Category Archives: In the here & now

What Goes In One End…

In the here & now, , ,

ideas

It’s funny you know, there are so many things that we’ve chatted about over the last few months where I’ve come to realise that life and diet kind of mirror each other, you know? It’s almost like there’s a set of life rules which apply to all situations including food and lifestyle choices, which I always regarded as something completely separate.

I’m going through the process of applying tags to all my posts at the moment so they feed into the tag cloud I made last week, and reading some of the older posts reminded me of some of the moments where things started to fall into place for me. Unpicking the flawed thought patterns in my head is an ongoing process which has been utterly priceless on this journey so far, and I find myself drawing comparisons all over the place now, often subconsciously which goes to show just how determined my head is to weed out all the crap.

This week, out of nowhere, I found myself staring one of my more familiar mantras square between the eyes and wondering how I’d never drawn the parallel before between life and diet. I bang on about it all the time, and yet I’ve never joined the dots.

So one of the things that I live and breathe in my day job is leadership development. When people first start cutting their teeth in leadership roles, one of the things which sometimes trips them up is where they start holding people accountable for the results they get without giving any thought to the input which was at the root of someone’s success or failure in any given project.

Of course you have to measure and evaluate whether someone is achieving results, but you can’t coach and develop their output, can you? What you can do as a leader is coach and support someone in how they do their job, so the quality of their input is better. In turn that has a direct effect on their results, which get better. Every time.

My mantra therefore is that you manage the input, and measure the output. Don’t hold people accountable for just the results, right? The results are what they are, actually they’re just a by-product of what someone has put in at the front end…accountability starts and ends with the behaviours which feed those results at the business end. And I was listening to one of our senior managers playing that back to someone in his team, and the penny dropped…how is that different in the context of our efforts to lose weight? It’s not! Of course it’s not, in fact saying it out loud makes me feel like Queen of stating the bleeding obvious.

I should worry less about what the bitch in the bathroom is going to tell me, and focus all my energies instead on what I’m bringing to the party. The number I drop at the end of the week is a direct result of my input over the last seven days, right? With the odd blip here and there, but by and large there’s a direct correlation. The number is what it is, the bits that I’m accountable for are the choices I’ve made around what I’m putting in my mouth and how far and how fast and how regularly I’m moving my body.

I take care of the input, and the bitch in the bathroom’s only job is to report back on the number. Providing she’s on the correct tile, obviously.

Of course it’s never just that simple is it…if it was I’d have earned my string bean stripes donkey’s years ago. It’s complicated by the Asshole voice who’s on a mission to derail the input and my own occasional willingness to listen to him over holding the line and getting it right every time. However. Instead of saying I’m going for three pounds down this week, what I should be saying is I’m going for a 100% clean eating week with exercise every day and I’m going to resist any asshole suggestions that don’t support the cause.

So…I’m going for a 100% clean eating week with exercise every day and I’m going to resist any asshole suggestions that don’t support the cause.

Watch this space 🙂

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Stone Cold Easter Egg Sober

In the here & now, ,

easter

Happy Easter one and all…I hope you have a wonderful day whatever you’re up to. Me, I have nothing special planned, other than today being the day that I’ll get my fat wardrobe loaded on eBay, as well as walking with Charlie dog and playing host to my mum who will be with us later.

I think it’s only the second time in my life where I haven’t eaten chocolate for breakfast on Easter Sunday. I almost feel like I’m breaking the law. I must admit I had a quick two minute sulk before I emerged from under the duvet this morning at how unfair it all was that more than likely everyone in my neighbourhood except me would be in a sugar-induced coma at that very moment, but then I looked across my bedroom at the mountain of fat clothes which are too big for me to wear now, and I got over myself pretty quickly. See? If I’d moved that pile of stuff when I should have, it wouldn’t have been there to sweeten my mood today.

On our walk yesterday, my thoughts turned to the shopping I needed to do afterwards, and I couldn’t help wondering exactly how many Easter eggs I was going to get mugged by as I walked around the supermarket. Not to mention the fact that currently cheese balls are on offer two for one. It all made me feel a bit under attack, you know like a double-whammy of temptation.

I kicked that one around for ages, before deciding to simply go to a different shop. I’ve already ‘fessed up about my momentary weakness this week with the cheese and pickle sandwich, and fries so I’m not in the mood for flirting with the danger zone. Bargain and cheese balls have proven to be a killer combo in the past and I wasn’t going anywhere near it.

Seriously, earlier this week when I was in there I must have walked past and eyed them up at least half a dozen times, arguing with the Asshole voice the whole time. Thankfully yesterday’s diversionary tactics paid dividends and I came home without either, having treated myself to a pack of the biggest fattest cherries you’ve ever seen.

I did make myself a sweet treat for breakfast this morning though, have any of you tried the skinny banana muffins from the video on my foodie stuff page? I’m not gonna lie, you will have tasted better muffins. But if you steer clear of the butter and icing sugar – neither are needed -they hardly cost any smart points, and they are sweet. To be fair, once you’ve sampled a few batches and gotten over the texture (which is distinctly un-muffinlike) they’re not half bad.

Anyway…for those of you who accepted the three-pound-challenge challenge last Sunday, I hope you did better than me 🙁 Half a poxy pound gone this week…I’m slightly underwhelmed. Still, I started off the week with a bigger promise than I managed to deliver in the end, so I’ve written this week down to experience, and I am about to unfold a beautiful shiny new Weight Watchers week. How did y’all do?

Sod it, I’m having another crack at this. These are the reasons why this week I can do it. The clocks have gone forward overnight therefore I have an extra hour of daylight. That means when I get in from work, it’s not going to be dark and I can do my three mile walk with the dog. No excuses. I have no functions, catered days or days where my schedule is going to be anything other than in my complete control…it’s a golden week and I’m totally up for it.

Knowing you lot are cheerleading on the sidelines will spur me on…no cheese and pickle whoopsies this week m’lud, that’s a promise 🙂

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In The Company Of My Thoughts

In the here & now, , ,

thinkOne of the things I’ve come to value the most from my time spent walking Charlie dog is the time and space it gives me to think. Those of you who’ve followed my journey from the early days won’t be surprised when I say that some of the ways in which my mind connects the dots can be a bit random, but you know time spent on musing even seemingly random stuff occasionally leads to a nugget of insight.

So we’ve just returned from one of our usual circuits of the town. On the way up the hill there were no insights worth a mention, my mind entertained itself quite happily with a succession of interesting topics to ponder, for example if sweat is what it looks like when your fat starts to cry, then my fat is very clearly very upset today because despite it being much cooler outdoors, by the time I got to the top of the hill I was glowing.

Then I got to thinking about where does your fat actually go, when you lose it? I mean, I was looking at a picture on-line this week about what one pound of fat actually looks like, and its big, you know? So if you lose like two pounds a week…where is it now? It’s like it melts away by magic. One week those two pounds of fat are inside my skin, and the next week they’re not.

They just disappear, sneak away like thieves in the night. I go to bed weighing one number, and I wake up weighing a smaller number but nothing went anywhere, right? I must have spend a good ten minutes on that one, in fact I was so absorbed that I’d reached the top of the hill before the Asshole voice had even chipped in with his usual helpful suggestions about the shortcuts we could take every time we passed an opportunity to avoid having to walk right to the top.

And that’s the bit that provided the key to help me unlock today’s useful stuff. It’s the first time that I’ve actually put two and two together and realised that when my mind is occupied, I’m far less open to an approach or a suggestion from the Asshole. Which sounds really obvious but don’t you often find that things stare us in the face and we’re still blind to it?

I have a really low boredom threshold, you know? It’s one of those things that goes hand in hand with an inquisitive mind. When I’m bored I get destructive and my mind leads me into mischief. I’ll give you an example – on Thursday I was involved in doing some recruitment, and one of the candidates lost me in the first five minutes. By the time we’d completed the interview I couldn’t have told you how he’d answered the majority of our questions, even though I’d written down his answers on autopilot.

What I could have told you, was how many times he said the words in terms of during his one hour interview. I was bored, and my mind started fixating on the wrong thing. My in-terms-of ometer leapt into action and I counted them all, with a mental ker-CHING every time he said it. Seventeen in-terms-ofs, if you’re interested. And, don’t even get me started on the four little hairs sprouting from the top of his nose, which I’d have paid good money to tweeze out.

So that’s what I mean…because what he was saying wasn’t holding my attention, my mind wandered off and started poking at stuff it had no business with. And I think the Asshole voice recognises those moments where my mind is suggestible, and that’s when he moves in for the kill.

It’s hardly breaking news, I get that. I’m sure some of you are thinking well yes, so what – eating because you’re bored is a well known thing and you’d be right, it is. I’ve heard plenty of people say that, in fact I’ve more than likely said it myself. But only in the context of doing, and not thinking, right?

I can be completely knocking it out of the park being busy doing stuff, but if my head isn’t similarly engaged, that’s the chink in my armour, right there.

Just another little post-it note to self, to add to my collection. Knowledge is power, right?

 

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Walking On Solid Ground

In the here & now, ,

walking

I made it! It’s Friday and I’m anticipating no challenges today. I say that because honestly, Monday to Thursday this week have felt like one long obstacle course and I’m grateful to have skidded sideways into Friday unscathed.

Well, I say unscathed…the cheese and pickle sandwich and fries that I ate at lunchtime yesterday did not support my cause in any way whatsoever but the lightning speed with which my hands reached out and flung them on my plate from the buffet lunch didn’t leave me much time to open the I’m not doing this dialogue with my asshole voice. Once my jaws are engaged in the business of chewing I tend to find that my argument loses a degree or two of momentum you know?

And I’d love to be able to tell you that once I got home last night, I wore a hair shirt for the rest of the day and didn’t compound my indiscretion with any further whoopsies, but that wouldn’t be strictly true either.

So my super-turbo-charged week has one or two dinks in it, including a deep dive into those weekly additional smart points that I wasn’t going to touch, but you know what, I’m still in the game…I have no plans whatsoever for the Bank Holiday weekend, so me and Charlie dog are going to get some lovely long walks in, I’ve got two full days of clean eating left before my Sunday sulk-off with the bitch in the bathroom and I’m gathering up what’s left of my dieting week and going for it, big time.

And if the cheese and pickle sandwich catches up with me I’ll take it on the chin and move my three pound challenge to next week instead.

Blimey…there’s a statement. Can you even imagine me saying that six months ago..? My position in the sweet spot felt incredibly fragile back then. I was terrified that something was going to come along and knock me sideways, back into a world where the short-term need to feed my face trumped any longer-term thinking, not to mention hopes and dreams. And don’t get me wrong, I’m a long way from complacent but honestly, seven months into the journey and I feel like the ground under my feet is a little more solid, you know?

So I stumbled a bit yesterday, and made a not-so-sensible choice. So what? I’m within points by the skin of my teeth but I’m not sitting here with my head in my hands mourning the end of another diet. It tasted awesome, but I’m not craving another one and it hasn’t changed anything. My resolve and determination is as sound as it was before the sharpness of that cheese sandwich exploded onto my tongue, and nothing is spoiled.

I can only think that all the work we’ve done together on unpicking the spaghetti inside my head has started to pay dividends, and I’m one step removed from the twisted way I used to think about food. You know what I’m talking about…I’ve been less than perfect therefore I’ve blown it, I might as well call it a day right now. Today, that thought hasn’t even entered my head.

I’m acutely aware that it used to and I kind of half-anticipated that it might, but as I opened my eyes this morning and mentally patted myself down, I was relieved to note that all my dieting ducks were in a row, and the asshole voice wasn’t even trying to overcomplicate the situation.

Doesn’t that make a refreshing change 🙂

 

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I Could Have, If I’d Wanted To…

In the here & now, , ,

clothingrackSo yesterday was a better day for me, on a number of fronts. Firstly, work was a little less manic. I had time to breathe, which is always nice. In fact more than that, I even had time to get out at lunchtime, and that hardly ever happens. A couple of the guys in the office were going up to a big retail outlet near to where we work, and I took my head out of my bum for an hour and tagged along for good measure.

After a quick mooch around we went into Marks and Sparks so they could grab lunch from the food hall. Me, I’d taken lunch to work and already eaten it – hey I was hungry, once the little hand is heading for twelve, it’s fair game, right? So I waited for them in the clothes section, and had a poke about, as you do. There were one or two really nice things that caught my eye, and I damn near fainted when I realised they had them in my size!

I mean, before we all get too giddy I’m still in size sumo, but I was in a shop that wasn’t a fat girl shop, and they had really nice stuff on their rails to fit me. As realisation dawned, I just kind of stood there, grinning like the village idiot, looking at this beautiful turquoise linen shirt and trying to figure out how many years it’s been since I walked into something other than a fat-girl shop and walked out with something new. I wish I’d bought it. Except it’s not quite payday so I didn’t, but the point is I could have, if I’d wanted to.

What I wanted to do was fist-pump the air, and run around the ground floor of Marks and Sparks waving the turquoise linen above my head singing I’m too sexy for this shirt at the top of my voice.

I didn’t have to admire the jewellery, or pretend I was interested in the bag section, or the cosmetics, whilst normal people browsed the clothes. I could browse the clothes without fear of being laughed out of town because I’m a skinny-girl-in-training, and I’m officially in the club, you know? That club where members can wear what they like, instead of what fits.

I was still riding the wave of euphoria later in the afternoon (and wishing I’d bought the damned shirt) when bugger me, a colleague walked into our office and said MY GOD! Look at you, you’re wasting away!! I mean, I’m clearly not…I stand five feet five and a half inches tall in my socks and I weigh nearly nineteen stone so I’m hardly teetering on the verge of malnutrition, but still. It’s the biggest buzz ever when people notice I’m losing weight, and are kind enough to comment. It all helps to spur you on, right?

So, all in all, yesterday ranks number one day in my week so far, and you know what, days like this are going to keep on coming 🙂

 

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