The idea that excess weight = bad is so prevalent that it’s easy to get into the habit of thinking of your entire self as bad because you wish you weighed less. Although I know that slow and steady wins the race, and although I feel better in myself than I ever have before - thin or fat - I still catch myself doing me down for being fat, and for not losing weight faster, and for not being dedicated enough, and I end up forgetting about the bad habits that I’ve ditched as an adult and the good ones I’ve picked up.

So, for posterity, here are three non-weight-related bad habits that I’ve ditched, and three non-weight-related habits that I’ve picked up:

Bad habits ditched:

1. Smoking - ditched for good in September 2004.

2. Nail-biting - ditched last summer, and replaced with an obsessive regime of regular applications of cuticle oil, buffing and Sally Hansen Diamond Strength Nail Hardener, which is, if you will excuse the term, the shit.

3. Laundry procrastination: I used to wait until I had worn absolutely every stitch of clothing that I had; sometimes I waited until I had worn every stitch of clothing I had twice. Disgusting. I know. A permanently overflowing wicker laundry bin was a staple feature of any room I slept in. But no longer. I fixed it: I got rid of the laundry bin. I now have a plastic basket which I keep in the bottom of my wardrobe. Every night I take off what I’ve worn, fold it and put it in the laundry basket. When the basket’s full, which generally takes about a week, I take it downstairs and put it in the wash. Hurrah

Good habits picked up:

1. To have only what I immediately need out at a time. In the living room, this means reading one newspaper at a time; having only one book out at a time; putting a DVD back in its box as soon as I’ve watched it and putting that DVD back on the shelf before I get another one out. At work, it means only having one set of papers open at a time and making sure that they are tied up and back on my shelf before I start work on new papers. It’s a small thing, but it means that everything that needs to be kept together stays together, and it never takes longer than 5 minutes to tidy up.

2. To deal with post as soon as I get it. In-trays and letter-racks are the work of the devil. Seriously. They are like laundry bins, in that they exist purely to overflow until you open the nearest drawer, turn the in-tray upside down into it and then close the drawer again. They trick you into thinking you are being organised rather than just putting off dealing with the post. At home I have a wicker basket of plastic 12-part files in pretty colours, just next to the sofa in the living room. The post comes after I leave for work so every night the first thing I do when I sit down on the sofa is deal with the post letter by letter. If I can, I act on it immediately (sending back acknowledgments or forms, paying bills over the phone or writing out a cheque to post the next morning) and then file the letter if I need to keep it or bin it if I don’t. If I can’t deal with something right away, I file it so that it doesn’t sit out looking messy, and add it to my to-do list as well. The same goes for work: I file everything that needs to be filed and make a note of anything I need to read or respond to on the to-do list. I never keep things out to remind me to deal with them; that’s how I ended up with a desk that I couldn’t work at.

3. To keep a running to-do list. I used to think that I could keep one in my head, which was why I regularly woke at 4am with my heart pounding so hard it hurt, convinced that I had forgotten to do something very important but unable to remember what it was, or alternatively convinced that I had so much to do that I could never possibly get through it. Now everything I have to do, no matter how small, goes on the to-do list, which is in my organiser, as soon as I become aware that it needs to be done, which means that I know I haven’t forgotten anything. Also, I generally never have more than seven or eight things on the list, although when I come to actually tackle one of those things it might need to be broken down into several smaller tasks.

These are all small things that I’m sure most people do all their lives without really thinking about it. But the thing about being fat is that it makes you feel as if you are not like most people - that you are in some way inferior to them, that you lack willpower, that because you can’t control your eating that must mean that you have no willpower or control in respect of anything else in your life either. Every now and again I try to remind myself that that is not true. If you’re reading this post, it would be great if you took a moment to tell me what bad habits you’ve managed to ditch (weight related or not) and what good habits you’ve replaced them with.

I have always hated dancing, ever since Morag McIntosh and I ran out of our ballet class at the age of 7 and vowed we would never go back. I still feel woefully self-conscious dancing, even if we’re just talking about standing in a crowded club and jiggling a bit. I hate it, I can’t relax, everyone’s looking, I hate it I hate it I HATE IT. Did I mention that I don’t like dancing?

I love to watch people dance, though, if they’re good. In fact, let’s watch some good dancing now:

I’d love to dance like that, but I can’t. Not even close.

My aversion to dancing began long before my weight gain. I just never liked it. And yet somehow, over the last eight years, it has become all about weight. I blamed my complete absence of any sense of rhythm on the fact that I am overweight and cannot move quickly enough. I blamed my inability to perform certain steps on the fact that I am carrying too much weight to be flexible. It’s all about being fat, you see. Fat = bad at dancing. Thin = good at dancing.

Dancing is supposed to be a good way of improving your general grace and balance, and I am woefully lacking in both, so I decided to take up bellydancing. I chose bellydancing because, as everyone knows, it is fat friendly. You NEED a belly to bellydance. Bellydancing is for fat people! Everyone knows that! So you can imagine how thrilled I was when I walked into the classroom last Saturday to discover that everyone else in the class was a stick. Seriously. They were lovely women but not only was there no one as big as me, there was no one who had a belly, and that includes the instructor. She had a belly in the same way as Kate Winslet is considered to be a plus sized actress. It was as if I had nicked all of the bellies and shoved them under my top.

Looking at myself in the mirror sort of made me want to cry and run out the room, but I’d paid for the term in advance so I was buggered if I was giving up. And it’s just as well I didn’t, because when we started dancing, I could see that we were all actually pretty much at the same level, and by “level” I mean “utterly shit”. Think of Shakira. Now imagine her standing in for Michael Jackson in Thriller. That’s what we looked like as the instructor sashayed backwards and forwards in front of us, arms wafting delicately in and out, wiggling her no-belly, with the rest of us stamping and crashing about behind her, arms out like sticks, rolling precariously every time we stood on tiptoe.

We were crap. I was crap. The others were crap. It was just… crap. We all looked dreadful. It was great.

I found this strangely comforting. I took even more comfort in the fact that at the end of the class, when we were stretching, I was the only person who was able to bend over and put the palms of my hands flat on the floor without bending at the knee. YES! Me! The token porketeer! TAKE IT BITCHES!

I don’t know why I think that weight has anything to do with dancing, or with flexibility. At the Jamaican Dancehall classes I used to go to there were at least six or seven girls in the class who were much bigger than me; a couple of them would probably have been classed as morbidly obese, and they were fantastic dancers: 100% on the beat, fantastic sense of rhythm, they looked fabulous when they danced. One of them could do the splits. For some reason I had assumed that only thin people could do the splits. Because it’s like every other physical activity, isn’t it? If you aren’t thin then you can’t be fit, and if you aren’t fit then you can’t be any good at sport - and that’s borne out by the fact that these days professional dance is, with a few exceptions, the province of the ultra-skinny. Look at Cyd Charisse in that video - she was considered to be very thin indeed back then, and I would kill for her figure, but there’s no way a woman her size would get anywhere in professional ballet now.  I mean, yes, she may be an electrifying dancer - but can you count her vertebrae?  Can you see her ribs?  You can’t even see her knee bones!  What a fatso!

Anyway, I still hate dancing. I don’t feel good doing it, I don’t feel sexy or pretty. If we’re talking about taking joy in physical movement, I get more out of boxing or rowing. But I’m sticking with it because I want to get better - I’d really like to be more graceful - and the way to get better at dancing is not to come back when you’ve lost weight, it’s to grit your teeth and keep practising. I am determined to get it into my stupid head that it is not because I’m fat that I feel this way. It’s because I’m not very good at dancing, just like lots of thin people aren’t. LISTEN TO ME HEAD.

I know, I know, I don’t write here often, and there are several reasons for this
1) Priorities. In order not to go mad, I have to prioritise. In terms of writing priorities, first comes work, then my normal blog, then emails on my ‘oh christ haven’t I emailed you back yet’ list, then here, sadly. Sorry.
2) Frustrations.

I find losing weight a very difficult thing to talk about, and to write about, therefore. I don’t like talking about it, because … well, it’s even a very difficult list of becauses, apparently.

I don’t like talking about it because I don’t like I don’t like the reaction you get, when talking to people, sometimes - like they want to give you a blue peter badge for doing what they and society thinks is the Right Thing To Do. “Oh yes, well, you were fat, and now! You’re so much thinner! You must be so much happier!” And I don’t really want to get into that with people sometimes, because I am happier in some ways, and I am more confident in some ways, but agreeing with that sentiment always feels like I’m somehow reinforcing their belief that all fat people are unhappy and constantly self-hating, which is just not (and should never be) true.

I also don’t like talking about it because I’m just doing it so slowly. I first started getting aware of my desire to be a healthier and more body confident person at least two years ago. I joined a gym about a year and a half ago, which was really the turning point, and since then, I’ve rid myself of four or five stone of unhealthy body - which I’m pleased about, but it’s been such a very slow and boring process (an awful lot of exercise and eating healthily, I wish I had something so sexy as crash diets and miracle cures to write about) and hard work, and really not that interesting to talk about, or write about, I tend to think.

Trust me, I can talk about it for HOURS. I just don’t know why anyone would be interested - because women and their body issues are different for everybody, and people who haven’t for whatever reason been as successful as they wanted to be might be sad and cross and not want to hear about it; and people who have been more successful than they ever thought will think that I haven’t tried hard enough to have only got this far etc etc etc.

Mostly, I haven’t wanted to talk about it because I’m so mad with myself for making such slow progress. I keep telling myself that I should get to a certain weight or a certain size by a certain date. Or that when I get to this weight or this size or this BMI I’ll consider going swimming or getting married or having a baby or whatEVER, but it just takes So FUCKING long that…

See? Frustrating.

I know I’m doing well. I’m not any good at telling myself I’m doing well, whatever it is I’m doing, but I’m really bad at telling myself I’m doing well at this. And so I’m so scared when I do seem to be inching down the scales, that I’m going to ruin that somehow; jinx it by talking about it; something … that I shy away from talking about it at all.

I’m so frustrated at the moment, though.

A several month plateau has turned, at least, into the very gradual decline in heaviness, but so slow. So achingly, horribly slow, that I’m just cross with myself all the time.
For being weak - and, you know, wanting to enjoy food as well as live - all those dull things.

And … well, you know … lots of other things.
That’s why *I’M* shit at writing here very often at the moment.

Because I’m not an expert on anything, because if I was an expert, I’d be losing weight.
And I’m not a success story.
And I’m not a spokesperson for anyone at all.
I’m just in the middle, here, neither there nor fat.

She’s disappeared, as has her web-blog!!! Anyone seen her? We need her back here right now, otherwise I’ll eat all the pies. (All of them.)

That’s what I am today.

I don’t know why.  I don’t actually like chocolate that much.  I mean, I don’t dislike it.  It just isn’t what I usually want to eat.  I never have chocolate puddings, I rarely eat chocolate biscuits.

I’m just not that into chocolate.

Usually.  But today it is different.

Today, if you are made of chocolate and within driving distance - be afraid.  Be very afraid.

I’d like you to read something and tell me if you can work out what the point of it is. Because I can’t.

The article is here. Go and read it and then come back. Disclaimer: it’s in the Daily Mail and it was written by Amanda Platell. I will not be responsible for any ill-effects or nausea you suffer as a result of clicking on the link.

Right. Now, I think that the point of the article, if indeed it has a point, is that although Princess Bea is not fat, she should try to lose weight anyway, but only off her thighs, because Amanda Platell doesn’t like the shape of them. But I might be wrong, so if someone else could read it and tell me what on earth the point of this rambling, pointless, vindictive, tedious rubbish is, I’d be most terribly grateful, really.

Possibly.

It’s a beautiful weekend so you’ll get no lengthy posts from me over the next few days. Hurrah for all of us! But I just wanted to draw your attention to this post that I came across here. She pretty much sums up all my ranting about how counterproductive “diet” food is. I am still pretty sure that the key to healthy living and hence losing weight is to eat as much freshly prepared food from fresh non-processed ingredients as possible, without worrying too much about whether what you’re eating is “diet” or not.

Now everyone get out there and enjoy the sunshine, STAT. (Stat? Yes, stat.)

This morning I left the house early because I was on my way to the Frozen North and had to be there by 10am.

I stopped off at the garage at about six thirty in the morning to fill up the car, and I was straightening up to pull in by my pump of choice. As I did so, I was vaguely aware of a white van pulling into the pump on my right.

The next thing I knew, the same white van was on my left and the driver, a short, balding, bespectacled man in maybe his early fifties was leaning out the window, shouting, swearing and waving his arms around. Fists were waved and fingers pointed in my general direction. I gathered that he wanted me to move further to the right so that he could go to the pump on my left, and so I moved over - which was what I was in the middle of doing anyway.

That wasn’t the end of it, though. Readers of Everything Is Electric will be aware that I take a dim view of road rage. I take a particularly dim view of puny, cowardly men who wouldn’t have the balls to pick a fight with a bloke but will happily attempt to bully and intimidate the nearest woman driver, confidently assuming that said woman driver will be far too scared to answer back.

That confidence is sadly misplaced when the female driver in question happens to be me.

As I got out of the car to fill it up, I called across to him, “Excuse me. I don’t know what all that shouting and screaming was about. Would you mind explaining?”

“It was because you wouldn’t fucking well move over, that’s what it was all about. What the fuck did you think you were doing faffing about there?”

“What the fuck I was doing,” I explained, “was getting closer to the pump I’m using, and I think that was fairly obvious. Is there any particular reason why you couldn’t just have waited for me to move? Or perhaps been a little more polite and a little less pointlessly rude?”

“Fuck you.” He turned his back on me.

“Cock,” I said.

“And YOU just told ME to watch my manners!” he retorted triumphantly.

“Yes, I’m sorry about that. If I’d realised what an appalling cock you were I wouldn’t have bothered.”

He opened and shut his mouth a few times, then stomped round his van and disappeared.

In the shop, I realised that he was behind me in the queue. As I put my card in the reader, I turned round and said, “Oh, hello. Tell me, is where I’m standing all right, or would you like me to move forwards or backwards, or do you need me to move to one side really quickly?”

He did that openy-shutty mouth thing again.

“I’m in the plus sized clothes business,” he said, smirking. “I could give you one of my cards.”

“Why on earth would I want to buy my plus sized clothes from you?” I asked.

He blinked.

“Oh, I see,” I said. “Did you think that I didn’t know that I’m fat or something?”

“Yeah!” he retorted.

“I DIDN’T,” he added belligerently.

I raised one eyebrow. He stuck his lip out, stared at the floor and jiggled his hands in his pockets.

“That’s the best you can do, is it?” I asked. “Plus sized clothes? It’s like I was saying before. You’re a cock.”

The cashier winked at me and handed me a receipt.

“Good luck with the rest of your day, though,” I added, and left the shop.

The best bit about an encounter like that is playing Snappy Comebacks. That’s the bit where you roar off down the motorway chortling dementedly and thinking about all the other things that you could have said. Some people say this happens to them at two in the morning, but I like to get cracking straight away. A Snappy Comeback will naturally involve some sort of highly offensive comment about the other person’s looks, personality, competence or socioeconomic status. I don’t usually think like this, because I don’t think that looks are terribly important and I don’t really want to hurt anyone, but the nature of a Snappy Comeback is that it’s a response to some cunt who’s decided to pick on your personal attributes for no apparent reason, so the usual rules of polite society are suspended.

By the time I’d gone past Stevenage I’d come up with the following:

Him: “I’m in the plus-sized clothes business. I could give you one of my cards.”

Me: “Sorry. What? Do you think you’ve come across as a great salesman here or something?”

Him: “I’m in the plus-sized clothes business. I could give you one of my cards.”

Me: “Are the clothes as cheap and nasty as your van?”

Him: “I’m in the plus-sized clothes business. I could give you one of my cards.”

Me: “With a gut that size I assume you’re modelling them for us now?”

Him: “I’m in the plus-sized clothes business. I could give you one of my cards.”

Me: “What are you talking about? These jeans are a size two.” (Thank you, Lane Bryant.)

Him: “I’m in the plus-sized clothes business. I could give you one of my cards.”

Me: “Here’s how it is, right? Me: happy, successful, blessed with a multitude of wonderful friends and a bit fat. You: ugly, old, driving a white van. Okay? Okay.”

And then I stopped, because I don’t really approve of gratuitous nastiness about other people’s looks even if - and this is where I reveal myself to be a bit of a sap - even if they have revealed themselves to be cocks of the first order. I don’t really want to be the sort of person who wrecks someone’s self-image over a petty argument about manoeuvring on the garage forecourt, no matter how horrible they’ve been to me. I mean, the most confident (as opposed to arrogant) people that I know are also the ones who would never dream of bringing looks or weight or whatever into an argument, because they don’t have to get their kicks out of putting other people down. So once you descend to the “YOU’RE SO FAT/UGLY” level, what you’re really saying is “I can’t think of anything clever, funny or profound to say. I sense that I have lost this argument, which I should never have started anyway and only got into because I am a cock. I secretly know this and am deeply ashamed of myself. I have therefore regressed to the age of seven. In conclusion, you smell. A LOT.”

So the point of this post is: when you’re fat, there will always be some cock knocking around just waiting to point it out to you. And when they do, the best revenge is to just not be that bothered about it.

Even if they’re really fucking ugly, like this bloke was.

Sorry. But he was. AND HE SMELLED.

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?

Five things that made me feel good this week:

1. Crossing virtually everything I need to deal with off my To Do list.

2. Buying a 12-part file to organise greetings cards.  Don’t you just love that one friend of yours who never, ever forgets to send you a card?  The one whose card always arrives in the post ON your birthday, as opposed to beforehand or afterwards?  NOW I AM THAT LOVELY PERSON OH YES I AM.

3. Being asked if I had lost weight by someone who hadn’t seen me for two months.

4. Doubling my time on the rowing machine and achieving my best time yet on the cross trainer.

5. Walking past Burger King AND KFC to order myself a baked potato with beans at the cafe round the corner, then making it all the way through to supper without a hunger pang.

How’s your week been?