Category Archives: Freeform thoughts

Dear Santa

Freeform thoughts, , ,

santa

Having given it a lot of thought, I believe I am a reformed character, so this year I think I can send you a Christmas wish list without fear that you’re going to die laughing when I try and tell you what a good girl I’ve been. I mean, I know strictly speaking I haven’t been good for a whole year, but since the 17th of August I’ve made up for it, and compared to any year in recent history my behaviour has been nothing short of a miracle.

I know, I know, we have history. I genuinely hang my head in shame when I think about all the occasions where my boy left a lovely selection of chocolate and mince pies out on Christmas eve to welcome you and say thanks for coming, and I selfishly scoffed the lot before I went to bed. Yes ok, and the sherry. I even ate Rudolph’s carrot one year, but after the sherry and half a bottle of baileys, I’d lost my sense of perspective and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I’d also like to apologise for the occasions when I’ve ventured out in fancy dress and posed as your good self. My friends were all rocking the sexy santa look, but me…well I looked more like you than you do. I’ve got the girth and to be fair, now I’m over fifty I’ve even got the beard. But I’m hoping we can put my past indiscretions behind us and move on. Life’s too short to bear grudges, right?

So anyway, in my Christmas stocking I’d love to find some patience. I’m hoping you have some in stock, because it’s a long way to Skinny Town and if I run out on the way I’ll be in trouble. No, I mean I’ll really be in trouble, you know like last time and the time before that..? When I didn’t get there quickly enough I just gave up and returned to Mooseville with my tail between my legs. I know I’ve got the posse at my back this time and I reckon they’d have my guts for garters if I even thought about quitting, but you know it doesn’t hurt to take a belt and braces approach. I’m just making sure.

I’d also love it if you could arrange for me to have some top-up vouchers for my willpower. I mean I’m doing ok at the moment, and there’s plenty left in the old tank but you never know when you’re going to get caught a bit short. I might not need them, I’m feeling a bit cocky these days and I’ve resisted the emergency hob-nob for the last four months, which is pretty impressive. Well, when I say resisted, I did lick the chocolate off one corner of it when I was having a bad day but I won the fight with the asshole in my mind before any actual biting happened. It was a close call mind you.

At the risk of sounding greedy, might I trouble you finally for a small box of determination? I’ve promised to choose a big event to train for in the New Year, and although I haven’t decided exactly what I’m going to do I need to go from zero to hero far more quickly than my old fat body is expecting. I’m going to have to throw everything I’ve got at it, including all the determination I can get my hands on.

Let’s call this the 2016 Skinny Town Travel Kit. It would be awesome if you could drop an identical one into the stockings of everyone in the posse too…a little thank you from me since this journey probably wouldn’t be happening without them. Oh, and just take it easy with the candy sticks, if you don’t mind. We do veggie sticks in this posse.

Lots of love and a kiss for Rudolph…pass on my apologies for the carrot 🙂

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Holding The Line

Freeform thoughts, ,

no to food

So there’s only a couple of days left before our little mini break and I can’t wait to soak up the atmosphere of the Christmas markets in Dublin this weekend with a bunch of friends. I’ve been irritatingly angelic on my diet this week, I’ve not used any of my weekly points and I’ve resisted temptation despite being bombarded from all quarters.

My boss’s husband baked the most enormous victoria sandwich cake the other day which he brought into work for the team and OMG it looked absolutely lush, I was practically drooling…but I didn’t go near it 🙂

I’m slowly getting my head around the new Weight Watchers points system, it’s much easier to understand now they’ve got rid of the gremlins from their website…I think it’s going to be quite effective for no other reason than most of the things I like to eat as treats seem to have doubled in points so it’s put me off eating them. I’m not sure that’s sustainable, but for this week at least it’s not a bad thing. Plus I grumbled at them a bit and they gave me two weeks for free so all is forgiven, providing the diet works of course.

So as you know I’ve carved out a bit of slack for myself ahead of this weekend, but I’m not planning on going mad – I daren’t, in case my place in the sweet spot disappears in a puff of smoke. I’ll probably hold the line, stick to skinny food choices as much as I can and spend my extra points on fizz…that sounds like a good plan, right?

My friend doesn’t think so apparently. Her actual words when I outlined my plan were for God’s sake woman live a little! Delivered with tone of voice straight our of Snarkyville. It seems that in her humble opinion, the friends I’m travelling with will think I’m a proper diet bore if I don’t continually stuff my face with naughty things whilst I’m away. I don’t agree, and I might have mentioned that, just before I thanked her for her support. With a tone of voice straight out of Siberia. Yes, I see yours and raise you!

You want to know what proper support looks like to me? Eight years ago when I was doing the liquid diet, I spent 7 months drinking soups and shakes. In the middle of that time, my best friend and I went on holiday to a fabulous hotel in Turkey which was full board with the most amazing food…I never ate a morsel all week. We went down to dinner together every night, to our usual table right by the sea, and she ate her dinner whilst we chatted and admired the view.

I drank water and was perfectly happy, and she ate like a normal person and was equally happy. She knew it was important to me and she never batted an eyelid. That’s support right there. I lost five and a half pounds that week on top of having an amazing holiday. So forgive me for not believing that the friends I’m away with this weekend will be affronted by me declining pudding in favour of coffee, I mean why the chuff would they even be bothered?

They know I’m dieting, and it’s no big deal. You can bet your bottom dollar if there was a skinny string bean friend amongst us who curled her petite little nose up at anything with an actual calorie in it, nobody would give it a second thought. If the fat girl makes skinny choices, why should it be different? In any event, knowing my friends as I do, by the time dessert arrives they’ll be too pissed to notice anyway 🙂

 

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We See YOU

Freeform thoughts, ,

nerves

So I was helping a friend do some interviewing last night, for a fairly important role in her business. That happens a lot when you work in human resources, you’re sort of seen as the oracle on all things people-related. It’s one of those professions where you try and avoid telling strangers what you do for a living because as soon as they know you get the tale of woe. You know the score…everyone’s got a ‘friend’ who’s having some bother at work, and what should they do. It’s the equivalent of someone inviting you to check out their rash if you’re a doctor, or having to listen to complaints about someone’s hotel if you’re a travel agent…you just sort of learn to keep schtum.

Anyway, given this was my friend I was happy to help…we saw a couple of people who were a bit less than impressive, and then in walked Mr Charisma – we loved him instantly. He had exactly the right sort of experience, amassed over a number of years. He was really open and friendly, and the answers he gave to our questions were terrific, there’s no question he could do the job. And yet, he was possibly the most self-conscious person I’ve ever met.

I know, it’s really easy from the interviewer side of the room to say relax and enjoy the meeting, and I totally get it, as an interviewee you’re probably going to have a few heebie jeebies. But genuinely, I don’t think he was nervous about the interview – he knew his onions, and to be fair he aced it. This poor bloke was in his own private version of hell because he was self conscious about his weight.

There’s no getting away from the fact that he was very short and very round. And I can say with absolute certainty he was desperately hoping that it wasn’t the only thing we noticed about him. My empathy-ometer was nearly off the scale and If it hadn’t been highly inappropriate, I might have hugged him…I’ve walked a mile in his shoes, which is why I can tell you exactly what was going on in his head. He so wanted to be judged on his ability rather than his appearance, but I guarantee that in that moment, how he looked and how he felt was leeching 95% of his focus.

The chair we offered must have been agony. He had a bloody good go at sitting in it, but it just wasn’t built for a man of his proportions. He spilled over it you know? He looked so uncomfortable. His suit jacket was a little snug, and when he sat down it kind of bunched up around his shoulders. He spent the best part of the interview adjusting his tie to cover the buttons on his shirt which were straining across his frame, and tugging at the lapels and the sleeves of his jacket.

The irony is, I was having a moment myself at the same time. I wasn’t sitting up to a table, you know in true HR style we’d set the room up with no barriers so I was writing my interview notes in a pad balanced on my knee. I’m still too fat to cross my legs and as I looked down at my notes, the asshole in my mind couldn’t resist the opportunity to point out how my stomach and my pad were fighting over the right to rest on my leg.

I so badly wanted to say to him it’s okay…quit fretting about the fat thing, we see you. Of course I didn’t…but I was so in sync with his thoughts I felt like Mystic bloody Meg. The really ridiculous thing is that out of the three professional people in the room, at least two were preoccupied with how they looked and what other people might be thinking about that.

Being free of that distracting and destructive thought ball and chain is the thing I’m looking forward to more than anything once I get to Skinny Town 🙂

 

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Anything, But Not Grateful!

Freeform thoughts,

insecureMy friend’s daughter had her confidence knocked big time at a Christmas party this weekend – she’s quite a curvy girl, but definitely in a ‘curves you’d kill for’ hourglass kind of way. She’s young, gorgeous, and to be honest if she was my daughter she’d be locked in a tower until she was at least forty. There’s a bloke in the mix who she has a bit of a soft spot for – actually she’s got the raging hots for him, I was being discreet – so she was gearing up for a bit of a flirt and maybe a moment under the mistletoe you know?

Off she went, feeling really giddy. And within ten minutes of arriving at the party, a thoughtless catty comment made by one of her so-called friends about the way she looked ruined her whole night. I could have wept for her as my friend was telling me about it, because like many of you guys I’m sure, I’ve been there.

She doesn’t see what we all see, when she looks in the mirror. I look at her and I see flawless peachy skin and an amazing smile. I see a girl with boobs to die for and a proper waist, and yet all she sees when she looks in the mirror is fat. To put it into perspective, I’ve got more fat on my earlobes than she has on her body.

When I look back at my own teenage years, I often wonder how different my life might have been if I’d grown up in a hot body. I mean don’t get me wrong, I was a proper party animal when I was younger, and I didn’t suffer from a lack of confidence per se, but, I always felt like a munter at the side of my skinny string bean friends, like the fat funny one who was good for a laugh but not, you know, fanciable.

At the end of the night when it got to slow dance time, all the girls used to stand around the dance floor looking like they couldn’t be arsed with the boy thing, and didn’t care that they hadn’t yet been invited to shuffle around in circles and have a quick snog. And yet one by one the hot girls all got picked off by the hot boys, the reasonably attractive girls got picked off by the reasonably attractive boys, and then there were only swamp donkeys left, feeling a little bit awkward, with both sexes furtively weighing up their remaining options.

I used to fall somewhere in the middle, you know? I had a pretty face but I filled my disco pants a bit too well to be an A-lister. Mostly my dancing partners were definitely to the left of hot, but you know it was generally quite dark so it didn’t matter too much, in the moment. But the point I’m making is, because I didn’t feel confident about the way I looked, the overwhelming feeling I got whenever someone asked me to dance was grateful. And let me tell you that’s not how you want to feel when it comes to members of the opposite sex.

Feeling grateful that someone picked you leads to a whole world of pain…you put up with more, and overlook things which should set alarm bells clanging because you know, he likes you and that’s good, right? You settle. Usually for someone who’s not worthy of you…here speaketh the voice of experience.

When I look back, I wasn’t fat really, not fat like now fat. I mean yes, I filled those disco pants a bit too well but not on an industrial scale. Trust me, I wish I was the same size now as I was when I thought I was fat the first time around…nothing quite like the twenty twenty vision of hindsight hmm?

Anyway…I’m happy to report that my friend’s girl got her man, well that is to say he texted her the next day and apparently told her he’d thought she’d looked ‘sick’ the night before. I’m reliably informed that these days that is a compliment…I shall file that away for future reference because under normal circumstances if anyone texted that to me they’d be asking for a smack in the chops 🙂

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Fur Coat And No Knickers

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fur
One of the things I’ve always been quite good at, is making decisions and then doing what I’ve said I’m going to do. You know like some people talk about what they’re going to do but what they actually mean is, I might do it, one day, if the Moon is in Saturn and the stars all align. It’s not really a statement of intent, so much as a thought spoken out loud. With me, by the time the words make it out of my head they’ve generally  been mulled over and I’m pretty much there in terms of deciding to go for it.

Until I understood the difference between my approach and the thinking out loud approach that some of my friends adopt, it used to drive me bat shit crazy. I thought we’d agreed, you know..? That we were going to do this..?  Ah yes, well I’m definitely thinking about it…for those of you who have gotten to know me over the last few months you’ll appreciate that the patience fairy was a bit parsimonious with the magic dust and patience isn’t my strongest suit.

I was chatting to a friend of a friend over the weekend, who just happens to be one of these blue-sky thinkers, and whose daydreams are very much pitched as reality. Had my friend not forewarned me about him I would have left the conversation feeling exhausted at the thought of how much he was going to pack in over the next year, but as it was, my thoughts drifted as he rattled on about this and that. And as I was trying to nod and look interested in all the right places I got to thinking.

I’ve made some bold and cheeky statements over the last few months to you guys, about what I was going to do, right? But we’ve chatted about so much, I got to wondering about whether I’ve followed through with them all. I felt the need to take a quick inventory because I’d hate to turn into one of those people who is known for talking the talk but not walking the walk you know? I have a bad feeling about this, my palms have all of a sudden got a bit sweaty and I suspect a couple of my good intentions might have slipped under the net.

Lets start with the positives. Visualisation, portion control, goals and skinny choices…big tick in all those boxes. I’m all over those…I’ve even found myself choosing a cookie with a broken corner, which made me laugh…first time ever. There’s still no prince charming on the horizon – I mean come on, someone at least send me a tall dark handsome bloke desperate to ravish me so I can be tested!  I continue to work on spending my food budget carefully, and I’m planning better across the week. So in all those areas, I’m doing good…I’m walking the walk.

Except, I’m not walking the real walk. Walking half an hour every day, that’s something I said I was going to do when I got back from my trip…whoops. Epic fail. I haven’t been doing it. So, how many excuses do you need? I could probably rattle off at least a half dozen…I hold a black belt in excuses related to diet and exercise, I mean come on I’ve been honing my skills for a lifetime. But the fact is, I just haven’t pushed myself. And that’s a rubbish effort. There’s no wonder it doesn’t feel like a habit yet, I think I’ve only done it twice.

I can imagine what my granny would have said…yes well, all fur coat and no knickers, that one…that’s a good old Yorkshire expression for someone who’s all show. I don’t think that’s me…I don’t think I’m all show.  But all the things I’ve said I was going to do were things I put out there as a way of supporting this journey, and they’re not going to pack much of a punch if I don’t follow through are they?

So…I’ve ‘fessed up. And tomorrow, I re-boot and start walking 🙂

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