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.