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]

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.

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*

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.

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.

The Dairy Book Of Home Cookery Diet (in association with the Milk Marketing Board of England and Wales)

In the olden days, before the internet, mobile telephones and Kerry Katona, there existed a thing called a ‘milkman’.

He drove about the place in a ‘milkfloat’ which was (and may well still be) an open-sided shop that travelled at no more than 5mph. From the ‘milkfloat’ the ‘milkman’ (with whom you would have arranged an account via, for example, Unigate), would deliver food and drink to your very doorstep, including a range of dairy items (inc. milk, cream, eggs etc), fruit juice (orange), bread (Mother’s Pride white), “Watch Out, There’s a Humphrey About” stickers and, in later years (as fashions changed and people became less sturdy) bottled water.

He also delivered books or, more precisely, the splendid tome you see here: The Dairy Book of Home Cookery, by Sonia Allison (Milk Marketing Board of England and Wales, 1977). It has been revised and re-issued over the years, but the edition you see here is an exact replica of the one my own mother would routinely throw at my childish monkey head when she caught me in the larder with my greedy monkey paws in the breadbin.

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.