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.

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

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.

1: Fat!

lake-constance-1937138_1920 — Image by photosforyou from Pixabay

So, here’s the thing. I’m fat. What does that mean exactly?

It’s a weird concept because we all have such screwed up ideas about fatness, health, attractiveness, thinness, intelligence, laziness, and how all these things fit together.

If you were foolhardy enough to comment on my weight, I’ve got a whole range of defensive responses to choose from. Which one I’d go for would depend on who you are and how I am feeling at the time. So, I might say: “How dare you presume I’d rather be thin?”, “I am fat because I eat too much, so what?”, “I am fit and well and get plenty of exercise, what’s your problem?”, “ I love food and intend to enjoy it until I drop dead” (from a heart attack, probably), or “I love being big, it makes me feel powerful.”

The thing is, while I truly believe in all of the above statements, none of them are true. In my heart of hearts, I hate being fat. I look at adverts for fabulous clothes and I dream about being thin enough to look good in them. I see people jogging past with lovely muscly legs and flat tummies and I really envy them. Some days every joint in my body aches from the excess weight I have to carry around with me.

You haven’t got a hope in hell of getting me to admit to any of these truths in person, though. They are my deep, dark secret. They are a secret because if I admit to thinking these things, how on earth can I possibly explain why I am not thin? I am not stupid after all. I know what and how much I should eat in order to be thin. But I don’t do that. While I have some ideas as to why not, the truth is I am bewildered by the silliness of it as much as anyone.

I have looked at very fat people on TV and wondered to myself, why don’t they just stop eating so much? The cheek of me. Surely I, if anyone, knows that it’s not quite as simple as that.

If I sense someone is critical about me because of my eating habits (my mother-in-law springs to mind) I often want to ask her if she always does exactly what she thinks she should do or does she also make mistakes or do things she wishes she hadn’t? Surely everyone has some aspect of themselves that they’d like to correct, but somehow can’t? Or am I deluding myself? Do most people trot around feeling as if they are in complete control and is it just us fatties and addicts who seem to be at the mercy of our desires?

The other thing about fatness, is the disconnect I feel from my body. It is as if the big blob that I glimpse in the mirror from time to time, has nothing to do with the essential “me”. Maybe that’s why I can’t fix it, because in a way it’s not even real? I am sure a psychotherapist would have a field day exploring my disassociation and splitting (and if you have any thoughts on this, please comment below, it will save me a fortune in analysis).

Despite all this, I am determined to never go on diet again. I have been dieting on and off since I was 14, and I firmly believe that each time I lose some weight, I not only put it back on again, but that each time I add an extra 20%. This is how I have ended up being the lard arse I am today.

Looking back at photos of myself when I was young, I sadly note that of course I wasn’t actually fat. I can’t believe I listened to the bitchy girls who told me I was, and wasted all that lovely luscious youthfulness in worrying about the size of my tummy. Why couldn’t I have listened instead to that bloke who told me I had gorgeous big tits and legs that went on for miles? Because I am an idiot, that’s why. A fairly normal human idiot, but an idiot nonetheless.

My absolute biggest fear now is that in 10 years’ time I will look back at photos of myself today and think, well that wasn’t really fat, now I’m really fat. (Don’t forget to check back in a decade’s time. Although the truth is, if I get much fatter, the chances of my still being alive in 10 years’ time are the only slim thing around.)

So, in a last ditch attempt to stave off what I fear may be inevitable, I have recently taken myself in hand and am attempting my own version of a non-diet, which hopefully is going to have the result of at least a slight moderation of my excess weight. I have managed one and a bit weeks of this so far, and I am feeling good. The difficulty will be in keeping going.

I read an article^* recently about Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) that said that a feature of people with the condition is that they are not motivated by any of the things that most “normal” people are – namely importance, rewards or consequences. Instead, they can only be switched on by “a momentary sense of interest, competition, novelty, or urgency created by a do-or-die deadline.”I am not, as far as I am aware, someone with ADD, but that statement is certainly true of me. At the moment, I am interested in what I am trying to do, and it is novel, but I do worry about sticking to the plan. I hope that the pressure of having to write this blog regularly, will help.

^*Here’s a link to the article: https://www.additudemag.com/symptoms-of-add-hyperarousal-rejection-sensitivity/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=diagnosis&fbclid=IwAR1nF197DwlEAvs6r8vDtwrwKvxbkyf-Zdal5Ek_xB3a5l_oLxfhEWiMHDE)

So, what is this plan? I call it: