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?

Comfortably full: an urban myth?

Losing weight? Easy-fucking-peasy, or so I’m told. Generally by people who’ve never had a weight problem. “It’s simple. Eat fewer calories than you expend.” “It’s simple. Burn more calories than you consume.” “It’s simple. Eat less and move around more.” “It’s simple. Eat what you want and stop when you’re full.” I don’t necessarily have a problem with these principles in theory. It’s the “It’s simple” bit that gets my goat. Oh, of course! That’s why I’m fat! Because losing weight is simple! It’s just that being fat is SO MUCH FUN!

(This post is being written by an angry premenstrual woman. Day 26, y’all. TMI? I DON’T CARE. Don’t be in my face today.)

The canard I want to look at today is “Eat what you want and stop when you’re full”, because I actually think that’s some pretty good advice and not really a canard at all. But first I’m going to put a “Read More” tag here, to stop the page getting cluttered up.

Try this for lunch: Pasta Puttanesca

Get these:

500g fresh wholewheat spaghetti (enough for five people; I’d make the sauce for five, and refrigerate what I didn’t use in one sitting)

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1 tin anchovy fillets in olive oil

1-2 fat cloves of garlic, finely chopped

2 400g tins of chopped tomatoes

A pinch of salt

3 tablespoons of capers (I like them whole but you could chop them)

8-10 black olives, chopped

Half a teaspoon of dried oregano

Try this for breakfast

Get these:

50g oats or oatmeal - I really like jumbo rolled oats, but whatever you want is fine, ok?

300ml milk - skimmed, semiskimmed or (OMG!!1!1!) whole - which, by the way, is still a low-fat food and not a dirty word.

1 heaped teaspoon of peanut butter - smooth OR crunchy or maybe like a completely different nut butter altogether?

1 flat tsp golden caster sugar, or to taste.

Then do this:

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.