The wondrous world of sex with non-thin women

I have been spending a lot of time recently perusing the internet for things of interest or funness or note. Though this has unfortunately, meant a lot of time scouring the kind of peer review and recommendation sites apparently mainly peopled by spotty 15-year-old boys in their bedrooms who will promote anything involving girls in bikinis, because they’ve never touched one … and simultaneously things about fat women in the public eye in order to point out that they wouldn’t want to sleep with those.

Of course they’ve only got time to point that out because they have ten minutes before that date they have with Scarlett Johannson or Jessica Alba. Yeah, right. Because these little pricks could actually do soooooo much better.

[And sorry, I should have mentioned that those links will make you want to punch someone. They certainly did me]

Self-image 2: mirror mirror

Like Wendy, I have availed myself of the services of a personal trainer. I’ve been going for four or five weeks and I really like it.

This morning, he asked me to do some step-ups on the PowerPlate, which is a strange vibrating sort of step. You do the same things on the PowerPlate that you would on a step like what Wendy has, except that the vibratingness works your core muscles (not like that!) and improves your balance, strength and posture. I had to put one foot on the step, lift myself up off my back foot so that I was balancing on the foot on the step, and then raise two dumbbells up above my head and back to shoulder level, then step back down, then do it again. (I am not describing this very well.)

Monday Resolution: Drink More Water

For all I sneered at “Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Big?”, I have been decluttering like mad since last week. I am forced to admit that there does seem to be a connection between the part of me that clutters up rooms with rubbish and the part of me that clutters up my body with fat. I plan to give it a couple of weeks and then do a proper post about it.

Today I am putting one aspect of it into practice. To date, I have been the sort of person who decides that they will take five days off an completely revolutionise their living space in that time, only to run out of steam halfway through and end up just stacking the stuff back where they found it. This is why my wardrobe is full of stuff dating back to 1992. I have tended to adopt the same approach with dieting: I spring out of bed, spend three days living on nothing but healthy food, adopt fifty thousand new healthy habits, lose track of all of them within three days and then nose-dive into a Mighty Meaty on Day 4.

I do not do this anymore.  Having looked at a few sites about home organisation and housekeeping, I have discovered that it’s more effective to do things a bit at a time, and in particular add new good habits one at a time, and giving them a chance to sink in before you add another one. That way you don’t overload yourself. And so I decree that this week’s habit shall be Drinking Enough Water.

Clutter

(If you think this reads differently today, you are quite right. I rewrote this quite a bit this morning because I felt, on re-reading it, that it was a bit ranty and didn’t really give the author credit for the things I felt he got right. - KN)

At Newark Airport - which, I notice, most Americans seem to pronounce “ne-WORK”- I picked up an interesting-looking book by Peter Walsh called “Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?”, partly because I remembered Le Singe Non-Travaillant Super-Sexy mentioning it in a comment on one of my other posts. No, I’m not linking to it. Why? Because I can’t be bothered to find it. Go and find it yourself if you’re that bothered. All right then, DON’T. That’s fine. Good! Fine!

The author is a decluttererer, i.e. one of these people who makes a fortune going to people’s houses and telling them to throw things away. I would sneer at this if not for the fact that I am the Clutter Queen of North London. I never throw junk mail away and I usually have hundreds of tiny bottles of toiletries that I will never use or which have an inch in the bottom of them that I’m never going to get out of the bottle. My desk at work was until recently a nightmare and I still never file anything, although - funnily enough - I do keep my PC’s desktop absolutely spotless and everything is very neatly filed. People who send me documents via email are people I treasure forever.

Ad of course I am also fat. So I found this all rather interesting.  BRING ME A READMORE TAG.  STAT.

So I’m in New York, right

which is particularly good because New York City contains this shop called Lane Bryant. Lane Bryant is a chain that sells plus-sized clothes that:

(a) cater for women who are big and curvy, not thin-legged and pot bellied and if any buyers for Evans are reading this can you PLEASE take some notes? and

(b) also appreciate that tall people can be fat and actually do trousers that cover the whole of a tall fat person’s leg, Evans buyers this is another one for you particularly YES YOU, and

(c) vaguely resemble clothes that fashionable people might want to wear, but are made a bit bigger to enable fat people to be fashionable and fat and tall at the same time. WRITE THAT ONE DOWN TOO PLEASE EVANS BUYERS.

I went into Lane Bryant this afternoon, which would be one of your UK evenings, with my usual game plan in mind: place credit card on counter; buy anything I feel like; close eyes; sign bill; continue to make minimum payments on credit card without looking at balance. I justify this on the basis that being tall, fat and small waisted means that I rarely find anything to wear in the UK and therefore a couple of hundred dollars in the US is acceptable, particularly as George Bush is currently cocking up their economy considerably more than Gordon Brown has yet done with ours.

I may be fat but I’m still in pretty good nick. STOP LECTURING ME.

Okay look this is really just a Sunday morning rant. I have noticed that people who are slim sort of assume, without thinking about it, that they are healthier than people who are fat.

I’m not sure that that is strictly true.

Yesterday morning the internet shopping arrived.

(a) Natural yogurt, cured ham, light cheddar, Philadelphia light. Cornichons, olives, onions in brine. Chopped tomatoes, fresh wholewheat pasta, tins of soup and beans.

(b) Fresh salad leaves, cucumber, aubergine, green peppers, skinless chicken breasts, neck fillet of lamb, lean mince, tofu.

(c) Ham and cheese pastry slices, steak pies, Scotch eggs, bacon, full-fat sausages, Meat Feast Pizza, chocolate-cream-filled profiteroles and a fresh cream Victoria Sandwich.

This is shopping for me (Licensed Porketeer), my mother (overweight) and my little brother (5′11 and 9 stone soaking wet).

So who’s going to eat what?

I take stock.

I started posting on here as something of a diet veteran. I hadn’t done anything too stupid - no cabbage soup diets, no food combining - but I had lost a couple of stone on low-carb diets, which I promptly put back on plus more, and considerably more on Weight Watchers, of which I promptly put back on 75% - making me a diet triumph, because 90% of dieters put the whole lot back on within a year plus ten per cent, or something. But by the time Anna and NWM and Wendy and I were putting this blog together, I had decided: no more counting, no more cutting out food groups. I was going to eat what I wanted, cook all of my food myself and exercise more.

I didn’t manage the exercising - I hadn’t organised myself properly, about which I will post another time. But I did manage to eat intuitively between Christmas 2007 and February 2008. There were no forbidden foods. The rules were simple: I ate whatever I wanted for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and ate until I was satisfied. I confined myself to fruit, vegetables or nuts in between meals. And I cooked everything I ate myself (apart from chicken beyti kebabs from the local Turkish, which are my absolute favouritest most favourite food ever). So if I wanted fried fish and chips that was fine - as long as I sliced the potatoes and fried the fish myself. The rationale was that if I wanted it badly enough I’d make it, and if I didn’t want it badly enough to take the time to make it, then I was probably more looking for convenience than fishy chippy happiness and should be rethinking my choice.

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.

I decide to start counting again.

Many many years ago I passed the entrance exam to a Rather Good Public School and got a place there. I got permanently excluded three years later, so don’t be getting too excited. And I was really miserable there anyway. No no, stay with me, there’s a point to this. It was a bit of a coup for my junior school, which was a middling state school, and naturally as soon as I passed my head swelled to fourteen times its normal size and I wandered about looking smug and generally acting like an unbearable twat.

But then my mother, who is Very Wise, took me aside and said: “Don’t be thinking that you can stop working now. You might have been top of the class at junior school, but now you’re going to a school where everyone was top of the class at junior school.”

“This,” she concluded, “is where you have to really start working.”

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