Category Archives: In the here & now

Throw Me A Bone

In the here & now, ,

I’m in a philosophical mood today. As I see it, the only good thing about not moving forwards at a rate of knots is that I’m not going backwards at a rate of knots. Well, the odd whoopsie excepted of course. I had to work hard at getting to philosophical, from a starting position of pissed off, and I’ve been reflecting all weekend on how I could do better. I was convinced that yesterday’s weigh-in was going to be a disaster. Lets be honest most weigh-ins just recently haven’t exactly been the stuff that dreams are made of, have they?  I didn’t feel skinny either as I walked the Shitbird mile, and that’s never a good sign.

I am trying so hard to get it right. The top of the year got off to a cracking start but despite working out as much as I’ve been able with my busted knee, and counting, weighing, in fact obsessing over everything that goes in my mouth – and let’s be honest, plenty of stuff that doesn’t – I’ve barely moved the needle from where it was in early April and I don’t know about you, but to me that feels like a lot of effort for sweet bugger-all progress.  I’m grateful for my solid 2lbs loss this week and I’m feeling more in control, but that’s still two whole months’ worth of trying hard without really going anywhere.

And yes, I know the fuck-up fairy paid a four day visit in the mix but really, two months?

I feel like I’ve been treading water, and it’s so much harder to try and stay motivated when the needle is barely moving, don’t you think?  With north of one hundred pounds left to lose, surely they should be shifting more quickly than this? Come on you Gods of Skinny, throw me a bone here. I’m not even pitching for fireworks when I step on the scale, I just want to see steady progress. I don’t want to be sitting here two months from now trying to justify to myself why the number on the scale is the same as it was in early June.

My head panicked and jumped around all over the place last week, especially after my mid-week Shitbird check-in when it looked like the number might have gone higher still. I mentally rifled through all the fad diets I’ve ever done, desperately trying to recall the one that had helped me drop loads of weight really quickly and then keep it off. Oh yes that’s right, silly me…there wasn’t one. There’s no such thing as a quick fix, and that’s why my arse would still give your average moose a run for its money.

On the upside, the No Count plan seemed to work okay for me last week, and my 2lbs loss made me feel a lot more positive so I’m going to keep it going. I dropped a few balls in the first couple of days as I was navigating my way around it, but I feel better prepared this week, and I shopped yesterday like I knew what I was doing. Time will tell, right?

The Asshole voice has piped down now I’ve kicked sugar to the kerb and cut off his oxygen. My meals are planned and I’m not working away this week so all my stars are aligned…I just need to deliver. Come on, lets go for two more 🙂

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Fighting The Good Fight

In the here & now, ,

The first week of going cold-turkey where refined sugar is concerned is always the pits. I’m hanging in there, and happy to report that I haven’t caved, despite my Asshole voice rolling out every trick in the book in an attempt to cure me of the ridiculous notion that I can live without it.

Wednesday brought its own unique brand of torture. I was working in Birmingham, and one of our recruitment partners had very kindly offered us their office space to do some interviews. The room was lovely, with tea and coffee all laid out, together with a plate of biscuits. And I’m not talking just any biscuits…these were Choco Leibniz biscuits. My favourite. There’s something about the buttery crunchy biscuit base and the thick slab of chocolate sitting on the top which makes me want to lock lips as soon as I clap eyes on them.

I could tell you now exactly how they were arranged on the plate, because for the three hours we spent in that room I was barely able to focus on anything else. There were six of them. Four were arranged down one side of the plate, chocolate side up, and two were in the middle, chocolate side down and leaning against a pile of bleh biscuits which occupied the other side of the plate.

Did you know that the long fluted edge of a Choco Leibniz has fifteen little chocolatey bumps on it? And the short edge has eleven. I fantasised about biting into each and every single one of them. Or resting my tongue in between one of those little chocolatey bumps, and resisting the temptation to lick so it’d last for the longest possible time,  just waiting for that sweet chocolate to melt and explode onto my tastebuds. Or best of all nibbling all the chocolate from around the edge first, before dunking the middle bit in my coffee. For three hours those thoughts wrestled for pole position with everything else going on in my head.

They almost drove me mad, but I didn’t have one. It was warm in the room we were using so we had the window open, and every now and again there was a suggestion of a breeze which carried the scent of them right to my nose. I could feel myself sniffing the air like a lion with an antelope in it’s sights…shit the bed I wanted one so badly. But I left all six on the plate.

And last night, I went out for dinner with three very good friends. We’d picked the restaurant carefully, and researched the menu before we went so we were all confident that we could stick to our respective food plans. And that was fine, except as we were seated, dessert in the form of baclava was delivered to the table next to us. Oh you have no idea.

I could see the crispy filo pastry ready to flake stickily as someone bit into it. I could see the crushed pistachios on the top and the gleam from layers of sticky awesomeness. I think all four of us let out an involuntary variation on ‘Mmmm…I love baclava‘ as we collectively stalked every mouthful taken by the folks who’d ordered it. Three of us are on the same journey in terms of getting the food demons under control, and we had one much-envied string bean in our midst who has to fight just as hard as we do to stay there, you know?

From my perspective, if just one amongst our group of four had voiced the words fuck it, I’m ordering baclava,  I think we all would’ve jumped on the bandwagon. I came this close. It was a bit like being in a baclava-related scene of The Voice, with me and my friends in the big chairs waiting to see who’d push their buzzer first and get first bite before we all turned our chair around. Happily none of us pushed the buzzer for baclava but just because I didn’t, doesn’t mean I didn’t think about it for the rest of the evening, or that I’m not still thinking about it now.

*Sigh*…it’s all work in progress, right? I stared temptation down twice this week, and every time I say no, it gets me a little more skin in the game.

Day five of being refined-sugar- free in the bag…come on day six, let’s see what you’ve got 🙂

 

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Stepping Back From The Ledge

In the here & now, ,

Three full days under my belt without going rogue, check. Get me. And you know it’s been okay, despite a couple of curve balls. Yesterday morning I took two shredded wheat and a banana to work for my breakfast, along with a drizzle of honey (I’m sorry but even hardcore dieting days require a drizzle of honey on shredded wheat, right? It tastes like a stale bird’s nest otherwise). It was all going really well until I doused the contents of my bowl in skimmed milk which, as it turned out, was 10 days out of date, and rancid.

I rest my case. Nobody likes the skinny stuff. We must get through five hundred litres of semi-skimmed milk on a daily basis in our office, and yet the skimmed milk had clearly been hanging around on the bottom shelf like Billy-no-mates since God was a lad.

Anyway, after I’d finished ranting about my spoiled breakfast – never have two shredded wheat been quite so publicly mourned – I resisted the temptation to dip instead into my stash of emergency porridge. On Sunday, I’d swapped out my food plan to the No Count version of weight watchers, and instant porridge isn’t on the list, so it stayed in the drawer whilst I ate a couple of plums instead. Without grumbling, which is always a good indication that I’ve dragged my sorry ass away from the ledge. The crisis has definitely passed.

Dont you think it’s harder though, to step away from the ledge when you’ve had a blow out blow out, as opposed to just a blow out? Despite the three solid days that I’ve got in the bag since I rebooted my attitude on Sunday, I still feel like I’m carrying more than just guilt about the four days I spent eating off-piste. I swear I can feel my arse following me as I walk. It’s like a bad spy movie, where I turn around quickly and nobody’s there but as soon as I start walking again I know I’ve picked up a tail.

It’s reflected on the scales too. To my horror, I had a cheeky mid-week step-on this morning and the needle had continued to go in the wrong direction. Like five pounds on wasn’t enough to prove the point that off-piste eating was a bad idea, the Shitbird scale messed with my head by suggesting another three of the fuckers had joined the party in my pants.

Now, at the time I was rushing around trying to get out of the house to catch an early train, so I didn’t have the luxury of following Shitbird protocol (which demands an immediate recount on every tile in the bathroom followed by best of fifteen on the most favourable spot) so it might not be accurate.

However. When you feel skinny, it’s easier to act skinny. When you feel fat on the other hand…well it’s harder somehow. Standing on the platform this morning with my skinny latte and my banana, the desire to throw my banana at the first skinny girl I saw and go get a bacon butty from one of the food carts was overwhelming. Happily, I resisted which is the reason I didn’t get arrested, and I made my train without incident.

But I’m still having a fat day, which stacks the odds in favour of broken thinking, right? I’ve got the wind behind me though and I’m feeling mardy, so bring it on, I say.  I’m up for a fight ?

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Climbing Out Of The Hole. Again.

In the here & now, , ,

Saturday night found me sitting at home on my own feeling wretched. My one bad day had morphed into a run of bad days. Confidently declaring I choose skinny, after pouring my heart out to you guys on Friday turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of words and a really strong statement of intent, you know? I believed it from the bottom of my soul as I tipped those words onto the page, but somehow the intent never got wired up to actually drive a turnaround in the way I was behaving. For that reason, Saturday had been day four of what felt like a freight train descending into anarchy.

From a position of food sobriety, I’ve often wondered how it’s possible to have both my head and my heart lined up behind a determination so strong that it could support the weight of a thousand cravings, only for me to watch it fall away to dust when I’m in the grip of an overwhelming need to eat shit, and lots of it. At the very moment that I’m pushing food into my face, I can hear the sound of my Asshole voice laughing hysterically, as he takes the piss out of my naivety in daring to believe I’d ever have the power to stop him in his tracks.

So. Two steps forward and ten steps back huh? If you’ve clocked my conversation with the Shitbird Scale this week, well. What can I tell you? That’s the aftermath of the last few days and it officially sucks. I had to reset the dial yesterday morning, and by some miracle I managed to pull a textbook day right out of the bag. Yesterday, happily, the Gods of Skinny were on my side.

As I laid my lazy arse back in that big fat armchair on Saturday night, I was catching up on one of my favourite medical dramas on the TV and the  Psych doctor said something which struck a chord. He wasn’t talking about me, obviously, but in that moment when I was beating a path back and forth to the freezer eating one raspberry magnum ice-cream after another, he may as well have been. What he said was this…

Ironically relapse can be a very important part of recovery…it happens to most addicts at some point and it’s very often the utter misery of falling off the wagon that motivates those that suffer to finally get serious about staying sober.

Ain’t that the truth.

The only person rooting for me to keep on eating ice cream was Charlie dog, who always gets to lick the lolly stick so to be fair, although I feel sure in his little furry bonce he’d want the best for me, him rooting for me to stop would be a bit like turkeys voting for Christmas and on that basis I forgive him for egging me on.

Even as I ate those ice-cream lollies, one after the other, I didn’t really want them. I just felt compelled to have them. But the words spoken by Dr Whatever-his-name-was kind of stopped me in my tracks because I was miserable. Utterly fucking miserable. And somehow, for once I wasn’t easy in my own company. It was a lonely place. Just me, and the pile of lolly sticks sitting in the chair with a drooling dog at my feet. Some life, right? The thing is, it’s not my life.

It used to be, but it’s not any more. And in that moment, realisation dawned that I was just passing through. I wasn’t staying in that old life. I’d visited it, briefly – well not that fucking briefly if we’re splitting hairs – but it was as wretched as I ever remember it, and I wasn’t staying. No way Jose…it was time to come back. I practically sprinted.

If we’re looking for the learning opportunity here, it’s glaring me in the face. The moment I started messing with my food plan a few weeks ago coincided with my decision to just reintroduce a bit of sweet stuff into my diet…it doesn’t take Einstein to make the connection, does it? No refined sugar equals food sobriety with no binges and an inner peace. Reintroducing refined sugar on the other hand – even in small quantities – well, I’m right back to that combative broken relationship with anything that goes in my mouth.

So listen, I’ve been back to the dark side, and I’ve learned a lesson. To those of you who can achieve and maintain balance by eating a bit of what you fancy from time to time, well fair play to you and I’m more than a little bit envious of your self control. Me, I clearly don’t have the ability to control shit when I’m under the influence of sugar. I sort of knew that, based on the first four months of this year but like a true scientist I needed to prove the theory. And now I have.

So I can’t have it. And I’m not going to have it. This is day two of my refined-sugar-free food sobriety and tomorrow will be day three. Next week’s conversation with the shitbird scale will paint a different picture, and the horrors of this last week will become just one more scar amongst the motley collection which have opened and closed many times over the years.

My heart feels lighter already 🙂

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One Hundred And Fifty One Minutes

In the here & now, , ,

That’s how long it took, to go from hero to zero. I’m always honest with you guys, right? Best buckle in then, let’s get it over with.

I woke up in a dark place on Wednesday, I mean I’d really seen my arse. From the moment I opened my eyes I was seething with resentment that I had to be on this stupid fucking diet in the first place, and I knew I was going to have a bad day. If I look back on the sequence of events I can sort of see it unravelling.

I had a rubbish night’s sleep on Tuesday night, which I think is  where it all started to go tits up. I’d had to pull out of my fat furnace class at the Kingdom of Pain due to my knee, which since our cycling adventures on Sunday has been giving me hell. I’d settled down later in the evening to draft a blog post, but no words had come.

It happens every now and then, you know? I wrote and rewrote the same few moany paragraphs until I was boring myself sick, and I ended up turning in after midnight with a pile of shite on the page and a plan to look at it with fresh eyes in the morning. Which I did, and it was still shite. It took a while for me to get it to a point where I was ready to send it out to your ears and that meant I was late getting into the office.

My to do list was overwhelming, and from late morning I was tied up in a meeting that was due to go on for the rest of the day. For all the reasons I’ve talked about I’d not had time to prepare any food to take to work, so when the catered lunch arrived at 11.59am, my defences were shot.

And I fell.

Mini yorkshire puddings with rare beef and horseradish…oh yes I’ll have one of those. Then another two. Three BLT sandwich triangles and a handful of crisps. Back for another mini yorkshire, and a king prawn and cream cheese blini. MMMmmm that was nice, best have a couple more of them. There’s cake? Awesome. The rocky road looks good…three of those then and a square of ginger cake whilst I’m there. They’re only little after all.

We’re done? I’ll just carry the six remaining squares of cake across the hall for the girls in the office…girls, (chewing) there are five pieces of cake here if anyone wants them...

Just in case anyone on the planet was still under any illusion that I was watching what I ate, I also managed to sink six treacle toffees before we wound the meeting up. One hundred and fifty one minutes to eat my own bodyweight in crap, and I did it beautifully. It was carnage.

So from there, contrite and lesson learned, I headed home to sit on the naughty step and think about what I’d done, right?

Did I fuck. I drove three miles out of my way because I wanted pizza, and whilst I was picking that up I bought a box of Magnum ice cream lollies for my boy. Except I ate three out of the box of four before he got home, and I didn’t tell him about the fourth. FYI I ate that yesterday. Which wasn’t as bad as Wednesday but I won’t be winning any prizes for clean eating, that’s for sure.

How is it, that the ground beneath my feet can be so fucking solid one day – actually for more than one hundred days – and then I’m jettisoned headlong into dieting quicksand for no apparent reason? I think messing around with my food plan has had a catastrophic effect on my psyche. Lesson learned, eh.

This morning, I just feel a bit dazed. And I’ve got two choices haven’t I? I can choose a skinny life, where I pick myself up and reset. Or I can choose to carry on behaving like a fucking ejit.

I choose skinny. I’m starting again with my clean eating as of today, right now in this moment. I’m not waiting until Sunday. From today, and one day at a time.

Walk with me? I need you guys 🙂

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