Category Archives: In the here & now

Degrees Of Light And Shade

Diet update, In the here & now, , ,

whoops

I think I hit the 60lbs milestone last weekend. At least that’s my best guess…I’m still kicking myself for not getting weighed right at the start of this journey, but let’s just say back then my relationship with the bitch in the bathroom wasn’t in a good place. If you’ve been reading along you’ll know I’ve encountered a buggeration factor or two in recent weeks, so I ended up treading water for a bit. Annoying but hey, if you’re treading water at least you’re not sinking, right? But, I’m on the move again and 60lbs off is pretty awesome, if you’ll forgive me a big fat happy dance.

When I started this diet, like every one before it my intention was to hit it completely straight – no weeks where my weight stuck, no weeks where one of those minxy little pounds snuck back into my pants when my back was turned, and certainly no close encounters with my trigger foods. Hmm. I am at least having the good grace to look a bit sheepish but you know what, life just isn’t like that is it? And I’m actually starting to appreciate the degrees of light and shade that I’m encountering on this journey.

Every time I’ve stumbled, I’ve done a bit of a post-FUBAR debrief, and what I’ve realised is that most times where I’ve struggled a bit, I’ve gained a soupçon of insight that maybe I didn’t have before. That’s helping me. And more importantly that that, I’ve come to understand that struggling is different than failing. Now all of you might know that already, but it’s taken me a while to catch on.

It used to baffle me when folk talked about enjoying something more if they’d sweated their cahoonies off to get it. It always struck me as far too much like unnecessary hard work, you know? Working overtime for six straight months with no treats and no new handbags in order to pay for your holiday didn’t mean you’d enjoy it more than if you’d banged it on a credit card and saved the bill for Ron, surely?

Similarly I’ve fantasised often about what it would be like to just wake up one day in a gorgeous skinny body. I mean like go to bed fat and wake up skinny. Instant skinniness…it’s every fat girl’s dream. But I can tell you exactly how that fantasy would have played out…by the end of week one my skinny pants would be a bit on the snug side and within weeks those sleek smooth limbs would start to resemble a lumpy old pillow. Because that’s what would’ve happened if you’d attached this head to a perfect body…they wouldn’t match.

So, my journey so far has been about as straight as a dog’s hind leg. It doesn’t look like I intended it to when I set out but you know what, the degrees of light and shade are making it stick. Instead of perfect-perfect-perfect-fail-the end, it looks more like try-try-succeed-whoops-yes!-celebrate-scratch head- try-try-happy-pissed off-try-lightbulb-try-succeed-try-shit-happy…not straight, but beautiful in its own way.

That’s why I feel sure that eventually, when I do wake up in my skinny body – my hard-won long awaited skinny body – all these learning opportunities mean it’ll be attached to a wise old head who cherishes it and treats it well, and no matter how hard the asshole voice nags, deprives it of cheese balls until the end of time.

Here’s to the next 60lbs…onwards! 🙂

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Everything I’m Not

In the here & now, , , , ,

eyes-belly

I woke up with a familiar sickly feeling this morning, and I have to say it served as a sharp reminder about both how far I’ve come, and how far I still have to travel on this journey to Skinny Town. It’s my own fault for handing over the control of all food-related decisions to the Asshole voice after I got in from work yesterday…he was on form, as always and I can’t even pretend that I put up a fight.

I’d been very organized before I left in the morning, throwing liver and onions in the crock-pot to slow cook all day, so by the time I got home there was a divine smell. My boy, who would rather stick pins in his eyes than go anywhere near liver and onions threw a dirty look at the crock pot and fixed himself a pizza. Obviously I wasn’t going to fall out with that…more for me, right?

So I’d worked out the Smart Points value in the morning and there was only ten in the whole thing. Which to be fair would have comfortably fed three people…three normal people. People who didn’t eat as though their food supply was about to be turned off for a month. My eyes lit up like a Christmas tree when I lifted the lid.

The Asshole voice was all over it. There’s only ten points in the whole thing so you’ve got more than enough to cover it. And it’s liver…you can’t re-heat liver and it’s too awesome to go to waste. Yes, I know the dog’s almost having a heart attack trying to let you know he’d be happy to share but it’ll give him gas and then we’ll ALL suffer. You can manage that, come on you’re hardcore! It’s only ten points!!

I’ve got to admit, it was a challenge fitting it all on the plate, along with the mountain of vegetables, but purleease…as a fat girl who’s built many a salad bowl in a dish the size of a thimble at pizza hut over the years, I know how to build a plate so nothing escapes. And I ate it…all of it. It was only ten points at the end of the day.

I was fit to pop, so stopping there might have been a smart move, right? Ahhh…isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing. I just fancied something to finish with, and there he was again. Yes I know it’s true that you’re practically about to burst, but chocolate cherries hardly take up any space at all, and you’ve got eight points left! You can’t keep them in the bank, use them or lose them, you know the rules…

So I ate eight points’ worth of chocolate covered cherries.

Then, having got the taste for them I finished the bag using exercise points accrued and some of my additional weekly points for good measure. The last three that I put in my mouth took some effort…I was starting to feel a bit sick to be honest. And yet. I had points to cover them, and I was on one.

This morning when I woke up, I knew I’d over-stepped the boundary. I just felt bilious and that familiar prickle of guilt was there, even though technically I was within points, if you don’t mind a bit of creative accounting. But I wasn’t within normal. Normal folk wouldn’t have done that.

For some reason, I was thought about my Grandma. I have no idea why, but something she used to say started rattling around in my head. Don’t apologise for the things that you’re not…instead, shout about the things that you are. Okay then.

I AM A MUPPET.

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Unleashing The Skinny Wrath

In the here & now

Snake-Oil-Salesman

So, it’s about a month since I tinkered around with the blog, and started displaying a couple of advertising banners down the right hand side. Eventually, of course I’d like to get to a place where I can earn even a little bit of revenue from all the hours of love I pour into the blog, and so this was my first attempt at exploring the art of the possible.

I think it’s fair to say it hasn’t been a rip roaring success, mainly down to the fact that the adverts have largely been shit. I mean, I’m not allowed to click on my own advertising banner, so I have no way of knowing what lays beneath the headlines. However, when I look at a cartoon picture of a badly drawn banana, accompanied by the suggestion that I should avoid this and four other fruits if I wish to preserve my levels of testosterone, I have to say I probably wouldn’t fall over myself to make further enquiries even if I was allowed.

Nor would I have been tempted by the advert for Metal Supermarkets, Government solar panel funding or some file converter free download thingy. Yesterday they even had the cheek to offer a click-through opportunity to meet  Russian singles, I mean come on. All I needed was an advert for Snake Oil and I would have had a full set of dodgy. There’s clearly work to do, and I don’t think even the most persuasive marketeer could convince me that these morsels were hand picked to tempt my discerning readership.

Hardly surprising then, that over the month I appear to have earned the princely sum of 47p. It seems my dreams of imminent retirement were a little premature, dammit. So, I started looking around, and thought maybe I’d give Amazon a try. I mean that’s a reputable site, right? They sell pretty much anything and their affiliate programme is supposed to be quite good, so I decided to can my first attempt and write my 47p loss down to experience.

Thirty minutes after I submitted my details to Amazon I got a polite thanks, but no thanks. I quote:

I have reviewed your application. When selecting Amazon.co.uk Associates Programme participants, we try to determine why a customer would seek out the website in question.

The programme is not set up to simply advertise Amazon.co.uk and third party links within websites, or make mini Amazon websites.

Since your website does not appear to be finished, we encourage you to resubmit your application after creating a unique site with original content.

Chuffing cheeky knackers! I lost it at that point…original content??? I’ll give them original bloody content…how about the blog posts I’ve written every single day for the last 8 months? There’s one hundred and fifty thousand words’ worth of original content right there for starters. I was beyond mad. So, they got a Dee special email by return… 🙂

Anyway, it turns out when they bothered to look again that I’m welcome after all. Sorry Dee, human error. Yeah whatever, I felt like telling them where to shove it to be honest, out of principle and sheer bloody-mindedness but I’ve never been one to cut my nose off to spite my face, so I didn’t. Anything’s got to be better than the dross we’ve been served by the other guys, right? So that’s how come you’ll start to see Amazon branded ads…I’m mixing it up a bit to see whether it works any better for me, and of course for you guys.

Better..? 🙂

By the way, just in case any of my subscribers are wondering why your skinny mail appears to have stopped, there was apparently some bug in the system but I’m assured you’ll start getting them again from tomorrow. I just don’t have much luck with subscription feeds do I?!

 

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Who Saw THAT One Coming!

In the here & now, , ,

exercise

Well, I’ll be damned! Who’d have thought it..? They said it would happen…to be fair, you lot pointed out that it would happen, and I nodded along of course, because you’re a bunch of wise old beans who know stuff. But genuinely, on the inside, and with my hand on my heart I didn’t believe it, not even a little bit. And yet. Here I am.

Did you notice, yesterday? At the risk of repeating myself, I wrote this…

I’ve missed walking this week – my sore hamstring and pinched nerve have given me more than a couple of challenges, but I’m slowly feeling better and it’s a gorgeous day out there…as soon as I’ve put my last full stop on the page, me and the furry one are going to go out and have a bit of fresh air. It might be a bit slower than normal, and it might take a bit longer but I’ve had a touch of cabin fever over the last few days, so it’s time to motor. That’s going to be up there flirting with a ten.

It was only when I was reading the post back to myself last night and looking at your messages, including an ‘I told you so’ email from one of the posse that I realised. It might have snuck up on me by stealth, but there I am in black and white, referring to something which falls completely under the heading of exercise in a very positive manner, as in I’ve missed it and I’m anticipating that I shall enjoy it to the power of ten. Bugger me!

Those words weren’t planned, they just tumbled onto the page with the rest of what I was thinking about. I wrote them without really thinking about them, and even as we walked, I didn’t realise that the Asshole voice was conspicuous by his absence. There was no nagging to hang an early left in order to cut the distance down from the route I had in my head. All I thought about yesterday, even as I was  gently encouraging my still-a-bit-tender hamstring up the big hill at the start of our walk, was how good it felt to be out in the fresh air, and not hobbling around at home feeling guilty because I wasn’t moving much.

And actually, whilst we’re on the subject, that’s another revelation. I didn’t fist-bump at the opportunity to sit on my backside all week and rest. To be fair there wasn’t much sitting going on anyway, given the bruising 🙁 but I genuinely felt frustrated that something had come along to disrupt the momentum that I’ve been building up over the last few months. I was even careful with my food plan to compensate for my lack of activity.

Even as I write this I’m shaking my head in wonder…I could almost use a cold compress on my forehead to help me cope with this amount of sensible. I didn’t do any of that through gritted teeth, or resent the hell out of having to tighten up my eating. I did what felt right, under the circumstances, and without really thinking too much about it in order to adapt and find the balance in a tricky situation. Me! I did that!! In a perverse kind of way, I’m grateful for the injury because it helped me see.

Every now and then, it’s good when someone helps me lift the veil off, you know? It makes me realise that bit by bit I’m changing. Honestly, I’m far more excited by the changes I can feel happening on the inside than I am about the fact that I’m four dress sizes down…my body has changed shape countless times over the years, but my head never shifted in the way it looked at things. This time, that’s what’s going to keep me in Skinny Town, right?

Two more pounds off this week…I feel strong, steady and very sure-footed. Come on!

 

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Shooting For The Tens

In the here & now, ,

tens

So I got to thinking, as I woke up and carved out in my head what today was going to look like, what score I’d give the day if I looked back and tried to put a number on how much I’d enjoyed it. And I can see how that might seem like a bit of a weird concept at first, but a random comment I overheard yesterday planted a seed of an idea in my head, which overnight has done its usual thing of turning nothing into something and setting a train of thought into motion.

The comment was made in response to someone dropping their carefully chosen cupcake on the floor during our office bake sale yesterday, which typically landed buttercream-side-down. I mean, of course it did…don’t they always, right? I head someone laugh, and then say Oh no, what does your joy look like today!

My first thought was what an odd thing to say – it’s not an expression I’ve heard before. My head immediately started demanding to know how the joy in my day was shaping up, but I was up to my eyes in bagging up cake and collecting money so I sort of forgot about it. However, in the way my mind often does, it busied itself developing the theme whilst I slept, and started demanding answers this morning as soon as I woke up.

Imagine if we had to put a number to how much we enjoy the stuff we fill our days with. Say maybe on a scale of 1-10, with the bottom of the scale being hating every minute of it, and ten being just about delirious with enjoyment. That led to me thinking about all the things I probably needed to do today, and I realised the list was quite short.

Saturdays tend to be the only day that I can completely call my own, so in the context of my week, today is it in terms of the best possible opportunity for squeezing in a few tens. I got to thinking about how many tens I’d have on my scoreboard from the stuff I needed to do today, and I seemed to have quite a lot of fingers left over when I’d finished counting. Bugger…I didn’t see that coming. If I can’t pepper my best day with tens that’s saying something about me isn’t it?

So, I decided I was going to make today all about the tens. The suggestion that this is a deliberate ploy to avoid any chore-related low scores is just a wicked rumour, and to be fair there aren’t too many chores that need doing. Well, apart from the mountain of fat clothes which need putting on eBay, the same mountain that I managed to ignore again last weekend and which continue to piss me off every time I walk past them. But apart from that I’m good.

My first ten of the day was a dirty great bacon sandwich, which was epic. And let’s face it, you’d probably expect a fair number of food-related high scores, right? This is me we’re talking about. However, I’ve also decided that I’m going to score a mood-boosting ten for effort by staying within points today, and so despite it being a bit points-expensive it was totally counted and totally worth it.

I’ve missed walking this week – my sore hamstring and pinched nerve have given me more than a couple of challenges, but I’m slowly feeling better and it’s a gorgeous day out there…as soon as I’ve put my last full stop on the page, me and the furry one are going to go out and have a bit of fresh air. It might be a bit slower than normal, and it might take a bit longer but I’ve had a touch of cabin fever over the last few days, so it’s time to motor. That’s going to be up there flirting with a ten.

Oh, and me and my boy took a walk down to our local bookmaker last night for a quick flutter on the Grand National, so the biggest ten of the day might come later, if I win. I’m not holding my breath, over the years I’ve discovered that my system of picking winners according to what colour the jockey is wearing or the name of the horse is more than a little bit flawed and I’ve never won a bean. It does make for a more exciting 20 minutes though, watching the race when you’ve had a little flutter.

Whatever you’re up to today, make it count… get out and chase those tens, they are yours for the taking 🙂

 

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