

In the meantime, if you’re on Facebook, and you ‘like’ the Break Out The Skinny Girl Facebook page, a link to the daily blog post will show up in your news feed, so that’s one way you won’t miss anything, whilst we’re sticking the wheels back on the widget.

On a positive note, I’m happy to report that no hobnobs were consumed in the midst of this meltdown!!

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Moving The Goalposts

Biggest struggles, Diet update, Freeform thoughts, ,

goalSo back on the 17th of August, which was a Monday, (obviously, because Asshole logic dictates that diets can only start on a Monday, it’s practically the law) my dieting goal was to shed a couple of dress sizes before the trip I’ve just been on. I started my blog the following weekend and I can honestly say that since then I’ve not stepped out of the sweet spot…not even once. I did back the wrong horse I think, by starting on a carb-free regime at first but it’d worked for me before, and fairly quickly. Not this time.

I don’t have a scooby doo what I weighed when I started, which in hindsight probably wasn’t my smartest move. If you’ve been reading along since the early days, you’ll remember that a few weeks in I got weighed for the first time, only to discover that I weighed more than I’d imagined I had at the start. That made me swear, a lot. But once I was over being a diva, I took it on the chin, cracked on with the regime and didn’t let it throw me off course.

I checked in with the bitch in the bathroom again about 3 weeks ago to find that although my lard is on the move, the pounds have been slow to shift with only another 5 gone. So I switched out to the Weight Watchers’ food plan instead, dropped a couple more pounds and although I haven’t been on the scales yet since I got home, I’m not expecting to have gained anything on holiday. I’ve found my groove with the points malarkey, and I’m still in the game.

But I need a new focus. Visualising that helicopter trip has kept me 100% on the right path but you know what, getting skinny is just not happening quickly enough. And yes, I know I have my wrist bitch to bully me now (trust me, even the asshole’s running scared) but I need a new focus too.

And that is..? I’m going to be in a size 22 by the first of the year, and I’m going to get there by meeting or exceeding my activity goal every day – as well as the food plan of course. That’s my new short term goal. I was a size 28 when I started and I’m a good size 24/26 now, kind of on the cusp you know? 22 is where I’m headed and I’ve got nine weeks and two days to get there.

Now I have to ‘fess up and say I feel a bit of a fraud with that bold statement, given that today I’ve missed my activity target and I’ve welched on the deal to walk Charlie for half an hour every day after work. Great start, really, way to go Dee you’ve reached new heights of wimpdom. But guys I’m soooo tired – jet lag has kicked in big time, and despite staying up all day yesterday and not feeling too bad, when I went to bed last night at around 10.30pm, ping…wide awake! I saw 3.30am come and go before I could find an ounce of sleep in me. And my alarm goes off at 5.30am….a 50 miles each way commute and 10 straight hours in the office on less than two hours’ sleep is a stretch too far…my tank is running a little low.

I have the opportunity to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat…after all it ain’t over ’till the fat lady sings….oh wait a minute, listen…do you hear that? Right then…I’ll walk twice as far tomorrow. Promise.

Doh Ray Me Far So Laa Tee Doh…  notes

Me: 0 – Asshole: 1.  Sorry posse…I feel like I’ve fallen at the first fence  🙁

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