Tag Archives: food coma

Poking My Fat Muscle Memory

In the here & now, ,

I’ll tell you what, I had a bit of a flashback on Wednesday. At the point that I wrote my last blog post I couldn’t wait to get up and at my day, given that I was starting my experiment…it felt like Christmas day and my birthday all rolled into one.

Let me rewind…for those of you not following the weight watchers diet, you probably wonder what I’m banging on about when I mention points…it’s just the way weight watchers carves up a food budget. Every food has a points value in the same way stuff has a calorie value, right? I get 34 points every day, which is a number worked out based on my weight/height/age (and that’s quite a lot because I’m still fat…the nearer I get to Skinny Town the fewer points I’ll get). In addition to that I get 42 more points to spend as and when I like throughout the week.

I don’t always use my weeklies but this experiment I’m doing to try and turbo-charge my weight loss says I should, and what’s more it says I should squash them all in mid-week. So on Wednesday when I get out of bed I was rubbing my hands together in anticipation of scoffing 76 points’ worth of food.

Imagine that. I’m a fat girl on a diet and everything I’ve done over the last 18 months has been about restricting my portion sizes. Not allowing myself to over-indulge. And yet here I am, staring down the barrel of a day where the gloves are off and it’s open season on points…I was so fucking excited I can’t even tell you.

Breakfast was all kinds of awesome. I had two slices of seeded wholemeal toast (3 points per slice) with a teaspoon of butter (2 points) and three scrambled eggs (6 points). Fourteen points for breakfast…I’ve never done that. I was working from home, and mid morning I made myself a coffee with all milk…another 4 points. Lunchtime came and went, and I wasn’t hungry but I made myself have some more toast and a bunch of grapes. 8 points including the butter.

I was seriously full. I’m up to 26 points by now, and normally I’d be panicking a bit at the prospect of only having 8 left for supper. I’d be studying my food plan intently from every angle to try and squeeze maximum mileage out of those last 8 points.

Not on Wednesday…on Wednesday I still had 50 points left in play. So I made moussaka, which is my absolute favourite thing. All fresh ingredients so it still qualified as healthy eating, except there was a fucking mountain of it. 42 points’ worth to be exact. It was a moussaka mountain.

Thing is, as I sat down in the chair, flicked on the TV and started eating, I got this flashback to a life where my world revolved around sitting in a chair with a plate piled high with moussaka, or lasagne, or whatever. It didn’t really matter back then what the hell it was, because simply eating for a long time until I was fit to burst was the attraction. A self-induced food coma, night after night.

On Wednesday, I found myself having to force myself to eat it all. It wasn’t a pleasurable experience, you know? I was uncomfortably full, and I had to keep reminding myself that I was doing it for a reason. It was an experiment. At the same time, I was equally terrified that my Asshole voice would grab a hold of this thing I was doing like some kind of fat muscle memory and start demanding a return to the life I used to live. Yes Dee! That’s IT!! Welcome back to your old life, holy CRAP how we’ve missed this!!!

I couldn’t manage 76 points…wtf is that all about? I scraped 68 and I was done. I finished the rest of my weekly points yesterday, and now I’m back to two days of basic daily points only, before weigh day on Sunday…in many more ways than I have words to describe, it’s a relief.

If I was scoffing cheese balls and Haagen Dazs, 76 points would be a breeze. I could probably do it in ten minutes based on past form. But 76 points’ worth of healthy food felt like it was going to go on until the end of time. Next week, I’ll divvy my weeklies out over three days and make sure I enjoy them. And, honestly? Right now, the fact that my old life looks less and less appealing with every step I take in the direction of Skinny Town makes me much happier than a moussaka mountain ever could 🙂

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Knowing Where I’m At

In the here & now, , , , ,

So, Friday night was work’s Christmas doo – if you’ve been reading along for a while you’ll know that the prospect of a big night out generally makes me want to run at warp speed in the opposite direction, but for once I decided not to be an antisocial old git, and I went along. As it turns out, I had an awesome time, in fact I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much.

We’d arranged to have a pre-party face make-over, so by the time we got there I didn’t really look like me at all. We all sort of ended up with a similar version of the same thing, dark smoky eyes and a ton of face paint which I’ve got to say didn’t look half bad, right up until I got a bit warm halfway through the evening and my face started melting…it was nice whilst it lasted though. Except, I looked a bit like a panda. There were two girls doing make-up, and I think I got the rookie, you know?

Saturday afternoon was a low point. I’d woken up with renewed determination that I could kick the Asshole voice into the long grass if he started being a twat, and by 2pm I still had a full house of smart points left. Eating nothing seems to be the safest option for me, you know? I can hold out for ages, it’s stopping once I’ve started that gives me a problem. Anyway I ran a few errands, went for my nails and eyelashes done and then walked Charlie dog before I turned my attention to food.

That’s the point at which it went horribly wrong. I had a full-on binge, having decided that (wait for it, Asshole logic at its finest) since Sunday was my weigh day, and I’d actually given up trying to programme my new scales with the fancy stuff and just taken them upstairs, midnight Saturday was my line in the sand. Sunday I was back on it.

So best buy a Daim cake now because from Sunday when I woke up I wouldn’t be eating anything like that, right? So I actually went to the supermarket and bought the offending article, together with a family sized moussaka. And a large bag of crisps to eat whilst the moussaka was cooking. Not cheese balls, I wouldn’t let myself go there and strangely I didn’t even try.

Having vaporised the moussaka and the crisps, I cut myself a quarter of the Daim cake. It was gone in sixty seconds and oh my days it tasted amazing. So I cut another quarter and ate that too. I was starting to feel a bit sick at this point, but I had that now or never logic going round and round in my head…if you don’t eat it now you won’t be able to eat it at all, you’re back on the diet tomorrow…

The third quarter took a bit of getting down to be honest, but having eaten it I had to go hard for the fourth and final quarter, otherwise my boy would know I’d eaten three quarters of a Daim cake when he got in from work and I’d be too ashamed to look him in the eye. So I ate the lot, and got rid of the packaging in the outside bin before falling into a food coma and dozing in my armchair for a good couple of hours. I woke up feeling bloated and bilious with rampant indigestion.

Does that sound familiar..? It does to me. That was my life, once upon a time and I think I shocked myself at how comfortably I was able to just step back into the bad old days. And I brooded about it for the rest of the day, and into the evening. I felt so sick, which was hardly a fucking surprise.

Sunday dawned, and I didn’t feel any better. And then I stood on my new scale – which by the way will be known hereafter as the shitbird scale – and felt even worse. I wanted to know where I was at…well, let me tell you exactly where I’m at. I’m fifteen pounds heavier than I was when I set off for Cuba, that’s where. 

Knowing the damage I’ve done drove it home to me how broken my thinking has become of late…I thought I’d moved way past all that head spam, but I’m clearly not as free and clear of it as I’d thought. Mary made an interesting point on Friday when she said

…as a side note… it seems like at first naming the Asshole voice gave you power over him. Because you named him and separated him from who you were and what you want, you could say no. But lately… it feels like when you do something you didn’t want to do, it’s because you felt like you couldn’t say no to the Asshole voice. You don’t seem to have that power over him any more, the confidence that you can overrule him, that you can achieve your goal. It seems like you feel like you’ll inevitably give in, so you might as well get it over with…

Mary, you are spot on. I can’t pinpoint the moment in time where I started hearing my own voice instead of his but I’d lost sight of how quickly I can turn a deaf ear and close him down when I feel like I’m the one in control. So, that’s my homework for this week.

Back to basics. Listen for the Asshole voice, recognise him, and give him a big fat kick in the ging gang goolies every time he tries it on. One day at a time. Yesterday was a good day, once I’d got over the horror of the shitbird scale and I even went to bed last night with points in the bank. Not because it was easy, he was chewing my ear all evening as it happens…but I tuned him out.

I’ve forgiven myself for the fifteen pounds…it is what it is, and at least I know what I’m dealing with now, right? It’s time to get this show on the road 🙂

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