Category Archives: In the here & now

The Terrible Two’s!

In the here & now, , ,

I think I might have just realised what’s going on with my head and its refusal to play nicely. Think about it folks, it’s happened…I’ve reached the terrible two’s.

Two years ago to this very day, I’d just signed up with my web host and was trying to figure out what buttons I needed to push to make my words appear on a web page somewhere. As things worked out, no words made it anywhere that day because I just couldn’t fathom how it all worked. But I was excited, and I stuck with it because bizarrely – out of the blue and never having done anything like this before – I just knew that I needed to write.

My first blog post materialised the next day, and they’ve come on a regular basis ever since. Two years in, I get really choked when I think about how you lovely lot have stuck to my side like glue and what’s more you’ve managed to wade your way through just about three hundred thousand words. I can’t quite believe it.

This also means that I’m two years and five days into my diet. And that explains a lot, right? I’m officially a dieting toddler, doing toddler type things…pushing boundaries, acting out and generally ignoring all reasonable requests in the interests of touching hot things which are lying in wait to burn my fingers, not to mention working out how to climb over the safety gate. Yeah well I’ve well and truly figured that one out haven’t I, in fact I’ve turned into a regular fucking Houdini .

All joking aside, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting over the weekend. Mainly yesterday, which I spent in my own company. I had lunch with a bunch of friends on Saturday, who’d rescued me from another day in front of the TV when they realised that cabin fever was in danger of actually killing me. I can’t even tell you how awesome it was to leave the house. We went to a local garden centre for a bite to eat and I smacked headlong into my own rebellion, again, by dodging the healthier options in favour of a hot steak sandwich with fat chips and coleslaw. I know.

And a Florentine. Two florentines in fact, because I ate one in the cafe and took one home in a doggy bag for my boy. Now, if I look myself straight in the eye, I’m forced to admit that the duplicate florentine was never going to make it as far as the handover. If he’d been home when I got in there’s a slim chance he might have ended up with it, but only because he’d have likely rugby-tackled it out of my hands. He wasn’t there to take on the fight, and in the end it was out of the bag with indecent haste and eaten before I’d even put the latch on the door.

Yesterday also started badly. I had a less than inspiring conversation with the Shitbird Scale, and yes I know a pound off is a pound off, but I’d hoped that the four pounds on last week had been all bandage and now the big bandage is off it obviously wasn’t. So I went downstairs and ate leftover Shepherds Pie. For breakfast.

And then I cried. A proper, ugly cry because really what the actual fuck was I doing?

I’m still trying to pull all my thoughts and reflections from yesterday into a bunch of words that make sense. I need to let them cook for a bit longer and besides, it’s our birthday today so I’m not going to get all deep on your ass. It’ll come when it’s ready.

It’s a proper milestone today. We are two years a blog, and two years a tight-knit community who support the living daylights out of each other, even when one of us is acting like a complete brat.

*Coughs, and tries to look innocent.

I can’t begin to arrange enough words in anywhere near the right order to tell you how much your support means to me, and how you guys are the reason that I haven’t given up. You’re the reason why, two years in, I’m still here and I’m still trying. And today more than ever, out of respect for all the sheer bloody effort that’s gone into this journey over the last seven hundred and thirty days, I’ve rebooted my head, again.

Day one, take…whatever, I’ve lost count. It doesn’t matter. Day one is all that matters 🙂

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Nearer To Good Than Bad

In the here & now, ,

Well, I’m in a much better frame of mind today, and to the blessed relief of everyone I’ve been driving round the bend, I’ve stopped being a muppet. It’s taken me a week to get my head around the fact that I’m not going to feel better straight away. I’ve also come to realise that not every twinge means it’s all gone wrong. It’s normal to have good days and bad days after surgery, right? Wednesday was the worst day, but yesterday was better.

Stressing about my food plan hasn’t been especially helpful. After my prolonged dalliance with the binge demons, getting back on track would have been hard enough in itself, but doing it in a week where enforced inactivity has ruled out any opportunity to boost my pitiful calorie quota…well. I’ve narrowly avoided eating my own fucking arm.

And I’m still obsessing about Daim cake. I mean, in my repertoire of go to foods it’s up there towards the top of the list anyway but for some reason my head has stalled at the crossroads where I choose to walk either towards it or away from it. So I’m still standing there having the same conversation. I shit you not, it’s like Groundhog Day.

The Asshole voice is lobbying hard.  Look, just go get it out of your system, then you can move on. I’m not going to quit reminding you how that buttery taste will melt on your tongue and make you feel better, and sooner or later you’re going to cave. You know it, and I know it. Why don’t you save us both the trouble and go buy the cake.

I thought it would be easier because I’m stuck in the house, you know? My ability to nip out to the shops has been severely compromised by my not being able to drive. I know better than to ask the fun police to bring me a Daim cake, and in any event he’s been working so I didn’t even try. I did think about calling a cab to the place that sells them, and I also considered doing a full on-line shop just so I could get some contraband delivered and eat it whilst there’s only me in the house. Thankfully I haven’t done any of those things.

But I’m still thinking about doing all of those things because my head is refusing to play nicely.

The thing is, I’m clinging on. My food plan has not been the stuff that skinny dreams are made of this week, and there’s been a couple of days where I’ve gone a bit over my calorie budget but the upshot is, I haven’t eaten Daim cake. Whether I’ve coloured inside the lines or not, it’s been nearer to good than bad and that’s something to celebrate. I doubt very much that the Shitbird Scale will award me a loss on Sunday but to be honest this non-scale victory matters far more. It’s been one hell of a battle.

I don’t think it’s over yet. But it will pass, eventually. The non-Asshole side of my brain knows that, and I’m riding out the storm 🙂

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The Polar Opposite Of Easy

In the here & now, ,

I don’t know about you, but in that moment where I desperately want to eat something I shouldn’t,  the Asshole voice spits out reassurance after reassurance about how easy it’ll be to pick up the pieces pretty much straight away afterwards. My head totally gets on board with the whole concept and works in tandem to erase any old memories which may tell a different story, and right up until the chewing is over I remain convinced that getting back in the game is going to be a walk in the park.

I fall for it every fucking time.

Before you start throwing things at the screen out of sheer frustration that I’m still fannying around, I’m not. I’ve got five days’ worth of skin in the  game but honestly, pulling myself back out of that hole has been a full-on stinking turd of a task. I’m wrung out by the relentless assault on my willpower to the point where it feels like my week has been directed by Quentin Tarantino.

The reality of getting back on plan after a ten day hiatus is the polar opposite of easy. It’s compounded by the sheer boredom of not being able to do much else apart from sit in the chair with my leg elevated and have the occasional potter about. It seems that dragging my mind out of the refrigerator is much easier if I can take Charlie-dog out for a long walk, or go work up a sweat at the Kingdom of Pain.

I’m tetchy from the sugar withdrawal and my mind and body are not occupied with anything other than how much I want to eat whilst I’m sitting around doing nothing. There’s no unsuitable food in the house, so my options are deliberately limited but that doesn’t stop the steady stream of help and advice from the Asshole voice as to how I might engineer a situation whereby I’m left to my own devices and therefore free to order take-out pizza.

Fair to say then that it hasn’t been a textbook week so far. I had some ice-cream on Sunday that I haven’t paid back into the calorie pot yet, but that was my very last sugar-related transgression and other than that I’m doing okay as I claw my way back to clean eating. There might have been an incident with some out-of-budget sprouts and a battered haddock fillet yesterday but I was due to take pain meds and I needed to eat something. It could have been worse.

The big bandage came off yesterday, to be replaced by a full length elasticated support stocking. This didn’t improve my mood any, since my knee blew up like a football and I realised that said support stockings are just not built for fat legs.

Getting it on was easy so I was lulled into a false sense of security, but to stop the dratted thing rolling down from the top every time I moved, I had to make a sort of cuff with the top of it which then proceeded to cut the circulation off in my leg. Drama queen that I am, I convinced myself that I was having a DVT until it dawned on me that the stocking was just too damn tight.

On medical advice when I couldn’t stand it any longer, the support stocking went in the bin and I’m once again swaddled in bandages. Two steps forward, one step back. I’m sore, and my cranky pants are pulled all the way up to my armpits. Surely three family bags of cheese balls and a Daim cake would make me feel better right now..? Except I know they really wouldn’t, beyond a brief moment in time. So it’s a no from me.

It doesn’t stop the image of them playing on a constant loop in my head though 🙁

 

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Just A Bit Too Cocky

In the here & now, ,

I’ve had some lovely notes and messages relating to my knee surgery, which were much appreciated, thank you. It all went well, and I was home by mid-afternoon on the same day. It’s sore, but it’s not unbearable. I think I’ve been battered by the anaesthetic as much as anything, because in between all the knee exercises that the physiotherapist has given me to do I’m sleeping more than a middle-aged moggy. I guess that’ll wear off in a few days.

My friend came over yesterday evening and we decided to go see a movie – that was the point that I realised that perhaps I’d overestimated my ability to bounce back. Pottering around the house is one thing, but the car journey to the cinema was uncomfortable and although we parked right outside and didn’t really walk very far at all, by the time I got home last night I was exhausted. And my knee hurt. A lot. So no matter how bad the cabin fever gets, I won’t be doing that again any time soon.

The doctor raised an eyebrow at me on Friday when I said I was planning to go back to work in a couple of days…sometimes I can be a bit too cocky for my own good, you know? Lesson learned. I’ve assumed the position again with my leg elevated, where it will remain until the swelling goes down, and I guess I’ll be sending in that sick note after all.

I’ll tell you what though, just cast your mind back a couple of years. I couldn’t wait to lay back every weekend with my feet up in my big fat leather armchair and do nothing at all. Well, except feed my face. It’s almost worth being driven crazy with cabin fever as a reminder of how far I’ve come. That life doesn’t belong to me any more, which is why I reckon I’m finding the inactivity so hard.

These days, weekends are about getting out in the fresh air and walking with Charlie dog or setting off with a bunch of friends on my bike, not hunkering down with an armful of snacks and a steady stream of crappy TV. Hopefully it’ll only be a couple of weeks until I’m properly mobile again. I’m not sure how much more of the doggy death-stare I can take, for one thing.

My encounter with the Shitbird didn’t go too well yesterday. Again. I was in two minds whether to bother hopping aboard at all given that I’m wrapped from thigh to ankle in a massive padded bandage, but on the basis that I didn’t properly climb out of the sink hole until Friday, I figured bandage or no bandage I had to face the number. It wasn’t pretty, but I’m happy to report that the anarchy is over and I’m properly back up and running with my food plan.

Not before time. That twelve day fuck-up has put me back to what I weighed on 19th March. For fuck’s sake. Five months’ worth of effort wiped out in less than two weeks. Next time I’m in the mood to rebel I’m going to remind myself about that 🙂

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Teeing It Up Nicely

In the here & now

I’m a bit nervous tonight. I should be well asleep by now, but I’m having my knee surgery first thing tomorrow, and sleep is proving elusive. I don’t need to do anything by way of preparation other than just turn up so I’ve been finding other things to occupy my mind.

Do you remember last month, I mooted the idea of pulling a book together from all these words we’ve shared here in the blog over the last two years? I was genuinely blown away by the response from you lot, who came back with a resounding chorus of approval at the idea, and you know me…once I get an idea, I’m not one to let the grass grow under my feet.

Anyway, exciting news…I’ve booked myself onto a three day writers workshop next month so I can learn how to do this shit for real.

I know, right?!!

I’ve got to submit a 3000 word sample of my writing up ahead of time, so a bunch of folk who know what they’re talking about can do a proper critique on it, then I get the feedback whilst I’m there. They’ve warned me it might be brutal so I’m steeling myself…ah knickers to it, shoot for the moon, eh? But I need your help.

I can’t just launch right in with the blog posts because out of context it wouldn’t make much sense, so I’ve had to do a bit of an intro, which will use up about half my words. I’ve pulled some bits from the blog to do that and written a bit more. Then I thought I’d just pick a couple of blog posts as a sort of sample…what do you think?

Here’s what I’ve got so far…

Break Out The Skinny Girl – The Diary Of A Recovering Food Addict

I remember in vivid, excruciating detail the moment it occurred to me that I was fat. It was sometime around the top class in infants, so I must have been about six years old. The teacher who pointed it out was called Miss Baume, and the memory is so deeply engrained that I even remember the long white wet-look boots and Paisley-patterned mini-dress that she was wearing when the words came out of her mouth.

We were doing a class topic about farms, and Miss Baume called me and the only other chunky little girl in our class out to the front. Pointing towards the two of us, she announced to the class that together we probably weighed the equivalent of a fully-grown pig.

Yes, I’m serious. She really said that. I remember the sting of tears behind my eyes and the sniggers in the classroom, but most of all I remember the utter misery and humiliation of being compared to a pig. By my teacher. That moment was the first time I ever recall feeling ashamed of the way I looked.

I ran home after school in tears and my mum gave me a cuddle and a Kit-Kat to make me feel better.

Not long after that, a family friend mentioned that she was going to pass down a bag of clothes that her twelve-year-old daughter had grown out of. I was beyond excited, because money was tight in our house and new clothes were a rare event. This promised bag of clothes seemed to take forever to actually turn up, and by the time it did I was almost beside myself.

I was seven, and not a single one of the things in that bag fitted me. I insisted on hanging them in my wardrobe anyway, because one day I might be thin. To be fair, it wasn’t the last time my wardrobe would be filled with ‘one day…’ clothes, and it also wasn’t the last time I hoped I might go to sleep fat and wake up thin. I hadn’t joined the dots at that time between cause and effect.

For me, weight has been a lifelong battle. If I had a pound in money for every pound in weight I’ve lost and found over the years, I could probably give the Gates’s and Zuckerbergs of this world a run for their money. I can’t tell you how much I weighed when I was born, because I was adopted soon afterwards and back then it wasn’t the done thing to hand that kind of useful information over with the baby bundle.

There’s no doubt I was loved. My folks tried for twelve years to have a baby and it just didn’t happen. They took delivery of me at 6 weeks old, and never had a baby been so loved. Or so well fed. I’ve seen the photos, and I can say with a degree of certainty that by the time the deal was done and the papers were signed, I looked like a beach ball with hair.

Back then I was regarded as a bonny baby – these days my mum would be hauled in front of social workers and given a lecture about childhood obesity or food abuse, and to be fair they’d have a point.

I’ve dipped in and out of therapy over the years to try and understand the weird relationship I have with food, and it’s indisputable; the way I’m wired stems way back to my formative years. Feeding me was my mum’s way of showing love, you know? If I skinned my knee, or fell out with a friend, there was a ready supply of edible band aids to make me feel better. Bad times, difficult times, tears…all patched up with food. Good times? Hey, let’s go eat.

I remember confiding in an older girl once who lived on our avenue, and who used to play with me when her proper friends were busy. I was seven years old and I weighed around seven stone at the time. Pig-gate still weighed heavily on my mind, but my friend reassured me that she weighed that too, and she wasn’t fat, was she? Of course she wasn’t. But she was a good five years older than me, much taller and she’d already grown boobs. I wasn’t old enough to have a ready answer as to why it was different for me, but I just knew it was.

It’s not like I wasn’t active. When I was nine, I joined the gym club at school. Mr Roberts, the gym teacher was an absolute sweetheart, and he didn’t mind a bit that I was fat, even though my presence on the team meant that his dreams of winning any inter-school competitions disappeared like a fart on a breeze.

For a start, there was too much body in my leotard. I couldn’t quite pull off a forward roll – which was the cornerstone of our big display piece – without either grunting, or rolling backwards because my belly got in the way when I tried to stand up. And the leotard kept disappearing between my butt cheeks, which isn’t helpful when you’re trying to avoid reasons for people to laugh at you. What I lacked in finesse I made up for in enthusiasm, but let’s just say I wasn’t a born athlete.

Fast-forward a few years, to 1978 and the release of the movie Grease. I was 13, and I must have stood in line at least ten times to watch it. I was obsessed. I completely missed all the subtle messaging about not feeling the need to change who you are to please someone else…that went right over my head. I just wanted to be sexy and say the words tell me about it, stud to a hot boy who wouldn’t laugh.

Having watched the film over and over again, I nagged my poor mum half to death until she relented and bought me a pair of shiny black footless leggings. She clearly knew this purchase had disaster written all over it but as far as I was concerned, they were exactly what I needed to transform me in the same way they’d transformed Sandy.

I was very pissed off when they didn’t make me look like Sandy. Not even close. With the benefit of hindsight, I realize now that my legs were a good foot shorter than hers, and my arse was at least a foot wider. Plus, the only thing I had to wear them with was a pair of sensible Clarks’ sandals and a poncho, so how surprising that the school disco didn’t deliver me the happy ending I’d been hoping for. Said nobody at all.

I joined a slimming club with my mum after those footless leggings were consigned to the bin. I don’t remember losing any weight, because alongside the diet food that my mum used to cook, I continued to eat my own bodyweight in crap. In secret. And I got really good at wheeling out my surprised and disappointed face when it was time to face the weekly weigh-in.

I just wish I were as fat now as I was when I thought I was fat the first time. On reflection I probably wasn’t that fat at all.

Over the years I’ve tried every diet going. All the usual suspects – the ones where you rock up to fat class once a week, pay your subs and hop on the scales before sitting down for the talk. Some of them were quite good and the diets do work if you stick to them. The meal plans are flexible, and it’s normal food, but it’s just a bloody long slog when you have lots to lose.

And yes I know. The long game gets you into a healthy eating pattern. It’s habit forming, you learn about nutrition, you get support…I get it. Only I never made it to the end. I always got so far, but then I’d get stuck. Boredom, impatience, call it whatever you like but sooner or later the asshole voice in my head would land a sucker punch and BAM I’d come tumbling out of the naughty tree, hitting every branch on the way down. And that’d be it, shackles off and ready to make up for lost eating time.

I’ve also existed on packets of space dust and had hermetically sealed ping meals delivered to my door every week for months on end. Some of them didn’t taste that bad, but they cost a fortune and the portions wouldn’t have looked out of place in front of a two year-old.

The one thing I’ve never considered is weight loss surgery, because I’m smart enough to recognise that the problem is 100% in my head. I’d be the one liquidising mars bars and finding creative new ways to drink pizza through a straw if my stomach was the size of a thimble but my head was still broken.

Some of the diets I’ve tried have dipped into the psychology of weight loss. The liquid diet in particular came with an element of homework and group therapy. I found it fascinating and it really did work. For a while. I didn’t have time to be bored, in fact my journey down the sizes was exhilarating. I wish I could do it again but I literally gag at the thought of that chalky soup these days.

I guess where I’m going with this, is that despite understanding the concept of a balanced diet, and the science behind expending more energy than you take in if you want to lose weight, knowing and doing are two completely different things, right?

I’m self-aware enough to identify the triggers which set me off. I’ve spent pretty much all my adult life being pre-occupied with the size of my arse, and either losing the weight, or putting it back on again. I’ve lost and gained way north of 1000lbs over the last 30 years, but understanding the reasons why is not enough. Knowledge isn’t enough, on it’s own.

How many cycles of despair, followed by determination, hope, optimism, success, celebration, pride, self-destruction and back to despair can a girl go through in one lifetime? Lots, actually. The answer is lots. When I hit that sweet spot, and I’m in the zone and losing weight, life is good. When I’m not, it’s a car crash. I binge, so it’s either feast, or famine. I can never remember sustaining any kind of middle ground for longer than ten minutes but I really want it to be different this time because honestly, I’m too old for this shit.

And that’s why I decided to write my way to Skinny Town, one diary entry at a time. This isn’t so much a diary about a diet; it’s more a diary about what goes on in my head because I’m on a diet. If I call it out I have to deal with it, right?

*280,000 words’ worth of diary entries follow. I’ve picked out just a couple so you can hear my voice in the limited space we have…

So chaps, this is where you come in. Which posts do I include? I’m thinking Police, Fire, Ambulance, Me and Feed Me!  They were a couple of fairly early posts. But there’s almost five hundred to go at and I don’t know where to start. And anyway, you lot are the experts…you know what you like.

I figured that seeing as I’m likely to be out of action for a few days, you might fancy having a poke around in the archives whilst I’m too dosed up on pain meds to make much sense.

Let me know what you think…and wish me luck with the op. I could shit a brick right about now 🙁

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