Tag Archives: challenge

Taking Care Of The Hairy Mary

In the here & now, , ,


Well, first of all I can’t start this blog post without a word of thanks to all of you who’ve taken the time to answer my questions and tell me what you think about the blog…I’m blown away by some of the feedback. I’m not even kidding, I was so moved by some of the lovely stuff you said I did the ugly cry more than once.

I think I might print hundreds of copies and wallpaper my house with it all so when I’m having a shit day your words can lift my mood. Thanks guys, I feel so incredibly lucky having y’all in my corner. And so far, the consensus is that a Break Out The Skinny Girl book might just have legs. If you haven’t had chance to look at the questions yet and you’d like to share your thoughts, you can find them HERE…last time of asking, I promise.

So anyway, this week was born with the potential to go a bit tits up. I’m working away from home which means two nights in a hotel, and quite a nice one as it turns out. I did as much research as I could before I got here so I knew a bunch of stuff, like the menu options for room service, and the fact that it had a pool. And hot on the heels of my holiday swimming, you don’t need me to tell you how excited I was about the pool.

Now, I’m not the only one from the company I work for who’s staying here, in fact there’s probably another eighty colleagues here for the next couple of days. Which means that I’m probably not the only one who’s clocked the leisure facilities. And yet, despite the fact that there’s a very real possibility that I might bump into someone I know from work – cringe – I brought my swimming costume anyway. In fact, I brought two.

Can you even begin to imagine me doing that a year ago? These guys are used to seeing me in a professional capacity, you know?  Dressed appropriately with my game face on, not wrapped in a scrap of Lycra with my wobbly bits on parade in the broad light of day.

Back in the day when I was crippled with horror at the size of my arse you couldn’t have paid me enough to doff off if there was even the tiniest possibility of bumping into someone I knew, especially someone I knew from work. Yesterday, when I arrived at the hotel after a three hour drive, I couldn’t wait to get into that pool, and beyond a cursory check to make sure there was no overspill from the hairy Mary on display I didn’t give a second thought to what if I bump into… I just got on with the business of enjoying the water.

As it turns out, I didn’t see a soul down at the pool…all our lot were all in the bar. And by the time I’d had my swim, and tamed my hair again (since the water had kinked every strand and left to its own devices I would’ve morphed into a Brillo pad) they’d all disappeared into the town for a few scoops, so it was a very sensible early night for me. 

I had a carefully chosen light supper courtesy of the room service menu, so I’m off to a good start. Today will be a challenge. Last time we had a retail conference I remember all the tables groaning under dishes of naughties to keep folk entertained as they sat through one presentation after another. I tried hard to say no but I couldn’t get the words out because I was too busy chewing. It didn’t go well.  I think I ‘fessed up told you about it at the time.

Anyway, this time will be different…no refined sugar, right? I shall liberate a couple of pieces of fruit from the breakfast buffet and if the Asshole voice tries to lead me down a dark alley to get mugged by a something sweet, I’ve got something to stuff into my face which doesn’t involve chocolate.

Sounds like a plan…watch this space ?

 

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These Are OUR People!

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You know when you find yourself doing something that you thought people like you just didn’t do? Well that was me at the weekend. I’m really living this life, and I have to keep pinching myself. My friend Nic and I set off on Saturday with our bikes slung in the back of her car, looking for an adventure. Yes, you heard that right.

There’s a vast network of forest cycling trails about ninety minutes north of where we live, and since our recent gentle bike rides have helped to acclimatise our respective backsides to the prolonged use of a saddle, it seemed like a great idea to take it to the next level and try something different.

Apparently, loads of folk had woken up on Saturday with the same idea because the car park was bursting at the seams with athletic-looking people on bikes. One barbie-esque girl who climbed out of a van opposite our car had it all going on in a tiny crop top and painted on leggings, although to be fair she seemed more interested in checking herself out in the wing mirror and posing for selfies than she did in her bike. Mind you, as we sat in the car watching her, we were equally pre-occupied with eating our packed lunch before we’d even unloaded the bikes, so we were hardly in a position to judge.

Despite the fact that our jaws were moving at the time, as we sat there, two reformed couch potatoes surveying all these fit families and middle-aged men in lycra, Nic made a sweeping gesture with her hand and said Dee these are our people…cue a fit of the giggles but what she was trying to say in between snorts of laughter was that we were like them, you know? We’d driven for miles to partake of stuff requiring effort, of our own free will, and we shared a moment of satisfaction about our own lycra, even though it didn’t look quite like it did on Toothpickarella across the way.

The forest had a colour coded system to mark out the various forest trails…green for easy, blue for intermediate and red for difficult. We studied the map carefully and tried to fit in by pretending we knew what we were doing. It seemed sensible to  start on a green route, and then maybe have a crack at blue, so we followed the signs out of the car park and set off on what we thought was the green route.

I think we must have cycled a bit of the green route when we first set off but after we’d been climbing for around a mile on a road that seemed to get steeper by the minute we started to wonder whether we might have gone just a tiny bit wrong. I mean, I know we weren’t experienced map readers and all, but the gentle green route which followed the river at the base of the forest hasn’t seemed to suggest you had to climb a killer hill first. We weren’t actually in the forest for one thing, which might have given us a big fat clue. However, on the off chance that this was the easy route, neither of us were going to admit defeat so we carried on going. And going.

So how were we to know that the little green tree on every signpost was fuck-all to do with the green route? It wasn’t our fault that the Forestry Commission’s logo happens to be a little green tree, right? An easy mistake to make m’lud. Anyway, those nice people from mountain rescue happened to pass us after seven miles and pointed us in the right direction and then happily, finally, we made it into the forest. And it was awesome.

Awesome, and hard. It was twisty and uneven and bumpy. Really narrow paths with sharp bends where the effort of controlling a bike on top of loose sandy stones makes your shoulders scream and arms numb and your wrists tingle. Going down was hard but climbing was even harder. Trying to get enough traction to keep going whilst dropping down multiple gears and holding the bike steady was really bloody tough. I’m sure it must be easier if you’re skinny. Roll on that day.

At one point going up and round a bend, I slowed almost to a stop, realised that I couldn’t get the right gear in time then toppled sideways in slow motion onto a log, which was fine until my handlebars jabbed me in the chest and the pedal attacked my leg. Mind you, I came off a lot better than Nic, who fell off spectacularly, twice on a couple of hairpin bends…we were well into the blue route by this point having bypassed green altogether whilst we were scaling the perimeter road. Duh…

Despite all that, we were having such a great time we forgot we were exercising. It was hairy at times and really hard work but it was beyond fun and we barely stopped laughing all afternoon. We did about fifteen miles in the end, at least half of that off-road. That’s not bad going for a fat lass, eh?

To top off a brilliant weekend, yesterday, the Shitbird scale finally woke up and accepted that I mean business, awarding me 3lbs off this week. I worked bloody hard for that 3lbs, and I couldn’t be happier. This new regime is working for me and I’m more motivated than I’ve ever been.

Come on, let’s see what we can squeeze out of this week 🙂

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All My Knobs Are At The Top

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You know what, this week is shaping up to be an absolute corker, I mean I’ve had a couple of really cracking days. After all that sorting out at the weekend, I swear the last thing on my mind was going out and buying more stuff, but on Monday I tagged along with a couple of friends from work for a cheeky lunchtime mooch around a local retail park and I accidentally came home with two dresses, two tops and a jacket. Mainly because I really liked them but also because I could. I should probably feel guilty, but you know what, bite me 🙂

Then, I was out of the office all day yesterday on a course at the local University designed to help me develop resilience in the workplace, and I had lightbulbs going off in my head every five minutes. It was supposed to be a work thing, but there were more parallels than I could even count with this weight-loss journey that we’re all on, so I couldn’t wait to tell you.

One thing in particular really resonated, about mental toughness, and God knows those of us on a diet need a bit of that to resist all the pies, right? I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain it.

This professor dude talked about ‘The Four C’s’ of mental toughness, which are Challenge, Control, Confidence and Commitment.

Challenge is about understanding what the challenge is – what needs to be done and the benefit you’ll get if you do it. Confidence is about believing that you have it in you to pull it off. Control is about feeling in control of both your environment and your emotions and commitment is…well, as it sounds – it’s about committing to a goal or an outcome.

It seems you can pretty much write a cheque for success in any situation if all four of those things are present and correct. As he was talking, I was supposed to be applying the theory to a work context but in my head, my thoughts set off running like a hare in a meadow…I started thinking about my weight-loss journey, and I started to get very very giddy.

Because. I understand that I need to lose weight, and I know how much better I’ll feel when I’m skinny. I one hundred percent believe that I can do it and right now I’m in control of what’s around me, and what’s inside me…the Asshole voice is well and truly gagged. And I’m totally committed to my food sobriety.

Imagine a graphic equaliser. In case you’re too young to remember what one of those was, (get out of my blog immediately) they existed in an era before digital sound blew the need for manual twiddling out of vogue. They looked a bit like the picture I’ve stuck at the top, with knobs you could move up and down to isolate and adjust the different bits of sound when you were playing a record, like dialling up the bass or the treble.

Now think about one of those knobs next to each of the four C’s…right now, all four of my C’s are dialled right the way up. All my knobs are at the top and they have been since I gave my head a wobble in the New Year and rediscovered the sweet spot. They’re all up there on full volume, and yesterday I made the connection between all this lovely theory and what’s happening with me right now. My unbroken run of fourteen losses in fourteen weeks. Not a toe out of line where my food plan is concerned. It’s because all my knobs are at the top.

In the last three months of last year when I was climbing on and falling off the wagon with alarming regularity, my knobs were not at the top. Sometimes one or two or maybe even three of them might have been, but if just one of those four things is switched off, you are on the back foot completely and the chances are you won’t succeed. I’ve lived it, remember? I regained twenty two pounds in the last three months of the year. I’m telling you, it was like fucking Blackpool illuminations in my head yesterday when I made the connections.

Where are your knobs? It might be worth doing a quick recce, especially if you’re in that place where you’re taking two steps forwards and one step back…I guess understanding which one of your knobs needs adjusting might just make the difference, right?

On another note, I’ve changed my weigh-day. I decided that since I’m spending my weekly Weight-Watchers points on days three to five of my dieting week it would make more sense if those days fell on a weekend. So, my new weigh-day is Wednesday. Today. And to my surprise and delight although it’s only three days since my last weigh-in, Shitbird Scale offered up one and a quarter pounds.

Told you I was having a good week 🙂

 

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