I Am Rigid With Glee

Yes! It is true! Finally, all my dreams have come true, for I am being paid to be fat. Paid in Canadian dollars (or “Loonies”, as they are called, in honour of a bird that I do not believe exists even in the European imagination), for wiffling on about what it is like to be a porketeer.

 

Let me explain. I work in an ‘advertising agency’, where I am a ‘planner’ (or “planificatrice stratégique” when in the French part of Canada). This means that I read things (mainly on the internet), try and make very complicated ideas (about for e.g. chips and the weather) very simple, write things down (sometimes on charts, sometimes on the wall in blunt wax crayons),  write a very great many emails and talk about stuff with other ‘planners’, ‘creatives’ and ‘account handlers’.  It is great. 

 

Of late, I have been working on a weight loss brand. It is quite interesting, and I will be sharing my ‘findings’ (”Weight Loss Gain Train”, anyone?  Any takers for the “Transtheoretical Model of Behaviour Change”?) with you, my eager readers, any day now. (I hasten to add I have lost no weight; in fact I have put on three pounds of late, but at least I know the transtheoretical reason why.)

 

In the meantime, I must confess to having been “stumped” by a section of the presentation I must make to my client(s) and a room full of (thin) advertising types the day after tomorrow. It is quite ridiculous, and not unlike asking Tony Parsons what it feels like to be a preening cockmonkey: yes - I must try and ‘get inside the mind of the consumer’ and try help them to understand what it feels like to be fat.  In the ‘advertising business’, it is called “getting inside the mind of the consumer” - but I’m fucked if I know what to do. 

 

Anyone got any ideas?

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.

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?

BMI slideshow

Further to my post here about how arbitrary the BMI calculator is as an indicator of whether a particular person’s weight is healthy or not, have a look at Shapely Prose’s BMI slideshow. The Flickr set is interesting too.

The slideshow is made up of photos of women, with a note underneath indicating whether they are underweight, normal, overweight, obese or morbidly obese according to the BMI calculator. I found it really interesting. There isn’t very much common ground between my idea of “overweight” and “obese” and the BMI calculator’s. It’s fairly clear to me that most of the “overweight” women in that slideshow would have to be very thin indeed to get into the “healthy” range, and whilst I can see that some of the women in the “obese” and “morbidly obese” categories are bigger than average, and might be described as “overweight” in that sense (assuming that there is a “weight” to be “over”), I am not sure that I would apply the “obese” label to any of them.

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.

So you think you might be fat.

But how do you know?

This is not a stupid question. I can only talk about the women I know, but it seems to me that nothing makes women, as a group, more miserable than WEIGHT - regardless of whether they’re 7 stone or 17 stone. They all think they’re fat. Even if they have been told by a doctor that they aren’t fat, even if they are comfortably within what is said to be the “healthy range” for their height, they all seem to think that they could do with losing half a stone.

But why? How do you know you’re fat? Because you don’t like what you see in the mirror? Because your clothes are getting tight? Because your boyfriend’s started making pointed comments about going to the gym? Did your mother ask if you needed that second slice of cake? Did your father take you aside and ask if you wanted to end up like your mother? Did you suddenly realise that the reason 1994 was the happiest year of your life was that you’d managed to get down to 10 stone? Did you divide your weight in pounds by your height in inches squared and realise that the chart says you’re overweight? Is your waist-hip ratio too high? Or perhaps you’ve just been to your doctor hoping for antibiotics for your cough and came out with an appointment with the surgery nutritionist instead?