Category Archives: In the here & now

A Perfect St Valentine

In the here & now, ,

So the nearer I get to my holiday, the more I keep expecting the wheels to come off my food plan. There are only four more sleeps to go, and generally by this point – usually way before this point if we’re splitting hairs – the Asshole voice would have kicked the pre-holiday campaign into full swing…you may as well stop now, you’re practically on holiday and you won’t lose any more weight between now and then. You’re going to blow it next week anyway so why don’t you just have a few days without having to worry about dieting and start your blow-out early…you’ve earned it.

This time..? Nothing. The food plan continues in textbook fashion, and not a murmur from the asshole between my ears.

I’m a bit baffled to be honest. Last night would have been a perfect opportunity for him to rattle his chains. I was in a proper strop when I finally got in from work, having left an hour early so I could make a 6pm class at the Kingdom of Pain only to get stuck in shitty traffic. My one hour commute turned into three hours so I missed class altogether…I wasn’t even close.

Then when I finally got home there was nothing in for supper. Well, there was, but it was all food I’m not supposed to be eating, because I rushed out yesterday morning without proper planning. So I cobbled together a fairly random and crappy supper consisting of a couple of crumpets which were past their ‘best before’ date, and a protein shake. I’m not going to lie, I didn’t get an A for effort. I couldn’t help feeling a bit envious at the thought of all those folk enjoying romantic and tasty valentine dinners,  as I sat there with my two stale crumpets and a crappy milkshake.

So the evening’s not going well, right? It was a stinker. Except in so many ways it was perfect. There was food in the fridge that my head just accepted was off-limits, so there was no debate to be had. No standing in front of the fridge whilst I tried to talk myself into it and then out of it again. No fight. Hello? That’s a first.

Then my boy came home later on with a box of seriously good chocolates that he’d been given, and normally I’d be all over those bad boys in a flash…last night, nothing. I wasn’t interested. I didn’t even smell them, that’s how immune I was. It’s not like I was grandstanding, or making a show of being good…I just didn’t want one. And let me be clear, not wanting one has never actually stopped me from having one in the past. If they were there, I could and if I could, I did. Always. But not last night.

Do you think I’m sickening for something?

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I Wish I’d Written That

In the here & now, ,

I read something really profound the other day…it was a post written by Holly, one of my favourite bloggers. I guess we all have certain blogs that we love to read, and I suppose like many of you who poke around the blogosphere I often find nuggets of wisdom from fellow travellers that help me in my own journey.

From time to time I read something and wish I’d written it myself, you know? This was one of those times. Holly wrote a blog post called Food Is My Person, (click HERE to find it) and reading her words was like looking into my own soul. It broke the surface of what I thought I felt about food, and forced me to acknowledge something much deeper. She articulated food addiction in a way that brought me to tears, and I identified with every single word, so I wanted to show it to you.

In some ways yesterday wasn’t a great day for me – it reminded me of the bad old days where a run-in with the Bitch in the Bathroom could, at the very least, ruin my whole day and often torpedo my food plan altogether. There should be some kind of reaction-cam in my bathroom so I could show you how quickly my mood changes depending on what conversation I have with the scale.

There are times when I walk into the bathroom jauntily, convinced I’ve had a good week, then punch the air and walk out just as jauntily. Other times I’ll waltz around the bathroom hopping on and off again multiple times on every damn tile before shuffling out of the bathroom like a condemned man if I can’t make it generate any good news.  I hate that this little glass square has the potential to vacuum my sunny disposition clean away and flick my happiness switch from one extreme to the other in an instant.

Yesterday, the Shitbird Scale started off by suggesting I’d gained a couple of pounds. For the first three or four step-ons it was having no part of this steady downwards trend I’ve been on so far this year. And I knew that couldn’t be right…my food plan has been bob-on and I haven’t put a foot wrong, so no way could I have gained weight.

I walked out of the bathroom with a heavy heart, trying to figure out whether I’d drunk enough water this week, whether I might be retaining fluid, whether I was overdue a poo, whether what I ate the night before might be curled up like a dormant food-baby waiting to be processed…I forensically examined my week, looking for clues as to why I might have plummeted from hero to zero in the weight-loss stakes. My mood headed south at warp speed, I mean I was sour.

I left it ten minutes, and then like a toddler picking a scab I went back in for another go, and this time the shiny glass Shitbird declared a one pound loss. So I nabbed a picture of it real quick and kicked the scale back in its box until next time but it left me feeling wobbly, and that’s stupid. And unnecessary. My input has been one hundred percent solid and my mind is focused. I’m in a good place.

I spent the rest of the day chuntering to myself. The scale has no power over me. Only I have power over me. I am forty two days food sober and I feel great. I am strong and I’m doing this, and that’s all that matters. The Shitbird Scale is a fucking psychopath. 

I might have repeated that last sentence more than once, just so you know 🙂

 

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Nothing In A Crackly Wrapper

In the here & now, , ,

Forty days. Four zero. Forty.

That’s how long it is since I ate something that I shouldn’t…I have to keep pinching myself, you know? It’s a milestone I can’t quite get my head around, when you consider how much my arse was dragging in the last few months of last year. And I’ll tell you what else…I haven’t really found it hard.

I know, right? I don’t understand it either. It’s like the Asshole voice has fallen off a cliff, because he hasn’t rattled his chains in well over a month. And I’m convinced it’s down to the fact that I’m giving refined sugar a really wide berth. I haven’t gone completely sugar-free…I’m not quite ready to go the whole hog and cut it out of my diet altogether, but to be honest I’m pretty close.

For forty days I’ve eaten no processed foods at all. No chocolate. No crisps or snacks. And that means that as I’ve been watching TV in the evenings, my viewing experience has been completely binge-free. Just me, on my own and flying solo without any treats which lead to more treats which lead me directly to hell in a hand cart. I’ve eaten grapes, or melon or a handful of nuts, but nothing which comes in a crackly wrapper.

It’s a weird thing you know…I feel like I’ve been set free. Right now, in this moment and all the moments over the last forty days I haven’t had to fight with myself over every food decision. I haven’t eaten a treat within my food budget and then taken that same budget down to the wire by having one more, then one more, all the time furiously recalculating what I might be able to eat for the rest of the week so I can eat still one more in this moment.

Those mid-afternoon cravings in the office have gone. That’s traditionally where my day took a wobble – everything up to lunchtime would be measured and planned, but whatever I put into my mouth with my afternoon cuppa would pretty much dictate how the rest of the day went, you know? Skidding home in the evening with only a sparse food budget left then spending what was left of the day driving myself mad with thoughts of all the things I wanted but couldn’t have.

Sometimes I’d cave and have them anyway, paying my Weight Watchers points forward with promises that I’d have a lean day tomorrow. Sometimes I’d just think fuck it and blow the budget then spend the rest of the week feeling guilty about the fact that I had no control, and pissed off that I’d left myself no further snacking opportunities. Whichever way, there was no respite from the food thoughts playing on a loop in my head, constantly stirred by my Asshole voice.

Imagine living that way, all the time. It’s like being stalked by some malevolent food beast that you just can’t get away from. The liberation that comes from that all of a sudden not being there is hard to describe. I remember being bullied when I was quite young and feeling like it was never going to end. My meek and gentle mum found out and raised all kinds of hell at the school, and it stopped immediately. What I’m feeling now reminds me of how I felt then, when I realised I could walk through the playground without having to worry about who was hiding in wait for me around the next corner.

Now, all that said, I’m not perfect…I am eating mountains of vegetables, and my portion sizes aren’t getting smaller…I know I need to focus on that, but at the end of the day nobody ever got fat by eating too much broccoli, right? One step at a time.

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Size Matters!

In the here & now, ,

I bought a lovely new top a couple of weeks ago, one size smaller than I’ve worn of late and my intention was to lose enough weight to be able to wear it on my holidays. I was feeling very confident as I fished it out of the wardrobe last night and tried it on. I started to sense it might be a bit too snug as I pulled it over my head and realised it didn’t contain as much elastic as I’d thought it did. I wasn’t wrong, but driven by the desire to get into something the next size down I pushed on regardless.

So, I concluded that it will look lovely when I’m another fifteen pounds down, but right now there’s not a hope in hell of me wearing it. Not if I want to move around. Or in fact breathe.

That said, at one point I thought I was going to have to wear it between now and when I’ve lost those fifteen pounds because I couldn’t actually wriggle my way out of it. The fabric had my arms in a vice-like grip and I couldn’t move them enough to reach around and pull it over my head. I  flapped around the bedroom busting moves for a good fifteen minutes before I finally managed to escape and put the offending article back on its hanger.

Now, I love the top and I’ll keep it of course…at some point over the next couple of months it’ll definitely fit me. But it dawned on me as I shoved it back in the wardrobe that I felt really fat. Which is ironic, because the only reason I tried the top on in the first place was because climbing the stairs to bed I’d felt really skinny and I was convinced my turbo-charged January meant I’d done enough to get into it.  Bugger.

I reckon it’s because I didn’t buy it from a fat girl shop. I’m wearing a size twenty now, which for my friends Stateside is a sixteen…the stuff I’ve bought in that size from fat girl shops is comfortable on me, you know? This one came from a regular store for regular girls, and as I stomped around the bedroom  last night trying to get the circulation back in my arms I hold my hands up and admit to using a few choice words about the skinny pattern-cutters who clearly want girls with bingo wings to stay the hell out of Dodge.

Having had experience of being fat through the ages, it’s definitely easier now to walk into a regular store and find stuff in bigger sizes, but it sort of defeats the object if they begrudge every extra inch of fabric. It’s like they want to tap into the fat-girl market without having to actually make them feel welcome. I imagine a gaggle of skinny designers sat around the table looking mardy with their herbal calorie-free tea debating whether they could even get away with charging more for fat-girl sizes, after all people who can afford to eat so many hob-nobs can clearly afford to pay extra, right?

Logic tells me that it shouldn’t matter what it says on the label as long as something fits and it looks nice, but I have a skinny friend who refuses to shop in a certain store because she has to pick up a ten when she’s really an eight. See, contrary to that wicked rumour, size matters… 🙂

 

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The Moose Who Got A Spray Tan

In the here & now, ,

You’ll never believe what I’ve gone and done…I’ve only taken the plunge and booked a spray tan for the day before we go on holiday. I know! I mean, I still have to gear myself up for the humiliation of standing in front of a skinny string bean with my kit off, in a pair of paper knickers which I can guarantee will not have been created with an arse the size of mine in mind, but do you know what, I don’t really care.

I don’t tan these days – I suffer from vitiligo, which means that I’m slowly losing the pigment in my skin, so when the bits of me that do still go brown see the sun, I end up looking like someone flicked tan coloured paint at my milk-bottle white skin, if you can picture what I mean…it’s sort of messy. So I tend to rock the pale and interesting look most of the time and pretty much avoid the sun completely. The thing is, when I see my friend turning a lovely shade of golden brown towards the end of our holidays I always get a tinge of envy…I do love a nice tan. And I’ll tell you what else, don’t you think being tanned makes you feel thinner? I do.

So as I was having my nails done on Saturday, I decided to go for it and I’m all booked in. I realise it’ll all happen the wrong way round, me heading off on holiday in all my bronzed glory to spend a week somewhere hot before returning home as white as a ghost but at least for the first two or three days I’ll feel like I belong in the holiday photos, right? Somewhere around the middle of the holiday, me and my friend might even be the same colour as she develops her tan and mine washes away down the plughole 🙂

Just booking my tanning session made me feel a bit giddy. It’s another example of something I would never have done when I was at my fattest, I mean it’s not just the thought of standing in front of a stranger with all the peaks and valleys of my morbidly obese body on display, although that would be bad enough. It’s the thought of what they might go home and tell their friends afterwards about the moose who got a spray tan, you know?

Every now and again it’s good to remember the way I used to have to navigate my life, avoiding situations where I might become the butt of somebody’s joke. It was exhausting. I used to think two or three steps ahead constantly so I didn’t bump into a situation that I hadn’t planned for, or figured out in advance how to handle. Where I went, what I did, where I sat, what I wore…everything had to be scrutinised through a fat-girl lens to establish its suitability for someone like me. And you don’t need me to tell you that the Asshole voice had a never-ending supply of reasons why I couldn’t do things that normal people could, and what people might think about me if I tried.

Today is day 36 of my new start. I had another strong week last week, and the Shitbird Scale rewarded me with another good loss. The further away I walk from the cycle of behaving myself then spectacularly falling off the wagon, regroup and repeat, the more sure the ground feels under my feet. For the first time in my life, I have been chocolate and salty-snack free for five weeks and one day, resulting in a loss of 13lbs since the beginning of January, which is more than all of last year’s net effort put together.

I’m calm. And trust me when I tell you that calm is the real soul food.

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