Category Archives: Biggest struggles

Hurting You, Pleasing Me

Biggest struggles, Freeform thoughts, ,

 

image

So we’ve had the most amazing trip. I’ve made some awesome memories and one of the nights in particular will stay with me always…early cocktails on the terrace of the Skyfall Lounge watching the sun set and seeing Las Vegas come alive, followed by dinner on the terrace of Olives restaurant at The Bellagio, whilst their fountains danced right in front of us…it was magical.

This was day two. Bearing in mind how flexible the weight watchers food plan is, up to that point I had felt completely in charge of me…keeping track of points when you’re constantly being offered things where you can only estimate point values – like the airline meals for example – is always going to be a challenge. But you’ve got to eat, on an 11 hour flight, right?  And when you cross time zones and end up with an extra 8 hours in your day you kind of have to adjust stuff, mess around with your budget a bit.

I took a balanced approach…accepting a little pot of ice-cream with the movie on the flight felt okay because I’d refused a bread roll and chosen not to eat desserts and cake with the meal…not perfect, but given the asshole’s campaign to make me forget the diet for the duration of the trip I felt I was firmly in control of my choices. So I was doing ok.

But going back to our memorable night..getting a table on the terrace at the Skyfall Lounge is a privilege reserved for a very chosen few. My friends had made the reservation weeks in advance, emailing details about the fact we were celebrating a milestone birthday to help get it in the bag, and so there we were…pre-dinner cocktails with the best view in town. Amazing. And then the manager rocked up with a surprise birthday cake bomb which he proceeded to souse in limoncello, cover with two huge dollops of whipped cream and present to me with a flourish. What a lovely gesture…but man oh man, I’d quietly made skinny food choices all day, trying to juggle stuff so I could fit all the planned treats in, including cocktails and a special dinner.

So do I say ‘thanks but no thanks’, and throw the gesture back in his face, or do I eat it as he’s standing there expectantly, having just presented the fat lady who is clearly no stranger to cake with the best boozy creamy cake ever. Let’s look at the evidence…I’m a people pleaser. I do in fact love cake. And limoncello. And cream! And they’re all on a plate together in front of me, an unexpected gesture made by someone who wanted to do a nice thing, just for me. And the asshole in my mind is on it like a car bonnet…you ungrateful cow, of course you have to eat it…it would be totally rude not to, he’s trying to make your birthday treat extra special, you’ll look ridiculous if you make a fuss and say you don’t want it…

Dilemma. And bugger me, fast forward a few hours…we’d had a magical dinner, again, seats on the Olives restaurant terrace are really difficult to engineer since everybody wants them yet they aren’t bookable in advance. We got really lucky, and the evening was made more enjoyable still by our waiter Paul, who was utterly charming, and just wanted us to have an awesome time. And would you bloody believe it, after my carefully chosen meal he arrived at the table with profiteroles with a Happy Birthday piped in chocolate and birthday candles, just for me, thinking he was going to make my evening extra special.

Again with the dilemma…and again with the asshole who by this time of course was hopping up and down like Rumplestiltskin screaming don’t be rude just eat it and be thankful for the lovely gesture, don’t even think about saying no! Once again I’m faced with Hobson’s choice…put someone’s feelings before my own and risk the wheels coming off my food plan…or put myself first and hurt their feelings. Twice in one otherwise perfect night!

So…over to you guys. What do you reckon happened..? And what would you have done in my place..? Bear in mind, I’m not perfect and I’m navigating the road to skinny town the best way I can…I’ll share the outcome tomorrow but I’m curious as to how you all would have reacted ?

 

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Keeping The Wheels On

Biggest struggles, In the here & now, ,

wheelI mentioned in a post recently about scrubbing my teeth with an overloaded toothbrush when I was wrestling with a craving, and I got a flurry of messages from various people in the posse who were keen to share their own tips in terms of some of the little things that work for them in the daily battle to keep on the right path. So I thought it might be a useful idea to put a couple of those things out there – I’m really quick to poke fun at things that strike me as ridiculous, so it’ll make a nice change to actually promote some of the things that work for some of you guys. Kind of like a public service but without the accompanying photo of a smug string bean who wants everyone to know why she’s so fabulous.

I guess the toothpaste thing was rooted in the fact that when you have the taste of peppermint in your mouth, things you love taste different. Me, I love a nice cup of tea, but if I have a mouthful of morning tea when I’ve just surfaced and brushed my teeth it tastes like crap you know? Quite a few of your suggestions worked on the same principle. Unless you live alone and are incredibly disciplined when you’re doing the supermarket run it’s not always possible to avoid having naughties in the house so any coping strategy is worth a try, right?

One of the notes I got was from a lady (hi Suzanne 🙂 ) who found it really hard not to binge on her daughter’s creamy yoghurts after she’d put kids to bed – until that is, she mixed a teaspoon of vinegar into one of the little pots and forced herself to eat the whole thing. Now when she thinks about that yoghurt, the raspberry and vinegar combo is what she tastes in her mind and given that it was disgusting, no more craving yoghurt and no more binges. Simple, but brilliant.

Pat (hi Pat 🙂 ) said she stomped all over her craving for fish and chips which regularly made the wheels come off her diet by putting them on a plate and putting the plate in the fridge until they’d gone clap cold and were really greasy with congealed fat, and then taking a few mouthfuls – she said they tasted rank, she could feel the cold grease sticking to the roof of her mouth and she’s never fancied fish and chips since.

Changing the memory of the way something tastes in your mind seems to be something that works well. It’s definitely filed away in my ‘useful things to know’ drawer although for me, depending what’s driving my binge it’s often not the taste as much as the need to just eat something and often anything.

I’ll chuck another one into the mix if I may…one of the things that my hookie spooky magic lady encouraged me to do when I was being taunted by the asshole in my mind and fighting the urge to binge, was to write down four things.

The first one, what was the asshole in my mind telling me to do right in that moment? His ‘pitch‘ you know? How was he selling it?

The second one, what about someone who really loved me, cared about me, wanted the best for me. What would they advise me to do in this moment?

Thirdly, someone I really looked up to, who I perceived as having it all figured out, in control of their life…someone I wanted to be like…what would they do? How would they act in that situation? (I picked Davina McCall – might seem a bit random but she’s had addiction issues of her own, way in the past now, and that girl really knows how to dig deep. I adore her – she’s faced down her own asshole and totally blown him out).

She told me to then re-read those three things, before writing down the fourth thing, which is what I decided to do, after weighing up all the advice, considering the options and understanding the consequences of each. Write down my decision, good or bad with the reason why…and own it.

It might work for you, or it might not. For me it has, once or twice but I didn’t do it enough times to really embed it as a strategy. But either way, it was interesting to look back after the event and look objectively at what was going on in my head at the time because generally you forget, when the moment has passed.

Anything’s worth a shot out there on the battlefield, right?

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Eat This Instead!

Biggest struggles, Freeform thoughts, , , ,

This is an evaluation image and is Copyright Chud Tsankov. Do not publish without acquiring a license. Image number: 0521-1102-1611-4613. http://www.acclaimimages.com/_gallery/_pages/0521-1102-1611-4613.html

I get very excited when someone offers me a piece of bona-fide advice which has been endorsed by people with letters after their name, especially when it claims to eradicate some of those bumps in the road which could make the wheels come off my diet. I was totally ready to be impressed yesterday when I saw an article on cravings, and how you might stop them in their tracks. Granted the article was in the Daily Mail rather than the New England Journal of Medicine, but hey it could’ve been scribbled on the back of a fag packet for all I cared, so long as it worked.

In my haste to get to this holiest of holy grails I was even prepared to pretend I hadn’t zoned in on the typo on line four which referred to the ‘sweet draw’ rather than the sweet drawer – yes I know, I’m a freak, but stuff like that really twangs my strings. Anyway, there was a team of nutritionists – a whole team mind you – who were standing behind this research, so I ignored the typo and pushed on.

And it started well…I was nodding along by line eight.  Yes, I completely bought into the fact that your body finds ways to tell you when you’re deficient in something. I remember drinking about 2 litres of fresh orange juice every day when I was expecting my son, even before I knew I had a baby on board. Totally random fact which might have nothing to do with anything, but I was relating, you know..? There was definitely an air of expectation…like this was it, I was going to learn how to get rid of all those cravings once and for all. A defining moment. I’ll run through the advice shall I..? Distill it for you and give you just the good bits, you know, the highlights…?

“If you crave something sweet, eat broccoli instead.” Yeah because that’s going to cut it. The Asshole will totally go for that.

“If you crave chocolate, have some.” Right then. Way to go to combat the craving. Did the Asshole actually write this one? He uses that line all the time.

“If you’re craving a salty snack have some anchovies.”  Are you fucking kidding me?

“If you’re craving some dirty carbs, eat some turkey instead.” And again…wtf?

I stopped reading there, having written off said team of nutritionists as skinny dimwits who had obviously never experienced a fat girl craving in their lives. I mean come on. A craving will turn your head inside out. I’ve been known to drive the 15 miles to Ikea in my slippers at warp speed, screeching into the car park at 9.55pm a whisker before they close so I can buy a Daim cake, simply because I cannot contemplate getting through the night without one. I’ve eaten dog chocolate when there was nothing else sweet in the house. If you’d offered me a broccoli floret when I was in the grip of that craving I’m here to tell you that you’d have been invited to leave with the suggestion of shoving it sideways where the sun doesn’t shine ringing in your ears.

For advice on how to combat cravings, don’t ask the experts – ask a fat girl. We might not always be able to follow our own advice, but we know better than most what might work, sometimes. I’ll give you a clue…it’s not broccoli or anchovies. For me, right now it’s toothpaste. If I’m desperate to eat something and I’ve spent my food budget for the day, going and brushing my teeth with an overloaded toothbrush takes the edge off. It’s not much, but it’s something.

No holy grail today then…ah well. We’ll all just keep plugging away shall we? 🙂

 

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Why Can’t I Stop at One?

Biggest struggles, Freeform thoughts, In the here & now,

cakes

I can’t believe I’ve just spent 5 minutes searching for a nice colourful picture of some cupcakes on line, and my mouth is actually watering! That’s ridiculous but then I guess that’s what 6 weeks on a diet will do for you eh?!

So I’ve already talked a bit this week about my issue with portion control and not having a working full-filter. It goes beyond that though. Something in me hesitates to label myself as greedy because that word has so many negative connotations, in fact I can’t think of a single context in which it could be used positively. But lets imagine I was hauled in front of a judge who had to make a ruling on that very issue. I put it to you M’lud that this woman, (points at me) is greedy. I think I’d be on dodgy ground. “Having an excessive desire or appetite for food” is one definition of the word and shit, look already my defense is crumbling, I mean how can I argue with that? I do have an excessive desire for food, I can’t lie.

Now, whether it’s as a fat girl or a skinny girl, if you put that plate of cakes in front of me, I’m not stopping at one. One of my colleagues has just come back from holiday this week, and she brought cupcakes in for the team. How lovely. But seriously, you should have seen the size of these things…they were cupcakes the size of thimbles. Now obviously I passed, because I’m in a good place at the moment, both feet still planted firmly in the sweet spot and my face is a cake-free zone. But I’m here to tell you even I felt cheated and I wasn’t even having one.

I watched in fascination as one of my friends at work picked one out of the box carefully and popped it in her mouth, made all the right noises…apparently it was ‘melt-in-your-mouth gorgeous’ (kill me now) and then carried on with her work. Like that whole rest of the box of tiny cakes wasn’t still there in all their delicate melt-in-the-mouth gorgeousness, right next to her desk. I mean that’s not normal, right? It was tiny. And she just ate one. And then moved on and forgot about the box. Wtf..? WHO DOES THAT!!

Me, in the 3 milliseconds it took me to inhale the lemon one, I’d have been planning which one I was going for next. Wondering whether the colour of the frosting made a difference to the taste. If for some reason I wasn’t able to take a second one but there were cupcakes left in the box, they would have tortured me for as long as they remained in my eye line. Now, is that greedy, or is it something else? Greedy feels like a dirty word somehow, but is that what I am?

I don’t think so…but I’m…something. And I think it’s a question I need to answer before I can be confident that I’ve really got this down, you know?

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Love, Love Me Do

Biggest struggles, Freeform thoughts, In the here & now, ,

love_myself

So, I was chatting to someone I used to work with over the weekend and catching up with all his news – well, he calls it news. Me, I’d call it gossip but he’d deny that of course on the basis that ‘boys don’t gossip’ (yeah right that’s what I thought too).  Anyway, during the conversation he referred to the girl he was talking about as being ‘a classic people pleaser’ and for some reason the phrase stayed with me way after the conversation finished.  It annoyed me.

It’s not so much what this guy said, it’s they way he said it, like being a people pleaser is a really bad thing. He threw it out like some kind of insult you know? I almost felt like calling him back but then I thought he’d probably think I was some kind of nut job getting my knickers in a twist about nothing. So I didn’t, because he’d probably have a point.

I think the reason it felt like he’d poked me with a big stick was because I’ve spent quite a large portion of my life putting the desire to please other people before my own needs, and to think that people might stick a label on me in such a dismissive way was what set my teeth on edge. How bloody dare he. I suppose if you’re blessed with the confidence and wisdom to lead a life where you balance the desire to be a good all round human being with taking care of your own needs, it might seem a bit pathetic when you see someone whose need for acceptance drives them to a place where their own wants and needs are utterly overlooked. And what’s worse, they’re okay with that. But hearing the scorn in his voice rattled me more than I like to admit.

As my blog has taken shape I’ve referred a few times to the fact that I’ve been fat-skinny-fat-skinny on an almost continuous loop since my late teens. You want to know what I’ve realised as I’ve chewed on this over the last couple of days? My desire to take care of everybody else but myself is way, WAY more obvious when I’m fat than it ever is when I’m skinny. Isn’t that an interesting thought.

It’s as if subconsciously as a skinny girl, I feel free enough to be selfish when the occasion demands. I make demands of my own that – surprisingly – people meet without thinking too hard about it and even though I can be a proper diva, I still manage to be a decent person. But when I’m fat I almost feel the need to compensate by trying to be all things to all people…like the most I could hope for in terms of anyone’s opinion of me is yeah she’s fat but she’s really really nice. Which is ridiculous, because I’m the same person.

Jim Carrey – not someone you immediately think of as one of the world’s great philosophers – once said “Your need for acceptance can make you invisible in this world. Don’t let anything stand in the way of the light that shines through this form. Risk being seen in all of your glory”

Wise words. Haven’t quite nailed it but I’m trying.

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