Tag Archives: struggle

When Minnows Become Monsters

In the here & now, ,

So yesterday was a bit turbulent. I ended up scraping through on a wing and a prayer, and only by paying two hundred calories forward onto today did I manage to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Having said that, in and amongst the stresses of an incredibly challenging day I scored the biggest non scale victory ever, by walking past the pasty shop in Kings Cross station and ignoring the big fat stack of cheese and onion pasties which were shouting my name.

I reckon the girls behind the counter clocked the width of my arse and thought they had a guaranteed sale in the bag, especially since I locked eyes with every single pasty in their display. I’ve rarely made it past this particular pasty shop unscathed, and I wanted to stick my tongue out and lick them all as I walked past, but yesterday there was no sale.

At that point I was already sailing close to the wind, to be honest. I’d meant to buy a coffee at 5.45am before I boarded my train to London, but instead I’d bought coffee and a bacon roll. I’d meant to have coffee at coffee break but I’d actually had coffee and three cookies. All logged and counted but not the stuff healthy diets are made of that’s for damn sure.

We had a major crisis at work yesterday and I had to abandon my meeting a couple of hours in, heading three hours north back into the office. There were lots of colleagues pulling together to keep the wheels on in a superb display of teamwork until quite late last night, so we brought in fast food as a thank you to keep them going. I was starving, so of course I joined in.

That’s when the minnow-sized errors of food-plan judgment began to flirt around the edges of becoming a monster error, you know? Having access to fast food when I was tired and stressed could have gone horribly wrong. Thankfully despite the unplanned but welcome supper, I reckon I just about scraped through.

If I’d eaten sparingly until the point at which the emergency take-out arrived, I might have had a little bit more wriggle room. The fact that I’d allowed myself to have treats when treats weren’t really needed is a mistake I’m often too quick to make. The treats weren’t even that special, you know?

I didn’t need a bacon roll first thing in the morning, it just felt easier to grab it at the station than faff around making porridge before I left home at stupid o’clock. And there was certainly wasn’t much thought given to whether or not I should have cookies with my coffee. They were there, on a plate in front of me and I just ate them because I could.

I’m still fat enough to get away with a decent chunk of calories every day, even when I’m eating in calorie deficit and the temptation to play fast and loose with how I spend them is constant. I need to get back to that place where I’m eating as cleanly as possible, and staying away from sugar. I’m not quite there but I’m working on it.

Day by day, choice by choice, right?

Before you go, we have a brand new guest post today! My good friend Kayleigh has not only shared her story, she’s also taken the massive step of baring her numbers on her very own Shitbird page. I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing her all the luck in the world as we watch her journey unfold 🙂

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Running Out Of Noughts

In the here & now, ,

Well, I first of all have to say thank you to everyone who took the time to write to me after Friday’s post. As the day went on, my shoulders got squarer, and I definitely felt less guilty about the three bowls of pasta consumed by that lady which, according to y’all, were not my fault. You might remember a blog post back in the early days called The Sorry See-Saw. I was weighing down the heavy end again and watching all the sorry roll towards me when it really wasn’t my fault, but you lot are definitely my voice of reason.

I hope she doesn’t check out my Shitbird page this week, that’s all I can say. She’ll be apoplectic and probably chucking stuff at the screen if she does, because last week wasn’t pretty and of course it’s reflected in the number. I’d about got myself back in the zone by the end of the week but it’s all gone to shit again over the weekend.

I got a call in the early hours of Saturday morning to say mum was on her way to hospital, and I mean it was the full blue-flashing-lights job. She’s had a nasty chest infection over the last week which has seen her feeling a bit grim, but she took another tumble on Friday evening which shook her up and she was struggling to breathe. I shot out of bed as soon as I got the call, pulled my pants on – backwards as it turns out – and almost beat the ambulance to the ER.

We were there all night. She got admitted, and has been hooked up to oxygen and I.V. antibiotics ever since. She’s responding quite well, and thankfully the CAT scan ruled out anything sinister as a reason for yet another fall but they diagnosed pneumonia, and we all know how that can turn out when it grabs a hold of a frail octogenarian whose tank is already running on empty. She’s had a really crap few months.

When I finally headed home on Saturday after mum was settled and sleeping, the need to eat a mountain of crap was overwhelming. I drove home via the supermarket and all I could think about was going home to bed with a box of double caramel Magnums. The Asshole voice was screaming at me that things were too serious for just one box so I bought two and I ate the whole fucking lot in one sitting.

I headed back to the hospital later on, sat and held mum’s hand for a while then went and cleared my head with a swim before ordering Chinese food and eating till I almost popped.

Yesterday was supposed to be better, only it wasn’t. We spent time at the hospital with mum, and she seemed a little bit better, but she’s so tiny and frail in the midst of this big nosy ward. She’s very hard of hearing, and it’s a strange environment with no familiar faces so she’s scared and a bit confused and it’s heartbreaking leaving her there, but we’re not allowed to stay. Turning straight to my drug of choice seemed like the only way to get through the rest of the day and I pretty much ran out of noughts on the calculator when I tried to tot up the number of calories I’d consumed by the time I stopped eating. Shit.

Sundays are nearly always good days because they’re my ground zero, you know? The start of a new week and an opportunity to start a clean untainted sheet. Well, this week’s sheet already looks like the dog threw up on it, and it’s only minutes into Monday.

I’m going to try and reset again…it’s all I can do. My focus has to be on my mum, with a little bit left over for me. I’m going to try and find an hour somewhere in this day to take solace in the pool instead of the food cupboard. I just keep reminding myself that this too shall pass.

 

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Coming Home To Roost.

In the here & now, ,

I had to take my mum to the fracture clinic at the hospital on Monday. I swear, her right arm looks like it belongs to a six foot tall navy blue body builder, it’s so swollen and bruised. My mum is tiny, I mean she can’t weigh more than about eighty pounds, so right now it probably outweighs all her other limbs put together. The doctor was fairly happy with her progress though, so I feel a bit more able to breathe, and a bit less strung out.

By the time we’d done the rounds of doctor/more x-rays/doctor/made-to-measure-sling lady, almost four hours had passed, and we were starving. Actually, that’s not strictly true… I was starving. Mum doesn’t have much of an appetite these days, and she’s so fed up at the moment she probably wouldn’t have even noticed if we’d skipped a meal. Like that would ever happen on my watch, right?

We agreed it would be nice to eat lunch together in the hospital canteen, which has a fabulous salad bar. I parked mum up at a table in her borrowed wheelchair and went back to join the line. Boxed salad for me, tuna sandwich for mum. Oh, and the puddings…sugar free jelly for me, and an off-the-chart awesome hand-made coconut slice with jam and pastry for mum. Oh my god, that coconut slice looked so moist I could’ve wrung it out, no doubt about it. There were about ten slices on the cake stand, and I wanted to lick every single one of them as I walked past.

Now, picture the scene. Mum, after half a tuna sandwich, was feeling quite full, and she didn’t want the coconut slice. She wanted the jelly. I may or may not have been able to predict that scenario in advance on account of the fact that 1) mum really loves jelly and 2) she’s not really that big on coconut.

Buying it was okay though, right? Look at this innocent face…it wasn’t for me. It was a treat for my mum. Except if I’d paid attention to what was really going on as I handed over eleven pounds thirty for my tray full of booty, I would have known immediately that the jelly was for mum and the coconut slice was for me. Of course it fucking was.

I tried to sigh and look disappointed, as I agreed mum could have my sugar-free jelly. I was prepared to let it go and take one for the team, or at least that’s what I was desperately trying to make my face say as my insides started breakdancing behind the scenes at the thought of all the coconut and pastry and jam that was coming my way.

I ate it. I ate every last moist coconutty crumb, and I’m here to tell you I was transported to heaven and back again right there in the canteen. It was the most awesome thing I’ve ever tasted. What I wanted to do was go buy the rest of them. Every last succulent slice. But I didn’t…I stopped at just the one.

And you know what, stopping at one is fine, I mean yey…go me.  Except one is all it took to tip me into dieting quicksand. Let’s face it, it was always going to, wasn’t it? That generous slice of heaven was loaded with sugar, and now I’m loaded with sugar, which means my inner sat-nav is trying to steer me towards disasterville. Again.

Sunday was so-so. Monday’s coconut slice was compounded by an un-calorie-counted chilli for supper, and yesterday there was an incident with an unplanned frittata at lunchtime, not to mention delaying tactics at the office engineered by yours truly which pretty much guaranteed I’d miss the exercise class I’d been planning to go to.

That’s the sound of wobbly wheels right there…looks like my anxiety is coming home to roost in the form of self-sabotage. Just for a change.

Today is a new day. It was just a blip. I’m not putting pressure on myself to be perfect.

Yes, you are…

No. I’m really not.

It happened, get over it and move on, right?

 

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I Didn’t See That One Coming…

In the here & now, , ,

So here was I, coasting along under the rather cocky misapprehension that wrestling with the Asshole voice was a pastime well and truly relegated to days gone by. I mean, he’s been silent for so long that surely he must have relocated to someone else’s head, right? Sadly, no. Yesterday I was subjected to four hours of torture over a cheese and pickle sandwich.

I found myself in a catered meeting at work facing my old nemesis, the buffet. I knew it was coming, and I was cool with it, you know? I’ve spent the last 81 days being a rock star with my food choices so I strode confidently into the meeting room, and I even picked my seat before throwing a glance towards the lunch table. Let’s just say it hasn’t always happened in that order…in the past, whilst trying to give the impression that I’m holding back, I’ve been known to cover the area between door and lunch table at warp speed, knocking people over like skittles in my haste to fix a plate.

Yesterday it was a good buffet, I mean it was all seeded wholemeal bread with green stuff, and some wraps with chicken as well as a big bowl of crisps and some cakes.  No sausage rolls or fries or wedges, just a handful of puff-pastry savouries…really, aside from the crisps and cake it was wholesome and healthy. And I made careful choices from the sandwiches, mentally calculating my weight-watcher points as I went. The crisps didn’t worry me, and I barely noticed the cakes. It’s all good, I remember sitting and thinking I’ve so got this…look at me, I’m cured!

Famous last words, right? After we’d finished eating, and there were just the dregs of the buffet table left, well that’s when the fun started. There were two cheese and pickle sandwiches on a tray that nobody had picked. Me, I’d gone for the ham salad ones, and a chicken wrap. I’d scrutinised and rejected the egg mayo and BLT and of course the cheese ones on the basis that they contained stuff from the naughty list and were too point-heavy. I was happy with my choice, right up until I clocked those two leftover cheese butties.

Go on…they won’t kill you. They’re tiny, probably not even an ounce of cheese between ’em… (as I looked at two wedges of cheese clearly cut with a generous hand)…you’ve been so good and besides you’re having chicken for tea and there’s hardly any points in that, so you can afford the cheese. You deserve cheese, you really do. It’s not cake, or crisps, is it? That would be a bad choice but you know cheese is good for your bones. 

On, and on, and on, for four hours. The meeting finished at 4pm, and as I threw a glance back over my shoulder as I left the room and mentally waved farewell to those two cheese sandwiches which were looking a bit curled around the edges by that point, I still wanted them.

I probably could’ve spared the points but you know what, I recognise cheese as a trigger food. It wouldn’t have been the two cheese sandwiches which left collateral damage, it would’ve been the pack of Cathedral City strong cheddar that I might have picked up on the way home which just begged to be grilled until it was bubbly and golden and on my plate. 

Truth is, I can’t allow myself to get the taste. If two curling sandwiches can torture me for four hours, then allowing it over the threshold is never going to end well is it? It was hard not to eat them but on reflection, by the skin of my teeth I escaped unscathed.

Guess I’m still a work in progress after all 🙂

 

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