Square One?

Well, we’re back on our favourite Balearic Island again. We didn’t get here last year — Covid, of course — and it was touch and go as to whether we would come this year, although I booked the tickets back in January. Three of us are double vaccinated, which has made travel possible, but pretty expensive and a real faff in terms of paperwork and testing.

Last summer, I had swollen to extraordinary proportions and, as a I mentioned in a previous blog, Slim Sister finally intervened and gave me a bit of a talking to. This bore fruit and I promptly started a calorie counting and exercise regime which meant that I lost a decent amount of weight fairly quickly. Hooray – right?

Wrong.

In November, I started to run out of steam. By the time Christmas was cancelled, I was not doing very well at all. I managed to pull myself together for a bit, but initially, slowly, and now, sadly, quite quickly the pounds have piled back on. I am not sure if I am exactly back to Square One, because there’s not a scale here, but I am pretty sure it’s not going to be a happy moment when I do force myself to confront the scales again.

This makes me so sad. When I was losing weight successfully, I had such happy thoughts about how much I was going to enjoy my summer holiday. How I was going to look a lot better in a swimsuit. Then I started doing something, which always spells disaster for me. I started projecting weight loss figures based on my current weight loss rate. So, I’d tell myself that if I carried on losing a pound a week, that would mean I would weigh such and such by the time we went on holiday. Then, I’d think, well, that’s plenty of time. I’ll start dieting properly again in a couple of weeks’ and I will still be looking great when the holiday comes around. And when that deadline passed, I’d think to myself, well if I start NEXT week, I might not manage that target, but I will still look a lot better, and on and on it goes until I end up here, with sweat sliding through my fat rolls and feeling pretty damn miserable about my appearance.

You will note that I am not even pretending anymore that my weight loss aims are primarily to do with my health. As I have confessed before, all this blah blah about health is a smokescreen. I, like just about everyone else I know, believe that fat equals ugly and thin = pretty.

Mind you, I am also a bit scared about my health. Covid isn’t over, and fat people are more likely to die from it – there’s no evading that truth. One of the friends who has joined us on holiday had an accident last year, which resulted in a serious brain injury. He spent nearly 6 months in neural rehabilitation, and he is doing okay now. But he talks about the horror of the stroke victims who were in rehab with him. He says he has never seen anything more painful than those people, trapped by their completely useless bodies. He keeps saying: “Whatever you do, don’t have a stroke.” The high fat, high alcohol diet I am currently following is almost guaranteed to give me one. What the heck am I playing at? Why can’t I stop myself?

Anyone got any ideas? I am really stuck.

Update: We are back from our holiday and I am feeling more positive. The confrontation on the scales wasn’t quite as bad as I had been expecting. I am feeling more focused and determined and not quite so pathetically helpless. My writing is also going well so that’s a help, too.

Love, Fattily

This is a bit late for Valentine’s Day, which is a pity because it is one of the few “Hallmark Holidays” that we celebrate, largely because it is also the anniversary of Fat Fella and my first proper “date”, some 29 years ago now.

I often think how lucky I am to have found Fat Fella. Back in the day, when we met, he was a rather Fit Fella, and I was a considerably leaner person than I am today. Even so, I never felt that what we felt about one another was based on how we looked. Sure, we were attracted to one another, and we still (very kindly) tell one another how gorgeous the other one is (looking at the pair of us, you might struggle to believe this, but fortunately beauty is in the eye of the beholder, etc, etc). But he has never made me feel as if I had to look good in order for him to carry on loving me.

I have a friend whose experience was quite different. She developed a crush on a chap who was quite a bit older than she was. She was a vibrant, bouncy attractive woman with very generous curves. He was skinny, pale, had a “difficult” personality and was not attractive in appearance or manner. He also made it clear that he was not attracted to my friend as he did not find “big” women appealing.

Now, what would you do in this situation? Move on and find someone as full of life and joy (and dinner) as you? Or would persist in your unrequited affections and actually go on a diet to get thin so that he would “like” you? That’s crazy, surely? Yet that is exactly what she did. Eventually he “deigned” to get together with her when she fitted his expectations of what a woman should look like.

She, of course, duly got pregnant and he insisted that they marry before the baby was born (as I mentioned, he is a much older man, and is also socially very conservative). Her wedding pictures (none of her friends were invited to attend the tiny, rushed civil service) show her big and uncomfortable at 8 months pregnant. When she got her baby home, we went to visit. What a skinny little thing the baby was. Do you know why? He was starving because she had gone on a crash diet while breast feeding. Fortunately, sense prevailed and she started eating properly and he grew bonny and well. And she was also bonny and well and fairly chubby. It seemed that her husband still found her attractive enough to impregnate her again, but after the birth of her second child her weight really ballooned.

Her marriage did not appear to be a happy one. Her husband would humiliate her in public by making fat jokes at her expense. If you offered her a slice of cake, he would jump in and say she couldn’t have it. She took to secret eating. And she got bigger and bigger. Then she discovered one of those really severe calorie restricted meal replacement diets. She excelled at it and lost a huge amount of weight. The husband was delighted. Then she confided in me that she was throwing up after binge eating. In high school she had suffered from anorexia and bulimia. I begged her to think carefully about what she was doing to herself. Fortunately, she had enough sense to recognise the danger she was in, and she came off the diet. It didn’t take very long for the weight to pile back on.

Today, many years later, she is still married to her skinny disapproving husband. They live completely separate lives because he fears that she will infect him with corona virus (she works in a hospital). I haven’t seen her for many months and when I next do, I could not tell you if she will be enormously fat or painfully thin. I do know that her teenage daughter seems to be following in her mother’s footsteps and after being a fairly rounded youngster is now receiving treatment for anorexia.

It is astonishing how things carry on from generation to generation. I always believed that my friend became anorexic because while still quite a young child (10 years old) her parents sent to Weight Watchers. I guess she was a big child, but you have to wonder why her parents were so concerned about it at such an early age? What had her mother been like as a teenager? She was a big woman by the time I knew her, but always very concerned about how heavy people were. Is there a genetic predisposition to this kind of bother with weight and eating? Or is it all about societal pressures and expectations?

My children are adopted, so I can discount any genetic factor with them, and I must admit that neither of them seem to have serious issues around food. Captain Shoelace is indeed, very thin, but also strong and fit. Captain Jellybean got really tubby a few years back, then gently shrunk back to a “normal” size once she got through puberty. It may be that my somewhat unhealthy relationship with food will emerge in them eventually – I couldn’t say. But I am doing my damndest not to let food become a big issue in our house.

As for Fat Fella and me, our chubby days are far from over, but I believe we are on the right track. He has completely given up drinking alcohol (he plans to stick to this for 12 months), which is most impressive, and I am continuing with my steady exercise and slight calorie reduction regime. The past couple of months contained Christmas, both of our birthdays and a bereavement. All of which are usually terrible triggers for excess. I think I have managed to contain it, though, and my weight is holding steady. I have lost 15kg (33 lbs) in 5 months, which is not too bad really.

Intervention

What is it about fat that makes it such a super-sensitive topic? If I had a septic toe that I was refusing to treat and it became life-threatening, no one would think twice about telling me in no uncertain terms to get it sorted out. Yet, when someone is quite visibly and obviously putting their health at risk by eating too much, no one says a word. Not even health care professionals. Every time I visit my GP, I expect him or her to say something to me about the elephant in the room (which I have at times closely resembled), but not one has ever even hinted that a change to my eating habits would have considerable health benefits. And to be fair, if someone did broach the subject, I wouldn’t react in the same way as if we were discussing my toe. I would likely be highly defensive and probably a bit angry or offended.

Fat is never straightforward. There are so many layers to the problem (excuse the turn of phrase there!) and often quite deeply seated reasons for it.

So, hats off to Slim Sister who was brave enough to bring up the subject one day and come right out and say that she thought I should take some more definite action with regards to my weight. This blog, and my slow and steady approach was sort of working. I had lost a bit of weight over a long period. But then along came Coronavirus and it all went to hell in a handbasket. Over the course of the first UK lockdown, I put on nearly 10kg!!! (No, that’s not a typo – 10 kg in just over 6 months.) I am not entirely sure why, because I continued to walk the dog every weekday and stopped eating out and entertaining, the latter two having always been high calorie activities for me. My alcohol consumption definitely went up (well, everyone was drinking, weren’t they, so why not me, too?) and I suppose I wasn’t running errands or doing anything like as much calorie-burning trotting about as usual. Those online exercise sessions that I was talking about in my last blog didn’t last because my dodgy ankle became so painful that I realised if I didn’t stop, I soon wouldn’t even be able to manage the dog walking.

So, I swelled. Alarmingly.

Fortunately for Slim Sister, when she brought up the subject, I had already decided that I was going to have to break my vow to never go on diet again. So I was receptive to her words, rather than defensive. I had already decided what to do. I could not bring myself to go back on my decision to never again PAY for a diet (if you have read my previous blogs, you will know about my discomfort with the notion of fat, over-privileged people paying to eat less while others starve). But with a little research and reading of reviews, I found a free calorie counting app and a free exercise monitoring app, and I was good to go.

That was on the 1^st of September and now, two months later, I weigh 10.8kg less than I did then.

The app I use allows you to set a desired rate of loss, and I set mine fairly high at 1 kg a week. I wanted some quickish results to help motivate me and inspire me. But the main reason this has been successful is that I have adopted the same mindset that I used when I gave up smoking 16 years ago. I may have mentioned before that I achieved that (my one and only shining instance of really exercising self control) with the help of the Allen Carr method for breaking addiction to nicotine. I can’t really summarise everything he says about controlling one’s behaviour, but there were a couple of things that really struck me, and that I have been able to use again now, when it comes to food and booze.

Firstly, he asked the question, how bad are those feelings of wanting a cigarette really? Yes, they feel urgent, maybe uncomfortable, but they are not painful or overwhelming. They certainly are not as bad as say, having a really bad cold, are they? But if I asked you if you would be prepared to experience bad cold symptoms for two weeks and after that you wouldn’t crave nicotine at all, would you agree to it? Of course. It’s a very small price to pay to be rid of such a horrible addiction. Who really wants to be spending a lot of money to go around coughing, ponging of smoke, causing damage to the health of loved ones and oneself and generally being a bit of a social outcast?

Being fat has just as many unpleasant and damaging consequences as smoking. But being asked to “slightly reduce” one’s calorie intake and “slightly increase” one’s physical activity is really not such a big deal, is it? No one is asking you to starve yourself or actually go hungry. You are not even having to stop eating or drinking anything you like. You just have to fit what you consume into a framework of a certain number of calories a day. You are being asked to think about what you eat, and do a certain amount of weighing and measuring, but with all the fabulous technology we have at our disposal these days, that is really not much of an ask at all. I spend far more time playing Solitaire on my phone than I do working out how much and what I should eat every day.

The other useful takeaway from Allen Carr was the idea that the decision not to smoke was mine and mine alone. And if I did have another cigarette after I had said that I would never again put one into my mouth, then I had only myself to blame and I would have to live with the knowledge of my own pathetic weakness for the rest of my days. When it comes to diets or eating less, I am the QUEEN of excuses. My kids are giving me trouble – I deserve a nice glass of wine. I am stressed/exhausted/sad/in the mood for a celebration – bring out the ice cream. And on and on. This time round, I am taking ownership of my actions. EVEN IF SOMETHING REALLY, REALLY bad happens, it is not an excuse to make myself more unhealthy by overeating. Incidentally, I also can’t “jinx” my weight loss/diet by talking about it or looking forward to it with anticipation (a piece of weird superstitious nonsense that I find myself succumbing to). No one and nothing can “jinx” something that only I have complete control over, namely what I put into my mouth.

So, that’s the current state of play. I am feeling good – stronger and healthier and more focused. Even my ankle has stopped hurting quite so much now that the load it has to carry around every day has lightened a bit.

Onwards and upwards. Or, better still, downwards (the number on the scale) and inwards (my waistline).

Excuses

Hoo boy, this lockdown is finally getting to me.

While I generally love having Fat Fella at home, it does mean that I don’t have access to the “big, fast computer” because obviously he needs it for work. This makes perfect sense, but I really miss it. It means that I haven’t been doing any writing at all for months and months. Not that I would have been doing much if I did have access, because I am a lazy slapper, but you know what it’s like – we always want most what we can’t have. Anyway, if I was serious about writing, I could easily have made a plan – we have so many other electronic devices that could be fit for purpose — but obviously I’m not, because I haven’t.

I have also put on a lot of weight, which is making me feel miserable and fed up with myself. While there has been no obvious reduction in my daily exercise routine – I still walk the dog 5-6 times a week – all those endless, unnoticed little daily physical activities, such as getting in and out of the car or carrying shopping and running errands, have just evaporated like smoke. Initially, I thought I might actually lose weight because I was doing a lot of gardening and house tidying and so on. But clearly, I was also eating and drinking a lot more. My extra-tight clothes and scary bathroom scales do not lie.

dig Image by Adina Voicu from Pixabay — Image by Adina Voicu from Pixabay

Recently, in an effort to get moving again, Fat Fella and I have been doing daily low-impact aerobics sessions in our sitting room. These are great. I have tried all sorts of different ones and so far am finding the PopSugar ones on YouTube to be really good. We haven’t been at it regularly for long enough for it to have had much of an impact, but hopefully it has improved our health and fitness a little already.

aerobics Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay — Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

It is no joke that we fatties are more at risk of dying from Covid-19. Suddenly all my blustering “I’ll be fat if I want to,” or “Being fat is not a crime,” or “I enjoy my life, what’s the harm?” is ringing a bit hollow. Of course, I have always known that being fat is an unhealthy and even life-threatening choice, but the current situation really brings it home to one with a bit of a thump.

That’s a good thing in many ways, but also hard to do much about, because it is the current situation that is making me feel low and lethargic and not inclined to diet or exercise in the first place.

And yes, the previous paragraph is merely a pathetic excuse. I know it. As with the writing, the healthy lifestyle could happen if I wanted it enough. Maybe I just don’t…

Lockdown

What was that I was saying about distractions being a good thing and wishing for some more? Well, I did specify that I did not want the sort of distractions that have me reaching for a bottle of wine at the end of the day. And the major distraction that we are all experiencing right now – the Covid 19 virus – is definitely one that requires wine and crisps and maybe even some ice cream. If I watch carefully, I can almost see my already enormous tummy expanding like a lump of bread dough in a proving oven. It really is quite worrying. Just how big can it get? Will it pop?

Joking aside, I actually feel ashamed of whining about how social distancing is making me fat. When so many in the world are struggling to eat at all, how dare I complain that I have too much? I am damned lucky to have the wherewithal to get fat.

But acknowledging my privilege does not make me any happier about my super-size. I still want to be leaner and healthier. So much so, that lately I have been tempted by the adverts for a “new” wonder diet that pop up on my screen every 10 minutes or so.

I took a solemn vow a few years back, that I would never again pay money in order to lose weight. To me there is, as I have already mentioned, something almost obscene about rich fat folks using their money to eat less, instead of using that money to help people who haven’t enough to eat to stay alive, much less get fat.

In addition, I am firmly convinced that while any diet will work in the short term, ultimately a diet is something you are “on” and when you go “off” it again, you get fat again. From personal experience, and from a number of accounts I have read, one not only gets as fat as one was before, but usually, a bit fatter. That’s why serial yo-yo dieters end up bloody enormous. I know. I am one.

So, while the new diet is quite enticing, I will resist its lures. Which is not to say, I haven’t read about it and had a look at the promotional material for it. This particular diet is taking the psychological approach. I suppose the idea is that you unlock why you have unhealthy eating patterns and then tackle the root causes rather than merely alter eating habits. This makes sense, certainly. They are selling it as a “brand new approach”, but of course it isn’t. I have been thinking and talking about why I eat too much for as long as I can remember.

All the thinking and talking made me reach the conclusion that I am a comfort eater. I eat as a way of making myself feel better. “Poor old you, you deserve something a bit nice to cheer you up”. I have been saying this to myself my whole life. But here’s the thing: for most of that life I have had absolutely no need of comfort.

Growing up, I was one of the luckiest people imaginable. No money worries, no health concerns, no disabilities. A gorgeous, loving and supportive mother and a busy, happy family life. Academic success, a great career, lovely home, lovely holidays and, if you can believe it, lucky in love, too – a really lovely husband. Yet with all this loveliness, while I certainly wasn’t as fat as I am now, I still ate to make myself feel better and I was always a bit tubby. Ridiculous! If I could, I would go back and give my chubby chops a good slap and make sure I knew and appreciated just how little I was in need of any sort of comfort.

It was inevitable then, that when the fickle finger of fate (or whatever it is that balances the universe’s books) decided to deal me an actual nasty blow, my desire for yummy comforting things to eat and drink would grow exponentially. And the real bummer with this is that even when you have coped with your blow, and your life is more or less back on track, or at least manageable again, you are left looking like someone has stuck a bicycle pump up your backside. And, as we all know, looking and feeling like an elephant is not the greatest feeling in the world. Poor me. Pass the bottle of wine.

elephant-Image by Tina Shaskus from Pixabay — Image by Tina Shaskus from Pixabay

22: Success!

It seems I was right. Being distracted and not focusing too closely on what I eat has actually resulted in my losing some weight. Hooray.

Since I started this journey, I have lost 6 kg in total. This has taken all of eight months, so not exactly a quick result, but I believe that’s quite a good thing. I managed to do it without any hardship or sense of deprivation. Essentially, all I have done is eat a bit less sugar, drink a little less wine and go for slightly longer, more energetic dog walks.

I hope I can carry on along these lines. After being quite ill before Christmas I have stopped swimming every week, which is a shame. Perhaps I can find a way back into the pool, especially if I work out a more convenient way to fit it into my week. I think this is the key to any change I try to make. There is no use vowing solemnly to walk the dog at 7 am so that I can be ready for a swim by 9 am. It might happen in the short term, while I am feeling strong and am carried along by the novelty of it all. But any bump in the path, will push me right off track because it is simply too difficult and narrow to negotiate comfortably. I have to find a more robust path — wider, more flexible and more realistic. That way I will carry on doing whatever it is, even if I do find obstacles in the way.

I have had a decent share of obstacles over the past few months, which is why I have not found time to do any blog-writing. Fortunately, as I mentioned, these have served as distractions rather than complete dead-ends. Now that things have settled down a bit, I am going to take another look at my road to good health and see what small adjustments I can make to ensure that in another eight months I can report a similar success. And if another bunch of distractions come along, I sincerely hope they are the interesting and exciting kind and not the ones that have me reaching for a bottle of wine at the end of the day

21: Crisis

So, unlike Boris Johnson, mojo is now dead in a ditch. But that’s okay because it has been replaced with crisis and I find crisis is a pretty powerful motivator.

The elements of our current crisis involve various family matters – granny’s broken hip, college placement uncertainty, vulnerable niece having a career breakdown – and are far too complex, personal and, well, boring, for me to go into. Suffice to say that at the moment I have very little time to spend thinking about what I should eat and how much I am exercising.

This might surprisingly turn out to be somewhat beneficial. I am a great believer in the idea that being distracted from the relentless focus on oneself and one’s weight and body image can leave one’s subconscious a bit of space to self-regulate in a healthy way. I just hope I don’t start feeling sorry for myself and begin self-medicating with bottles of wine.

But for now, I am energized by all that I need to get done so perhaps some good stuff will come out of all this mess.

Here’s hoping.

20: Resus

Beeeeeeeeeep.

Code Blue!

Mojo has flatlined.

Quick, charge up the defribillator to 2 peaceful nights of Shoelace staying with his uncle in Spain.

Clear.

POW.

Beeeeeeeeeep.

Nothing.

Increase the charge to 4 nights without Shoelace worries.

Clear.

POW.

Beeeeeeeeeep.

Still nothing.

Right, take it all the way up to 6 nights.

Oh doctor, are you sure? Think of the side effects.

Just do it. We’ve got no choice if we are ever going to get Mojo back.

Clear!

KERPOW!

Beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep.

It worked.

Mojo is alive!

But still very weak. We shall have to take great care over the next few weeks.

I prescribe one bowl of oats to be taken every morning.

Increase water therapy to a minimum of 2kms swimming weekly.

Book a therapeutic weekend away with Fat Fella in a beautiful 14^th century inn. This must include bracing walks, breath-taking scenery, delicious dinners and a substantial amount of good wine. Maybe a bit of shopping.

We’ll have Mojo back to full strength in no time.

landscape-Image by Elinor Puttick from Pixabay — Image by Elinor Puttick from Pixabay

19: Shoelace and Oats

I have been having a bit of a rotten time lately. It seems my “mojo” has died a horrible death. I just can’t seem to get myself motivated. Not only am I not doing a lot of things that I really wish I were (my cleanerobics are now slotherobics – slow and not very efficient), but I am doing some things that I really wish I weren’t (eating a whole slab of chocolate – blush).

Having given it some thought, I have come up with a few reasons for this sad state of affairs. Firstly, we are having a tough time with Captain Shoelace. Life with him has never been straightforward, but at the moment he is causing both Fat Fella and me a lot of sleepless nights. Like most people, when I don’t get enough sleep, I get grumpy and miserable. I feel sorry for myself. I feel the need for a treat to cheer myself up. I feel that eating a slab of chocolate will do the trick. Of course, deep down, my sensible self knows that this isn’t true. It knows that eating a slab of chocolate is actually going to leave me feeling a lot more grumpy and miserable. But my sleep-deprived brain won’t listen to my sensible self. It just goes right ahead and gets what it wants for a bit of a short-term boost.

Sleep deprivation also results in discombobulation and disorganisation, which in turn leads to the second reason my “mojo” has expired. I have not been eating my oats for breakfast. Instead of scoffing that satisfying, cholesterol-reducing bowl of loveliness every morning, I have been going off for my dog walk on an empty stomach, returning home ravenously hungry and then eating far too much lunch, far too early. This leaves me starving again by about 5pm and needing something to tide me over until dinner. Bad habits are hard to break and good ones (like eating a healthy breakfast) seem as fragile as tissue paper.

The final nail in “mojo’s” coffin is the fact that I have not been losing any bloody weight. Even before the chocolate/no breakfast/ too much snacking incidents, that number on the scales would not budge. Running up and down stairs, swimming for kilometres, dancing while dusting – none of them made a blind bit of difference to the size of my lardie arse. I know I shouldn’t need the boost that losing weight gives me, and that I should be satisfied with better health, but I jolly well do, and I really am not.

Where does this leave me? Can “mojo” be resurrected? I suspect that some of the reasons for its demise are more intractable than others. For example, I think it would be frowned upon were I to attempt to get rid of Shoelace along with the sleepless nights he causes. But I can start eating breakfast again and in fact, that’s what I have been doing for the past few days. And yes, it has improved my mood to the extent that I have been able to write this. Another major plus is that I have carried on swimming and am really loving it. I feel stronger and fitter each time I swim, and if that doesn’t breathe new life into ole “mojo”, nothing will.

18: Covert Ops

I was going to tell you all about this great way I have found of exercising discreetly. Inspired by that scene in the movie, Rocky, where he trots up and down a flight of stars in order to get in shape, I have been roaming my local parks to find fabulous flights of stairs and I have been running up and down them. It is brilliant, if knackering exercise. But what I was going to say I liked best about it was the fact that if someone else came along while I was doing this, I could simply pretend that I was walking up the stairs and not actually exercising.

That’s quite a bizarre thought, really. It got me pondering. Why is it so important to me that people do not realise that I am actually out there, exercising? Is it because fat people exercising are often viewed as figures of ridicule and scorn? (Why IS that? Surely doing something about your problem should be applauded, not derided?) Or is it something else? Less to do with fat shamers and more to do with fat shame?

You see, I am deeply ashamed of being fat. I wish I weren’t. Like the hairy German girls I mentioned in a previous blog, I am in awe of fat people who appear confident enough not to give a toss about their size. And the truth is, if you met me in real life, you might well mistake me for one of those people.

In real life, I would never in a 100 years admit to you that I am unhappy about my weight. I am more likely to make jokes about it and be faintly scornful of people who are too focused on their appearance and don’t “enjoy” all the food, drink and fun that life has to offer.

Yes, I am a big fat hypocrite as well as a big fat person. I hate being fat. And exercising in public is like an admission that I don’t like my looks and want to change them. It is also an admission that I am not very successful at it and perhaps all the fat shamers out there are right, and I am just a weak-willed, unself-disciplined, lazy, rather stupid slob.

Of course, what I should do now, is acknowledge how nonsensical this position is and get my chubby butt out there and join exercise classes and run along the road and basically just get over myself. But do you know what? I am not going to. I just don’t feel like it. Instead, I am going to continue trying to find covert exercise opportunities. I am going to break into my shuffling run only on deserted woodland paths. I am going to trot up and down outdoor stairs and huff and puff up steep hills. I am going to do these things in clothing that can pass as ordinary, everyday clothing, not specific workout gear. You are not going to know that the sports bra under my shirt is so tough it could probably be used as a weapon. My trainers are black and can easily pass as loafers. When you walk past me, you will see a chubby woman out for a walk with her dog. Unremarkable.

I suppose this would be a bit trickier if you encounter me in the pool as it is tough to pretend that one just happens to be wearing a swimsuit while grinding out length after length in the water. But the beauty of the pool is that you won’t really be able to see me. Most of me will be underwater and I will be wearing goggles – a great disguise. In fact, I had an absolutely brilliant swim this week in the big 50m training pool. It was practically deserted and everyone who was there was focused solely on getting their lengths done. Plus, the changing rooms have direct access to the pool, so a minimal walk of shame in cozzie before getting in the water. Result!

And my fears about all the serious swimmers being lean, mean, fit machines were completely unfounded. In fact, I definitely saw someone who was fatter than me there. She was one of the enviable “don’t give a toss” tribe and seemingly completely comfortable in her well-padded skin. Turned out she was a swimming instructor for very little kids and probably spends all day in her cozzie. Now that is impressive.