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?

I’ve got a lot on my plate (As it were)

I have been lying in my bed farting, rotating my ankle, scratching and berating myself. The self-haircutting pathologist is asleep, dreaming of rabbits and lobsters, as he usually does; sometimes he emits a squeak as the dream-lobster tweaks his nose. My leg is itchy; my tummy hurts; I am thirsty. I am fretting.

There has been much to contend with in the last five months, much of it awfully nice and for all the right reasons (moving to Canada), some of it sad (leaving idiot friends and family); some it downright fucking annoying (dealing with The Royal Bank of Scotland Fleet Street branch). Most of it is self-indulgent tosh, mind you, including:

I Am A Cretin

There are a million reasons why people get fat, or can’t lose weight, or don’t want to lose weight, either consciously or sub-consciously. There are also a million different ways to motivate people who are losing weight and whilst Katy, Wendy, Anna and I all broadly have the same reasons for doing it, what motivates us will be very different. (As will the way we cope with for e.g. random scone attacks, sudden curries, The Effect Of Ladyhormones, not losing weight for a week when you are doing all the right things, etc.)

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I am often the first to pipe up with ‘helpful advice’ for my fellow Porketeers, ranging from “shut the fuck up, stop your whining and just get on with it“, to “love yourself, yeah?”, via “It’s really simple! Just eat less and move around more!”, with many other interjections in between.

None of this, however, detracts from the point, which is that I have not:

1. Lost one pound since we started this blog;

2. Managed to combine going to work with doing exercise;

3. Listened to my own advice.

I found this post on my other blog last night.I was much more amusing back then; much more amusing than, in fact, I’ve been for about 530 days. But that is another story all together, and I shall not (for once) digress.

I wrote it on 18th July 2006. After having a quick lie down and a suck at the gin, I got out my scientific calculator and did some maths. A bit of really clever arithmetic told me that, had I stuck to my very reasonable and effective regime (and assuming I had lost weight the proper rate of approximately 7lbs a month), I could have lost 9 stone since I wrote that post, and that’s about five stone more than I need to lose.

What a fuck-awful waste of time. People being kind or encouraging makes no difference, and sympathy makes me want to vomit. I have never really listened to anyone else’s advice (unless I ask for it), and I hate being told what to do, or being told I “must” or “should” do anything; but the one thing that will get me off my fat arse (in almost any circumstance) is the prospect of looking stupid.

Yes. It is true. I have been stupid. I am a cretin. I am a fool to myself. I am an idiot. I have wasted time, and potential for cartwheels, riding horses at dangerous speeds, and not looking like a mentalist in jeans.

As of this very minute right now, when I am faced with an open biscuit tin, I shall shout ‘YOU ARE A CRETIN!’ and withdraw my hand sharply. If I decide that I cannot be arsed to either go to the gym or ride upon the noble crosstrainer that the best of all men obtained and assembled for me*, I shall remind myself of how miserable I feel if I do not, and shout ‘FOOL!’ in the mirror.  And if hot cheese is in the offing, I shall form its delicious fatty-fatness into the word “I-D-I-O-T”.

Yes. It is time. I must stop being an idiot and get my fat arse in gear.

* It is the least I can do. I have non-stop quiet support, 24 hours a day, in all weathers, hairy crack or not. I have not properly appreciated it until now.

SPECIAL VALENTINE EDITION: DIET ‘N’ EXERCISE TRUE AND FALSE

If you love someone, set them free. That is what they say – and by ‘they’ I do not mean that simpering fool, Sting.

And so, on this Valentine’s Day I intend to set you, our loyal and adoring readers, free. Free from self-delusion, self-justification and self-deception; free from Cabbage Soup Diets, mal-functioning glands and generously-proportioned bones; free from half-science involving metabolic rates and sausages, and free from the endless excuses that you make to yourself that, if said out loud to a passing and moderately intelligent stranger, would cause them to skittle alarmedly to the side, clutching their faces.

Yes. It is ‘diet and exercise true and false’, in which I examine and, with genuine scientifically sound analytic skills learnt whilst reading English and Related Literatures and the University of York, ‘debunk’ some popular diet myths. You will really love it!

Food Consumed When Travelling Contains No Calories

Long car journeys are often more amusing when punctuated by a visit to the petrol station, resulting in for e.g. packets of Hula-Hoops, Pork Farms Pork Pies, packets of Maltesers, all-in-one-breakfast sandwiches and entire packets of cheese, gnawed free-style whilst going at 60mph in the middle lane of the A40.

Similarly, the tedium of a trans-Atlantic flight is often broken only by chewing confusedly on an unidentifiable pasty/cake hybrid stuffed with curried chicken; and no aeroport experience is complete without a disconsolate visit to Prêt À Manger.

In days of yore, it was impossible to spend any proper amount of time on an InterCity 125 without a microwaved bacon sandwich; nowadays, of course, one simply passes by the Marks and Spencer Simply Food and purchases a prawn mayonnaise sandwich and ‘low fat’ crisps, to be chewed at whilst eyeing the family bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk, free with every copy of OK!.

All of this is consumed freely, in the mistaken belief that because you are (in theory) in motion, the calories do not exist.

Verdict: FALSE

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.

I’d Rather Be Fat Than Have Weird Ears

Imagine it, if you will.

You are having a “night out”. Young people are strewn about the place exchanging views on a number of different topics, some topical (e.g. the US elections and/or Kerry Katona), some whimsical (who would you rather sleep with, Nigel Lawson or Douglas Hurd?), and some puerile (if Finnegan’s Wake is about the Bible, and the Bible is about the law, does that mean that Finnegan’s Wake is about the law?) and drinking alcoholic beverages of various kinds. Everywhere you look, heads are thrown back with gay abandon. Outside, young ladies in short skirts who have forgotten their hosiery are sucking hard on extra-long Consulate cigarettes.

You are looking quite nice, like you might smell of buttercups and taste of caramel; your hair is glossy like that of a show pony; your clothes are well-cut and effectively demonstrating your capacious bosom which – it must be said – is one of the benefits of being a porker. You look like you’re getting it, and you probably are.

At the back of your mind, as it always is, is the awareness that you are bigger than most other people in the room, but you don’t really think about it; there’ s no need; after all, sometimes it’s a benefit and anyway, it’s not actually making any difference to the type of evening you’re having: your friends are still cretins, someone’s trying to chat you up, you’re drinking gin straight out of the bottle with a bendy straw, you’re better looking than the dwarf with extensions, and all is right with the world.

Then you are introduced to a woman you haven’t met before. You dimly register that she’s sort of medium-sized. She’s got slightly weird ears and could do with a good haircut. She’s OK; a bit over-familiar perhaps, but OK to talk to while Katy’s getting off with the Lithuanian in the corner.

And then it happens. She puts a confiding little paw on your arm and leans into you. Her voice drops and she tells you how fat she is. How – no, look, I can pinch AN INCH under my arm – flabby she is, how little exercise she takes, how she just hardly eats a thing but just can’t help being so fat, how she just feels so awful and how she’s not sure she’s ever going to fit into a size 10 again.

You go through the usual rigmarole, which usually involves saying something along the lines of “No no, you are wrong: for it is I who is fat; approximately twice your size, in fact!”, at which point she takes a step back and squeaks, “But you’re not fat! You’re just … big-boned! And you’ve got such a pretty … face. And a lovely personality.”

You look at her, and more half-arsed platitudes are exchanged. For some reason that, later, you can’t quite fathom, you have neither set her hair on fire nor invented a terminal illness that involves serious weight gain. Nor, importantly, have you told her to fuck off.

The rest of the evening is a bit shit, really. You’ve remembered that you’re a porker and have, against your will, said it out loud with your mouth in order to make someone else feel better. And indeed she does feel better, but you feel fat and (far worse), patronised.

Then you get home and you think about it a bit more, and you think: fuck me, when I’m three stone down I’ll be so fucking grateful I won’t worry about sags and kneecaps and flappy underarm skin. I’ll be medium-sized, wearing medium-sized clothes, possibly even able to do cartwheels. Things generally will be a bit faster, easier, less annoying, and I will be happy with that; but her ears will be as weird as they always were.

With this unkind but soothing thought, you fall into a deep slumber, interrupted only by pornographic dreams involving Alex James and cheese on toast. In the morning, you wake up and go straight to the gym realising, as you pack your size 18 gym pantaloons, that never being patronised again is as good a reason as any to stop being fat.

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”.