Category Archives: Freeform thoughts

The Power Of Will

Freeform thoughts, ,

willpower

So I got to thinking the other day about what a strange thing willpower is. It’s not logical you know? I find it bizarre that sometimes I have to dig really deep to say no, and other times I’m able to fire the word out faster than a bullet without giving it a second thought. Why do you think that happens..? To all intents and purposes, it’s the same head making the decisions…the asshole is in permanent residence so him trying to chuck a spanner in the works is par for the course. And yet, some days are still harder than others.

Did I ever tell you I used to be a smoker..?  It seems like a lifetime ago – in common with lots of reformed smokers I can’t bear to be anywhere near a lit cigarette now and it feels so alien to think I used to have a twenty a day habit. It was well ingrained too – I started having a sneaky ciggie or two in my early teens and by the time I reached adulthood it was a pretty deep seated habit. So it’s ten years since I quit, and do you want to know how much willpower that took..? None. None at all.

I know, it makes no sense to me either. I read Allan Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking in one sitting, cover to cover in one day, smoked my last cigarette when the book told me to, and I’ve never smoked another. I never had a single craving, after more than twenty five years of smoking. Picture my face when I realised he’d written a book on losing weight, I was beyond excited…I pretty much broke the land speed record to get to the bookshop and hand over my cash. Read the whole book in one sitting and…nothing. Read it again, just to make sure…still nothing. Bloody thing had no impact on me whatsoever. I was gutted.

So it seems that there isn’t any kind of formula which cracks the willpower code every time. I mean I’m doing ok – better than ok, I’m doing great – now. But it’d be nice to be able to have some sort of guarantee, you know? Some certainty, that I’ll shimmy into Skinny town this time next year having had no curve balls come hurtling out of left field to knock me out of the sweet spot…no struggles to get back in. Some kind of formula to apply like a sunscreen to keep me protected from the asshole and other as yet unidentified foes would be amazing. But I get it – life doesn’t work like that, right?

And you know what else..? I’m kind of glad it doesn’t. I feel like I’m really having to work at this. I’m putting in the hard yards. Examining every thought, every feeling…picking at loose threads and sewing them down tight in the hope that if I touch wood and whistle they won’t unravel ever again. When I look back at the way I quit smoking, it feels too easy. I mean don’t get me wrong, I could never go back to the evil weed but equally I don’t feel any sense of pride or achievement for managing to quit. By some miracle, it happened but I don’t feel like I can take the credit.

This, on the other hand…when I get to Skinny town I want to wear every bruise that the asshole leaves behind like a badge of honour. I want to be able to run my fingers across every scar, from every hard-won battle. And that sense of achievement..? I want that too. I don’t think I can carry the scars or the bruises unless I’ve earned them.

That’s what’ll help me cash in my chips and stay there permanently. Let’s carry on doing the work 🙂

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Let’s Do This!

Freeform thoughts,

lets-do-this-shit

One of the joys of writing this blog over the last few months has been the number of friends I’ve made, including lots from across the pond – it’s been a big holiday over there this week, and most of the Stateside blogs I check in with on my daily mooch around the blogosphere have referenced Thanksgiving in one way or another.

As my thoughts turn to the upcoming holiday season that we all share, I’ve been interested to see how different people have coped with what is an equally challenging holiday in terms of the food and drink temptations. All tips and tools welcome, right? I’ve read about cheat days where anything’s been allowed over the holiday. Some people carried on counting but with an extra allowance granted ahead of time, and then there were the hardcore ‘it’s like every other day and I’m not relaxing the rules’ people, who are made of very stern stuff!

So, as a general rule of thumb, do you fall into the ‘seek permission’ or ‘seek forgiveness’ camp? I’ve got to be honest and say that mostly I’ve been an ‘act on the spur of the moment and seek forgiveness later’ kind of girl, in most aspects of my life so that’s the approach I’m more familiar with. I’d go so far as to say in the past I’ve described routine or planning of any kind as anathema to me, given my incredibly low boredom threshold and hatred of feeling hemmed in by something I’ve signed up to in a moment of madness.

Mind you, this time, on this journey I’m doing all kinds of stuff that I’ve never done before…you know, like some really deep thinking, planning, making considered choices, poring over the route map ahead of time so I can avoid obstacles. Don’t get me wrong, those things have been in my kit-bag for donkey’s years, and I’ve applied them throughout my working life – they’ve even been centre stage of advice I’ve dispensed to other folk. Strangely, it appears they’ve been notable by their absence in regard to decisions I make about myself. Weirdo.

So I’m thinking maybe this time I decide up ahead of time exactly how it’s going to go, and then stick to the plan. I know, get me, I can’t quite believe it either. However…saying it, and doing it are two completely different things. I have to expect the odd ambush from the asshole in my mind who, if we were keeping a tally must be way ahead of me on aggregate.

Normally he manages to negotiate his own position way ahead of time – the conversation usually goes along the lines of why don’t you stop dieting for the holiday season and start again in the New Year? To which my response is usually well…I guess I could take my foot off a bit as long as I don’t go mad. He’ll nod in agreement at this, knowing that in the moment – in multiple moments across the holiday season – all he’ll have to do to make it a slam dunk is to whisper go on, it won’t hurt just this once and by the New Year I’ll be back to square one. Having agreed the dieting hiatus somewhere around mid-November it’s hardly surprising.

You know what keeps coming into my mind this time though..? I went to Las Vegas for five days, and lost a pound. I came home from the most amazing five days ever one pound lighter than when I went, and not once whilst I was away did I feel deprived, or as though I was missing out…I just planned how I was going to spend my budget.

Is it going to be easy..? No of course it isn’t. Is it going to be harder than some of the monumental battles I have fought in the last three months…? No. It’s not. I’m thinking about the double cheese and spring onion sandwich…the cheesy bugle…the chocolate-dipped sour cherries…the five day holiday in food mecca…I mean come on, I am a warrior!!

That’s what I’m going to be focusing on as I sashay into the holiday season…every single victory and that amazing feeling  I get when I’ve stared down the asshole in my mind and watched him slope off with his head bent and bloody after he’s lost a bit more of the battle ground.

Bring it on I say…come on December, let’s see what you’ve got 🙂

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Foot In Mouth Syndrome

Freeform thoughts,

dog-hiding-face

Given that I have a black belt in saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, I could probably fill a dozen blog posts with the bloopers I’ve come out with over the years, but someone said something to me last week which reminded me how easy it is to insult someone by accident. I was chatting to a colleague who’d just given me a whole cheesecake to take downstairs for our team – I work in the HQ of a food retailer, and a supplier had left some samples – as I took the offered box I joked about walking the long way around the building so I could eat it on the route between our respective departments. He laughed, and said well it probably wouldn’t be the first time haha…

Now, logic tells me – along with the slow motion way in which his face fell, then turned a lovely shade of magenta – that he didn’t mean it like that…he was talking generally and not insinuating that I’d vaporised samples before, heading down the stairs and along the corridor shovelling cheesecake into my face as I went…it’s just unfortunate that that’s how it came out. I think my snort of laughter sent the message that I wasn’t offended and the moment passed, but imagine if I’d been a really sensitive soul, just how easily I could have assumed that’s exactly what he meant, and how crushed I would have been.

It made me think about unguarded moments of my own where I’ve probably ruined someone’s day by forgetting to push my words through that inner filter which is supposed to vet all my thoughts before they make it out of my mouth. Like the time I bumped into a friend I knew was expecting in the post office and asked her how long ’till her baby was due…turns out he was three months old. Yeh, I wanted the ground to swallow me after that one.

Incidentally some years later, a lady in the queue at the same post office asked me when my baby was due…given that I wasn’t pregnant, just fat, I think that’s what you call poetic justice but in the spirit of avoiding a horribly embarrassing moment for both of us, I rubbed my stomach tenderly and made up a random date. I wouldn’t mind but I think my boy was about eight years old at the time so I didn’t even have the excuse of recent baby weight to console me.

I once asked a friend I knew from college who the bloke in the red shirt was on a photo I’d seen of her in a group and when she said it was her husband I was like no, the old bloke…nailed with a death stare and yes, that’s my husband…awkward…thank God the filter caught the words is he rich? before they made it out past my lips…it was a very close call.

Of course coming from Yorkshire, where people tend to be very straight-talking, I’m probably a bit de-sensitised to start with – folk around these parts tend not to flower things  up, and looking back I think the greatest compliment my ex husband ever paid me was when he commented admiringly that I didn’t sweat much for a fat lass. Not surprising he’s an ex when I think about it, right? The arrows with the sharpest barbs though have definitely been the ones to do with how I look.

There have been occasions in the past where people have said things unintentionally that really hit me hard, ably assisted of course by the asshole in my mind who picked up the baton immediately to make me dwell on them, awarding them far more power in terms of hurting me than they ever should have had.

What I’ve noticed though, is that now this march to Skinny town is established, and it’s gathering a momentum all of its own,  words which might otherwise have wounded are falling by the wayside unnoticed you know? It’s almost as though in my head I’ve totally bought into this fat suit being a temporary state of affairs, so it’s fine not to waste energy dwelling on a problem that’s well on the way to being fixed. That feels pretty bloody cool.

Can you feel the balance of power shifting beneath our collective boots too?

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Feed Me!

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now,

a-bit-hungry-I’m not saying I’m predictable, but most days somewhere around 11am you’ll hear me muttering at my desk about the fact that I’m starving. It’s a word so baked into the flippant fabric of first world language that it’s accepted for use in the ‘I’m a bit peckish and could definitely eat something’ situation but you know when I really think about it, I’m not sure there are many times in my life when I’ve even crossed the line from peckish to hungry.

My 11am declaration is usually more accurately interpreted as it’s at least two hours since I’ve chewed something so just in case there’s a hunger pang formulating somewhere, I’d better take action now in order to avert disaster. As I sit here in my kitchen typing this, thinking about my desk in the office at work I can even visualise my emergency stash – a box of teabags, a plastic box with crackers in it, some salad cream, some mayo, some Aromat, half a punnet of grapes and a tin of almonds. I’m not sure I could tell you from memory where my hole punch is, but if you needed a cracker quickly I could definitely deliver.

It’s almost like I’m scared to find myself in a situation where I don’t have ready access to food. Given that I work in an environment where two sandwich vans visit daily, there’s a fully stocked shop just around the corner, a vending machine down the corridor and a trading team upstairs who have a never ending stream of samples available, in the unlikely event that a hunger pang did manage to make it through, it wouldn’t exactly be the end of life as I know it.

Which begs the question, why am I so reluctant to allow myself to feel hungry? That’s surely the cue which most normal people look out for when they’re deciding whether to eat or not. And it’s not like we’re up against the clock as soon as a hunger pang strikes…you know, like you have thirty seconds to eat something or you’ll implode and the world will stop spinning. Hunger pangs aren’t painful, not unless we’re talking the kind of belly hunger that most of won’t ever experience.

I’m not sure that feeling hungry has ever been the number one reason why I eat. If I had to call out the number one reason I’d be hard pushed to decide between habit, and boredom. I think habit might have it by a nose…the first thing I think about when I get in from work for example, is what’s for supper. And often in the past if I’ve grazed my way through the afternoon I’ve probably not even been hungry at that point…but I do associate walking through the door with preparing and eating food.

So, prepare it, but leave it until I’m hungry then..? No, epic fail on that front too…if it’s there and ready to be eaten, I’ll eat it. Where food is there, whether I’m hungry or not, I’ll eat. Even now, when I’m in the sweet spot and my resolve to stay within budget is stronger than I can ever remember, I’ll eat. Those occasional catered lunches at work..? I’m still going in for the kill whether I’m hungry or not. It’s there, it’s got my name all over it, and I’m in there with my plate as though my life depends on it.

So…that’s head hunger rather than belly hunger, right…? I’m sensing work to do, in understanding the difference 🙂

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The Bag Lady

Freeform thoughts, , , , ,

 bag-lady-home-box

So I realised quite a long time ago that I lean towards an obsessive personality. I don’t mean in a weirdo kind of way, I just recognise in myself the tendency to fall into the grip of something to the point where it stops being a hobby for example, and sort of takes over. I guess it’s another example of the struggle I’ve always had to take a balanced approach to stuff. Trouble is, it’s like anything else…recognising that you’ve crossed a line, and finding the desire or the ability to stop aren’t necessarily one and the same thing, right?

Over the years I’ve referred to myself as a ‘collector’ – isn’t that just the best catch-all name for someone who can’t quit buying stuff…it’s kind of a license to carry on, because it legitimises what you’re doing. Some years ago, I bought a necklace. It was nothing special, just a little piece of costume jewellery but I really liked it. It drew a few comments and I liked the way it looked, so I started paying more attention to jewellery in general. Bought a few more things…outgrew my jewellery box so moved a few things around and had a jewellery drawer instead.

And then another. Then I started displaying them on a wrought iron wall sculpture in my bedroom, and loved the way it looked so once that one was overloaded, I bought another and started filling that one up too. I spent hours scouring on-line outlets for statement jewellery, hunting down unusual and often outrageously priced hand-made one-off pieces. After all, I was a collector. Shops, markets, boutiques, craft fairs…it was all about the jewellery.

The thing is, I rarely wore any of it. I mean I did in the early days, but I was skinny back then. As my collection grew, so did my waistline and in the same way that clothes don’t look or feel right on this fat body, neither does jewellery. You can have a gorgeous statement necklace for example, hand tooled by a master craftsman in an exclusive little studio who’s more than likely relaxing on a beach somewhere with a large Pina Colada on the proceeds of what you paid for it, but when you put it on, if it’s sitting in the shadow of a stumpy double chin, framed by fat arms and with a spare tyre sitting right underneath it, I’m here to tell you it doesn’t look as nice as it did in the shop window. Sure, it might fasten, but it still doesn’t fit…or rather, you don’t fit it.

The jewellery obsession passed, although clearly I will be accessorised within an inch of my life when I get to skinny town. Next it was handbags. It still is handbags…now that’s a fat girl accessory I can get along with. No matter what shape or size I am, fabulous handbags are fabulous handbags, even on this chunky arm. But they’re an expensive hobby and have definitely contributed to my bank manager’s nervous twitch. He’s even keener for me to get to skinny town than I am, on the basis that I might step away from the handbag counter. Because again, somewhere along the way, I crossed the line from interested, to obsessive.

I dipped into the psychology of collecting once, more out of curiosity than anything else – I couldn’t believe the wealth of differing perspectives out there in terms of what inspires people to collect stuff. I suspected some ‘ologist’ somewhere would try and declare that it was my way of filling a void, and I could even get on board with that on some level. It seems that Freud went one step further and regarded it as stemming from unresolved toilet training conflict which seemed a bit extreme to me. I mean yes, fair enough, one or two of the credit card statements I’ve had following a fuck it moment in Selfridges have turned my bowels to liquid, but I always made it to the potty in time!

Whatever…I continue to be a magpie. With great accessories… 🙂

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