Don’t. Eat. Cake.

I’m sitting on the train, and, as usual, am listening to my ipod on shuffle – which is fine in many ways, as it provides a constant and random selection of songs. However, it also provides the random introduction of other things that happen to be on there. Some people telling me how to order coffee in Portuguese for example. A podcast I subscribed to, forgot was rubbish, and forgot to take off there. And, prince over all them all in the chart of random things to pop up – Paul McKenna trying to hypnotise me into being thin.

I don’t know why I have this. No, that’s a lie, I know perfectly well why I have this. I have this because I realised I was fat, decided I wanted to do something about it, but was too lazy and scared to ACTUALLY do anything about it so spent 7.50 on Amazon in the hope that I could slap on some headphones close my eyes and, when I opened them again, I’d be thin.

I bought it, I received it, and evening after evening for some time afterward, I lay on top of the covers with my eyes and concentrated on the voice telling me comforting and fat-deflating. So, most importantly, Did It Work?

Motivation’s what you need - but in a BAD way

As the late Roy Castle would have said.

I’ll write a proper post later, hopefully. But in the meantime…
I just found this gallery of the worst foods you can order in American chain restaurants, and found it oddly motivational, in an anti-appetiser, snuff-movie-of-food kind of way, and quite apart from the alarming calorie and fat counts of these foods, if you can LOOK at those pictures and then fancy eating anything but a nice crisp salad, you are of stronger constitution than me. Seriously, I’ve only flipped through the slideshow and am suddenly desperate to go to the gym to repent for it. Which Can’t be bad.

*shudders*

Q&A

*mumble mumble*

What’s that Anna?

srywenquie

Louder?

I’m Sorry I went Quiet

Well done. And what else?

huh?

What else were you going to say to all the nice ladies and gentlemen?

oh.

Come on. We haven’t got all DAY, Anna. Get on with it or I’ll hide you behind a ‘read more’

I was BAD.

Well done. Now tell them what you did.

but but but but but but

TellThemWhatYouDID

I couldn’t write because I Went to Italy and I went to Crufts and I got really busy and I had loads of work on but also I hardly had time to go to the gym and I ate quite a lot of bad. Like cheese and pizza and cured meats bad. And pastries and ice cream. And booze. Just all kinds of bad.

And the rest ….

and I didn’t want to tell you because I thought it was embarrassing and then I didn’t want to weigh myself because I was scared and then I did weigh myself and I hadn’t put on any weight at all, which was totally flukey and then I was scared of telling you because it seemed really improbable and so I reckoned it must have only happened because of magic and I thought if I mentioned it out loud I might break the jinx.

And that was?

Quite stupid, yes.

And what are you going to do?

Am going to write more often and betterer.

Promise

Ysssss.

Good girl. Now you can go to bed. No, I promise I won’t murder you in your sleep now. You’ve done very well.

_____________________

God I’d be a really bad nanny.
Hello again. Sorry about that. Back now.

But WHY?

I have never really addressed the whys and wherefore of why I am here. Well, clearly because I’m a bit fat. That much is obvious. But fat people are jolly, right? They’re world renowned for it, in fact. And so why wouldn’t I want to be jolly? It is crazy, I understand. But bear with me all the same. I have an almost pathological need to tell stories from the beginning - it is why so very many of my stories are very long and dull. So I just have to get this ‘beginning’ off my chest before feeling more comfortable posting stories from the middle, on the way to the end.

I am, I have mentioned about twice in every post I have written, in the middle rather than the beginning of my shrinkage journey. I’ve always been certainly on the podgy side of things, but then I fell in love, I fell into an office job … and I fell from podgy into porky and from porky into fat.

Then a couple of years ago, a series of things were the catalyst to me starting to do something to do something about it.

It would all be fine if it wasn’t for the booze

Which, now I say it out loud makes it sounds as if my diet would be all peaches and cream (no, wait, that would be a BAD diet) - as if my diet would be all oatmeal and apricots if it wasn’t for the nine pints of Guinness I put away every night. Which is, of course, not the case.
It’s eight pints.

Haha! Not really. I don’t drink pints anymore - or hardly often - because I know they’re very very bad, and contain four-hundred thousand empty calories. And for what? For the sake of a lovely fun evening with friends. Oh, no, that sounds nice. Hang on…

Alcohol. I likes it. And it’s taken me the longest time to work out that if I want to get this whole weightloss thing actually moving again, I’m going to have to cut it down to (basically) zero. Not zero. That would be ridiculous.

But basically zero. Because for me, it’s not JUST the empty calories in the alcohol that make the difference - and actually, I’m finding it hard to call them ‘empty’ calories because that doesn’t sound like they’re any fun - it’s the hangover points that make the difference…

Mrs Oldlady would have been so proud

I fell in love with pilates last year.

I feel bad - like I’m going about this all arse over tit, actually (not pilates you should feel good if you manage to get arse over tit in pilates because it is how some of the positions are performed). I feel bad because, in order to do this blog right, I feel like I should be starting from the beginning and relating to you what it was that made me start wanting to lose weight, how I feel about being a woman naturally prone to podginess, how I worked very hard to get rid of several stone and how I’m so unbelievably annoyed that I’m stuck at the last third of the way that I could just spit. All those things I need to talk about; but they’ll come in time - I just need to get the disappointment of today off my chest first.

See, I fell in love with pilates last year - I found a class in London, in a drafty church hall near work, with a nice northern woman who walked constantly around the class, placing calming hands on trembling backs and correcting tiny wrongnesses, occasionally saying ‘Good!’. After two weeks I noticed that my gym workouts - mainly based on boring cardio and fixed weight training - were becoming more effective, all due to the focussed muscle-toning powers of the mighty and simple pilates, and my mighty and marvellous teacher. In the third week she told me I was a natural, and had a ‘very strong core’ and I immediately decided I loved her and texted my beloved informing him I was becoming a lesbian and leaving him for a bendy northerner. Sadly, she had to leave the class to save the world elsewhere, and shortly after the class came to an end. Then I went freelance and …well, the story gets a bit dull for about a year after that. Needless to say, though, I evangelised the miracle of pilates wherever I went.

And then I went to another class today. And promptly fell out of love again.
You can find out why if you like by clicking

Diet? What diet?

I was having a conversation the other day with a friend about the question of whether you tell people you’re ‘dieting’ or not. “Sure” he said. “Why not? It’s not a thing to be embarrassed about, is it?”

No. I mean, ‘no, I guess not’. Because I’ve never said it, and I don’t care to. I’m not on a diet. I’m eating carefully, sure, and being aware of not eating to excess if I can help it. I’m aware of what I’m eating, and pleased when it is healthy, and feel slightly naughty when I know it isn’t.

But diet is a VILE word. It’s a state of denial; an impermanent state after which you have to beat yourself up when it all goes belly-up, or rather ‘belly-big, all over again; and, what’s more, it’s a sublimation into a subservient state of eating only when and what people tell you to.
Yes, I have certain problems with authority. What of it?

I understand that diets and diet clubs are very helpful for people - and, to be fair, very effective, which is why people ON them - particularly the diet club thing, be it Weight Watchers or Slimmers World or whatever else - tend to lose weight a lot faster than I have. But for me it has been a slow process of changing the way I think about food - about cooking it, and eating it, and enjoying it.

I have changed the way I eat to eat, where I can, as healthily and deliciously as I can. But I eat what I want to eat. I ain’t on no diet, foo’. No sucker tell ME what I can and cannot eat. Also: I ain’t getting on no plane.
Sorry, I seemed to have turned into Mr T and thought I should probably try to make the best of it.

So eat what I like. I eat what’s in the cupboards and the fridge, which tends to be brown things (brown rice and noodles and things, I mean, rather than ‘poo’) or green things (again, vegetables rather than things that have gone off, although there tend to be some of those in the fridge too, because I am a bit slovenly). I don’t snack on bad stuff, I try not to graze mindlessly when I’m in a place where that would be possible, and I’m steering clear of Guinness and drinking vodka instead. Which, admittedly was pretty easy as I like one very much, and not the other at all. I am eating what many might perceive as diet food, then.

But if I have had a long week and a pissy day, and I’m hungover and grumpy and can’t be arsed to think of anything more constructive, yes of course I’ll have a pizza. A big one, piled with pepperoni and jalapeno peppers and anyone who says I can’t have one had better be prepared for the consequences. And if I’m in a restaurant that serves a big fat steak, you are very mistaken if you think I’m going to order a stuffed pepper.

There is absolutely nothing WRONG with being on a diet, please do not get mistake me. It is just that I am not on one. Not even slightly. No.

Don’t make me hungry. You won’t like me when I’m hungry.

You know when you’re in the supermarket and you can see a toddler really playing up, throwing things and shouting a lot and maybe spouting tears vertically from the outside of the eye? And the mother sees you trying not to notice, politely, and says “Oh, I know, but she’s just hungry” (unless she’s frayed to the very root, in which case she may punch you in the face?)

Well, that’s me, except I’m 30, and, well, if not louder, then certainly more capable of damage.
But I always forget that if I’m busy, or being careful what we eat and/or trying not to snack between meals, I forget and if … like last night, dinner gets delayed and delayed, then I still forget to eat, and there are other things to distract me, and dinner STILL hasn’t come and then it does and something is missing from the order?..

Well, then; then I am grumpy.

And not rationally grumpy, either, as if that were a thing. I’m the kind of Hungry Hulk Rage hungry that leads me to shout “How am I supposed to EAT without lime pickle!?” and kick my hand bag across the floor. It is the kind of little temper tantrum that would go away in about five seconds if I just sat down and ate something (yes, even without lime pickle), calming my blood sugar levels and pumping my inner hulk full of inner hashish. It is not mentioned in the diet books so very much, this exciting physiological fact. But boy, is it handy to know!

You need to keep fuelled, or you may quite literally hulk-out. It is no wonder those people who have never been on anything but diets their whole life are a bit crabby, you know what I’m saying? They’re so hungry they’re PERMANENTLY teetering on the edge of a big hungry-hulk temper tantrum. Allthetime.

So this is the thing. I have to remember not to eat crap, but to eat at all.
I have to snack, just not snack badly.
Therefore, I have decided, I should start leaving dried apricots lying around the house for occasions such as these.
And in case I get lost, obviously.

The story doesn’t end there, of course, but the catalogue of disaster that followed is not as it is doubtless not dietty enough for this blog, I suspect, so I will post it over my normal everyday blog where it might make more (or knowing me, less) sense in context.

But my point is only this - the point that no one ever made to me:
Let no one ever tell you that snacking is a pointless activity, or that empty calories ruin lives.
Snacking, I argue, is not only laudable, it is an imperative.

I just have to keep reminding myself that it doesn’t necessarily have to involve cheese.

Statistics

[week one, day one, lbs dropped toward total: none, obv]

Four things that are driving me mad
1) After a year and a half of going to the gym and eating well and about four stone lost, so far, I am completely, utterly and maddeningly stuck. I have bobbed up and down, a pound or two a week, going down, up, down, up, and down again as rapidly as a whore on a pogo stick, I cannot seem to break the stuckness.

2) The stuck point that I am on is exactly the most annoying point it could be. I know the BMI thing is dodgy and not a good scale to judge by, but the fact that I’ve stopped just tiny, weeny increments above the line that separates one classification from the next. This is makes me utterly stabby.
3) Although I exercise like a crazy demon and my dearest love does fuck all, he is only two points on the BMI thing above me, which frankly couldn’t be less fair. Lucky fucking 6′3″ bugger.
4) The new convention on TV news where people say “Hi, this is the nine o’clock news, I’m Matt, our top story tonight …” Matt WHO? You’re a news reader, have some sodding gravitas. I know that isn’t anything to do with weight loss, but it is driving me mad, so, you know, it fits.

Four things that could be my downfall
1) Lovely lovely wine.
2)Getting tired at the end of a week and being unable to stop the words “Oh can we not just order a pizza?” tumbling from my mouth.
3) Baking. There is nothing more relaxing and comforting than spending an afternoon chopping, stirring, beating and baking. Problem is, you end up with a large cake, or a mountain of muffins or a batch of cookies that, yes, have made the house smell lovely, but are also packing a sat-nav with the full instructions of the fastest way to your thighs already programmed in. I have been trying to lower the impact of said baked goods with low fat this and sugar free that, but everyone knows that ruins the flavour - and I have been practising the concept of cooking it but then refusing to eat them, but it does tend to undermine everyone else’s opinion of your food.
4) Work. Occasionally I have to eat out for work, and I have to order a variety of things, because … well, I just do. And I love food. Good food. Frankly, anyone who can go into a fabulous restaurant where they know how best to cook the world’s best ingredients, inventively, freshly and do it well … and then order a bowl of lettuce with no croutons and dressing on the side? Well, they haven’t got the art of living down pat, in my opinion.

Four things in my favour
1) I like exercise, mainly as it gives me an excuse not to do any work for a bit. So that should help.
2) I have a goal. I have two weddings to go to mid-May, and have sworn a pact of thinness with fellow attendees for the second one. That gives me three and a half months. But pressure. Pressure is good.
3) This blog. Peer pressure is a powerful thing, but I’m fucked if I’m going to Weight Watchers, because I’m not paying someone to try and sell me snack bars and weigh me like a bag of nutty slack before chastising me in front of a room full of hungry fat lasses. Thus, blog. Yay.
4) I know it is possible, this weight-loss thing. This not-being-stuck. This getting-thinner-again, thing.
I just have to work out how.

So please bear with me.