Category Archives: In the here & now

One Person, Two Mindsets

In the here & now, ,

So I’m two days post-stair machine and I’m pleased to say my bum cheeks are recovering nicely. I even managed to get up from my desk yesterday and walk across the office without looking like I’d just got off a horse. I wouldn’t have believed that five minutes on that thing could’ve had such an effect but clearly it worked something.

My plan was to go back last night for another session in the gym followed by a swim, but it took me almost two hours to get home from work because it was snowing a blizzard, and by the time I got in my motivation had waned a little. My boy had cooked supper, so I thought you know, maybe I’ll just have a light bite and sit down for half an hour before I go back out…hmm. Big mistake, right?

Two hours later (by this time in PJs) I acknowledged that it wasn’t going to happen. I’m not convinced I would’ve got my car off the drive anyway to be fair, the snow was still coming down, in fact I may well end up working from home today. If that happens, I’ll walk up to the pool at lunchtime and have my swim then instead. I much prefer that to turning out in the evening after a long day at work, especially in this shitty weather.

I’m struggling a bit this week, I’ve got to be honest. I’m good, I mean I haven’t over-eaten and I’m doing okay on the no sugar front, but I just want to fucking eat till my eyes pop out. I took lunch to work with me yesterday, along with a big bag of cherries, but the cherries didn’t even make it past the morning commute. I was clock-watching from around ten thirty and counting the minutes until I could reasonably eat lunch and then all afternoon I was preoccupied with what I might eat for supper.

It’ll pass, I know it will but it’s different to last week when it was all effortless. This week it’s anything but.

Don’t you think it’s really bloody annoying the way that happens? I’m the same person, in the same body as last week with the same ambition to climb out of this fat suit, except last week I breezed through the week without dwelling once on the things I couldn’t have. It was a textbook week. Yet here I am now, feeling pissed off because I’ve got to count points when all I really want to do is rip up the rule book and eat whatever the fuck I want until the end of time.

One person, two mindsets, depending on which way the wind is blowing. I can’t think of a single other example where my thinking is so fickle. Why is that? I’m fine one minute and I’m struggling the next. Then I’m fine again. Then I’m not. I often meet myself coming back and there’s no wonder I sometimes feel like a borderline basket case.

It’ll pass. Keep the faith, and just hang tough. We can do this together 🙂

 

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Something To Aim For

In the here & now, ,

I’ve been a bit non-specific of late in terms of my goals, and that probably hasn’t helped my cause, you know? It’s good to have something to aim for, I mean something tangible. I seem to remember the last time I mentioned any kind of goal I was planning to hit 215lbs by Christmas and clearly that didn’t work out too well. I went in the opposite direction and behaved like a right bloody ejit. But that was then, and this is now.

The Shitbird Scale rained on my parade a bit yesterday but as far as I’m concerned I’ve had a great week. With the exception of a close encounter on Saturday evening with a handful of Ferrero Rocher – which I don’t even like that much but they were there – I’ve closed out my first week off the white stuff and it’s gone well, so I was more than a bit pissed off when the number nudged up by almost a pound.

However, I reacted like a grown-up and wrote it off as a load of bollocks. I’ve had a good week therefore whatever weird shit is going on with the number, it’s not fat weight gain. Let it ride, see what it says next week and don’t sweat the small stuff. Granted, it was said with a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp, but it was still said. And that’s progress.

Anyway, speaking of goals…my first holiday of the year is now booked, for the middle of May. You know me, my feet were getting distinctly itchy and already I feel better knowing there’s a piece of the world just waiting to be explored. That gives me four months to get back to my lowest weight from last year, which also happens to be my lowest weight in years. That’s the challenge I’ve set myself, and it’s about 35lbs lighter than I am now so it’s going to take some doing but you know what, bring it on. The holiday’s my incentive to work hard.

That hard work started yesterday morning with a session in the gym. My friend Nic was there and egging me on…try the stair machine she said. Try the battle ropes. Try the TRX straps…it’s all good fun. And you know what, it actually was good fun at the time. It’s good to try new stuff. Well, all except the stair machine which was just undiluted torture after the first thirty seconds…I lasted five whole minutes, and I thought that was damn impressive.

It was later in the day when it stopped being fun and started being ‘I can’t fucking move‘. My bum cheeks felt like bowling balls and my arms felt like lead. On the upside, it stopped me from snacking my way though the evening because my arms refused to  follow the instructions coming down the pipe and my hand to mouth dexterity would’ve been a little shaky. I’d bought a kilo of cherries earlier in the day but I couldn’t even face the thought of lifting up the cherry pitter so they stayed in the fridge and I stayed in my armchair.

I tried to shake the duvet down when I went to bed last night but my attempt was so utterly feeble that I chose instead to sleep the night covered by a handkerchief-sized bit of duvet cover while 90% of my duvet lay bunched up in the opposite corner. To be fair, those battle ropes have probably put me out of any duvet-shaking activity for the next month at least.

However. It hurt, but it was supposed to hurt. My fitness has gone backwards in the last six months, and nobody said clawing it back was going to be easy, did they? Apparently though, my muscles have memory so they should in theory be able to get their shit together fairly quickly providing I turn up to workout and try hard. So I’m going to turn up at least three times a week, and I know once I’m in there I’ll be grand. Between that, and the swimming I reckon my goal is do-able.

Those fucking stairs though…

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Resident Of Lazytown

In the here & now, ,

So my conscience was poked a bit when Susan asked me on Wednesday whether I’d resumed workouts and whether I was still swimming…the answer is no. And Susan, by the time you’d passed further comment relating to how much you’ve always admired my drive and determination in pushing on with the workouts, I was shaking my head in embarrassment with my hands covering my ears. The truth is, I haven’t done much since before Christmas.

I know.

That situation needs to change, I recognise that. I full intended to go back to swimming straight after the new year, and I would have, except I had a small cyst taken off the side of my jaw and I had to have stitches in my face. They’re out now though, and I still haven’t been back to the pool so what does that tell you? As excuses go, it was quite a good one, although at this point I can’t quite remember what excuses I used running up to the holiday season as to why my activity had tailed off. Too tired, not enough time, full of cold…I suspect I used all of the above at least once or twice as I descended into inertia.

I’ve been light on the workout front since I had my knee surgery. I was due to go back to it in early November…by that time my knee was well up for it but sadly my head was not. There’d been a few changes at the Kingdom of Pain that I didn’t much like and it didn’t hold the appeal it once had, plus the rigid timetable had always been challenging in terms of getting there, so I moved on to pastures new. Well, technically I just moved on, since I haven’t yet settled into any particular new pasture worth noting.

There are lots of things I fancy doing, you know? I fully intend to resume my swimming because it’s a great way to decompress and I really do love it. I’d like to do more of the spin classes that we enjoyed so much a couple of months ago. There are a couple of other classes at the same place which look and sound like they might be fun, and I’ve also got access to thirteen leisure centres and almost five hundred classes a week as part of my swim membership. I’ve got lots of options, but I’ve been so busy considering all of them that I still haven’t gotten around to hauling my fat ass out of Lazytown and actually doing anything.

And I can feel the difference. In addition to the extra weight that managed to find its way back into my pants, I feel sluggish, you know? I’m loitering in that place where the less I do, the less I want to do and it’s incredible how quickly my body and mind have both embraced the armchair mentality. It doesn’t help that the evenings are cold and dark, and in winter my one hundred mile round-trip commute seems even more wretched than ever. By the time I get home it already feels like there’s hardly any evening left to enjoy so it’s an easy gimme for the Asshole voice to convince me that staying in and relaxing is the only feasible option.

Except it’s not really, is it? I should be heading back to that place where the more I do, the more I want to do, not the other way around. Maybe now I’m getting some traction with my food plan I need to broaden my focus and make a real effort to burn a few calories.

Later on today I’m swimming for the first time in almost a month. There, I’ve said it out loud now…it’s a commitment to myself. And y’all heard me, right?

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Life In The Quiet Zone

In the here & now, ,

So I’m two days into this sugar-free living malarkey and I’m feeling cocky because it’s not bothering me at all. Normally, for the first few days I can be a bit tetchy (she says, as friends and family fall over laughing…actually I’m usually like a bear with a sore arse, in fact a bear with the sorest arse any bear ever had) as my eyes adjust to a bleak and barren chocolate-free landscape.

This time, nothing, in fact I feel amazing. It’s like my head has just gone along with the plan… oh right we’re doing this sugar-free shit now? Cool, no worries..knock yourself out. I nipped out of work at lunchtime yesterday to pick up food, and some bits and pieces for a bunch of my colleagues. There were two different kinds of crisps on the shopping list which required me to pause and browse the snacks aisle, as well as two packs of cookies which meant I had to stray into that other well-known danger zone. Even as I was throwing stuff into my basket, it didn’t bother me one bit because…well, that’s not my kind of food any more is it?

Back in the office, the cookies were opened for general consumption and they sat on the desk opposite mine all afternoon. I didn’t flirt with them, not even once. And I don’t mean in a huffy I refuse to even look at you kind of way either…they just didn’t make it onto my radar. Now, we all know that normally they’d drive me bat-shit crazy from across the room, and I can’t begin to tell you how liberating it is when previously impossible-to-ignore food become invisible. I feel normal.

The most amazing thing of all is the way I sat in the armchair last night catching up with a bit of TV, and my mind stayed locked and loaded into the programme I was watching. It didn’t set off on a mental adventure around the cupboards in my kitchen wondering what snacking opportunities may be lurking behind closed doors. It wasn’t calculating how many of my weekly points I could get away with using up by the end of Tuesday. I didn’t even consider licking a piece of Charlie’s dog-chocolate. I mean, nothing. 

I’d been so absorbed in what I was watching, it wasn’t until I climbed the stairs to bed that I realised just how quiet it’d gone inside my own head. And the more I thought about it, the more I remembered that feeling of calm from the last time I kicked sugar to the kerb…it’s like someone throws a blanket over the incessant chatter which exists to de-rail my good intentions and the noise just stops. My mind becomes a dieting quiet zone and it’s fucking awesome.

Now, y’all know I’ve crashed and burned at this point several times so I’m not counting my chickens. And I can’t put my finger on why exactly, but this time I don’t think that’s going to happen. I’m not fighting with myself and it just feels like the time is right.

I’m calm. I’m determined and I think it’s time to bring this home 🙂

 

 

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My Sugar Swan Song

In the here & now, ,

So I weighed in yesterday at the end of my first full week in this shiny new year and happily it was a number worthy of the effort I’d put in, so I’m feeling great that I’m off to a flying start. It’s also one whole year since I started recording my weekly weigh-in with a picture on my Shitbird page, which makes it easy to look back and see what I lost this exact week last year.

I’d started my clean eating challenge if you remember, and I managed to cut out sweet things altogether. At the time I think I described myself as refined sugar free, and although when I look back I wasn’t exactly sugar free, my version was good enough. No sweets, cake, ice-cream, chocolate or crisps. I gave a very wide berth to every single trigger food on my list, and I felt calm and in control. It really worked for me, so guess what…I’m going there again.

I’ve had a great couple of weeks. I’ve lost my Christmas weight, and I’m not getting mega-hassle from the Asshole voice, but he is there snapping at my heels. I know I’ve been playing with fire, and filling up on free food so I can snack on the sort of stuff that should really send me straight to hell. I’ve got away with it so far, but I refuse to spend the next twelve months in a scene from Groundhog Day, losing and gaining the same thirty pounds. I’m putting my foot down, I mean, I’m really not doing it. 

I don’t want to get bogged down in analysis paralysis, but I look back at those numbers from the first few months of last year and you know what, there’s no getting away from the story they tell is there? By the end of April I’d lost thirty pounds. Thirty pounds!!  Then comes the point where I obviously rekindled my love-affair with the fat-girl crack and for two months after that I lost fuck all, well except for the plot, clearly.

I briefly wrestled control back in July, before spending the next six months snaking my way right back up to just two pounds away from where I’d started.

I’ve done a lot of reflection over the weekend, and it’s no accident that the most successful bit of last year coincided with my decision to eat cleanly and cut out the crap. So, that’s my plan, only this time I’m going to keep it up for longer. I managed four whole months last year, including a sugar-free holiday aboard a ship where chefs waited around every corner just to tempt me, and still I lost weight. I enjoyed the challenge, so I know I can do it when I put my mind to it.

Right now feels like the right time. I might as well capitalise on the fact that I’m not being a dickhead. The stars are aligned and my head is playing nicely, so I’m all in. I enjoyed a lovely meal with friends yesterday where I had a small slice of naughty, and I ate a ginger nut last night…let’s call that my sugar swan song shall we, because from now on, I’m done.

I find that weirdly exciting 🙂

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