I’d like to think that I’m a fairly rational person, with at least a couple of active brain cells, but I’m here to tell you that this whole change of diet thing has knocked me for six. This morning I had the biggest diva meltdown ever over dropping an egg on the floor – my son, who had just arrived home after collecting our Christmas tree put it down and disappeared at the speed of sound, clearly reluctant to get sucked into the shitstorm.
It was late morning, and I was overdue breakfast. After spending half an hour trying to negotiate my way around the Weight Watchers website – half of which still isn’t working – to get the new points values for stuff I had to hand, I’d finally settled on eggs and toast. There were two eggs left in the carton, one of which survived the journey from carton to pan, and one of which didn’t…the one that didn’t ended up half on the tiled floor and half all over my slipper.
At that point the red mist descended. I don’t think there’s a cupboard door that remained unslammed, or a naughty word that remained unsaid. I managed to spread the egg on my slipper to all four corners of the kitchen as I stomped around being ridiculous. Then I sat and cried, and that’s really not like me at all.
So now I’ve calmed down and eaten something else instead – I mean who could be bothered with just one egg, right? – I think maybe I should at least make an attempt to understand why smashing the egg pushed my buttons in quite the way that it did. I’m not sure there’s just one reason…I think it was kind of a killer combination of a few things. Firstly I was hungry. Secondly I’m not the most patient person in the world, so spending ages trying to navigate a website which felt like it was leading me a right merry dance with oops there’s a problem, please try later on every second click hadn’t sweetened my mood.
I think mostly, in the back of my mind, I was – am – still frustrated with the way in which the transition from one diet to another has been handled by Weight Watchers, and I feel like it’s pushed me into a situation where I’ve messed up my lovely clean diet bill-of-health, if that makes sense?
As far as I was concerned, I’ve eaten within points consistently, played it completely straight and resisted loads of temptations along the way. That gave me a real feeling of power, like I’ve got this, you know? The longer I had things under control, the stronger I felt, and every day I was building on a really solid record of getting it right. Knowing you have all that success under your belt makes you really reluctant to break that perfect record, so it gathers a momentum all of it’s own.
To find out that actually, by spending my food budget using a combination of old and new weight watchers currency means I might have unknowingly gone way over my budget makes me feel like I’ve spoiled that perfect record…broken the spell, you know? And whether that was intentional or not, I’m now wrestling with the asshole voice in my head who is screaming ha ha you’ve blown it, told you this wouldn’t last…the usual shit. And yes, I appreciate that I might just as easily have come in under budget – but the fact is I don’t know.
When you boil it down to brass tacks, I think that I’m scared…I’d settled into a groove with a diet that was working for me. I haven’t fallen off the wagon as much as been thrown off it, and that sucks. But you know what, writing this down is really helping, because it’s forcing me to acknowledge that I’m acting like a proper diva. Yes, of course I have a right to be angry. GGGRRRR. Right, been there, done that…move on.
I’m not starting from scratch. I still have all that success under my belt. I’m still knocking on the door of my third dress size down. I still have you guys, and I have still got a perfect record of making good choices. What I’ll never have control over is other people’s fuck-ups. But I’m big enough and hard enough to step over that bump in the road to Skinny Town and just keep on trucking.
And the diva..? She’s back in her box 🙂
