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.

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*

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?

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…

Lunch: the dieter’s nemesis

Lunch is tricky if you work away from home. It’s a difficult meal anyway, to be honest - I never really know what to have or how much to have. Where I work, there are more soup bars, sushi bars, noodle bars, sandwich places and sit-down cafes than you can shake a stick at, but the portions are huge and excess fat lurks everywhere. NEVER, for example, let the girl behind the cafe counter put butter on your baked potato for you, unless you want to spend your lunch hour wading knee-deep in said butter to find your potato.

(Does anyone else find the thought of wading knee-deep in melted butter profoundly sexually arousing?)

(What? I like butter.)

Takeaway sandwiches are always bigger than they need to be, the bread/filling ratio is always high (or low? Whatever. More bread than filling, that’s what I mean) and generally bulked out with mayonnaise or cheap spread. Plus, they cost a fortune. A sandwich, a drink, a yogurt and a couple of pieces of fruit will set you back between £4.50 and £8.

No wonder we’re always hungry. And strapped for cash.

I appreciate that the whole browniegate thing earlier in the week has somewhat dented my credibility as a healthy eater. But I am about to redeem myself. Follow me past the “read more” tag, my friends, for a couple of simple, tasty, filling recipes that are both reasonably priced and nicer than anything you could buy.

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.

I Am Not A “Big Girl”, You Cretin

Being a porker is quite bad enough without having to deal with the ghastly euphemisms for “you’re fat” that are routinely employed by the cretinous.

In the same way that I do not go “to the little girls’ room” or “pop out for a lite bite to eat”, I am not “a big girl”; nor am I “a larger lady”. I am not “big-boned”, “well-built” or “solid”. I say “what?”, not “beg pardon?”. I go to the loo; I don’t “powder my nose”.

I am (obviously) hilariously funny, but I am by no means “bubbly” - and the only time you’ll hear a slim person described as having a “lovely personality” is if they’ve tumbled out of the ugly tree, hitting a few branches on the way down.

I am not “Rubenesque”. I am definitely “curvy”, but then so’s the Michelin Man. You can’t be “chubby” if you’re more than twelve years old, and “cuddly” (particularly in internet dating profile speak) means that you probably have difficulty walking and/or have tiny animals living in your folds.

I am a great many things (frighteningly beautiful, extremely clever, gifted with the ability to play all of the works of Alan Parsons on the Glockenspiel, shit at Scrabble, good at dancing in the comedy style), and one of the things I also happen to be is fat. Or overweight. Either way, I weigh more than I should.

I would like to continue to play the works of Alan Parsons on the Glockenspiel because that simple act enriches my life and that of those around me, but being fat does not. I am not that bothered about clothes (my simple but perfect beauty usually serves to distract attention away from my cellulite-reducing leggings), but I would like to live until I am quite old and not get diabetes and/or need a winch to get in and out of the bath.

I have therefore decided to stop being fat and try and weigh what I should weigh, give or take a slight allowance to account for the weight of my enormous brain. “But how will you do this thing?”, I hear you cry. Quite simple, my friends: I shall eat less and move around more! I hear it is all the rage in weight-loss circles, so I am going to give it a try. Wish me luck!

Coming soon: I write about weight-loss using a paragraph that does not start with “I”.