When It Rains...

I woke up at about 4.30 this morning, to discover that Mama Conchita had been back to swap hips again. But as I sat there, peeing, I realised that the noise wasn't all me. It was raining.

It can't be raining, it's Spring for God's sake. As I sat there, I was in two minds. Well, one mind and one set of hips. The hips wept with joy at what would have to be a free pass on the morning walk - I'm not walking in the rain unless I go slightly demented with calorie-counting obssession, it reminds me waaaaaay too much of being young and too poor to ride the bus in Wales. I used to walk up and down from school every day, come rain, come snow, come baking heat (yes, occasionally, even in Wales), and everywhere else we used to go, we had to walk. You had to be really dedicated to be a fat fuck and poor in Wales when I was a kid, it was practically my first job.

So as I say, I was quite relieved at 4.30 to think I wouldn't have to do the morning walk, and could say so with a clear conscience, or at least a legitimate excuse. Of course, that started me thinking. It's a habit I can't seem to break, especially at 4.30 in the morning. It hasn't properly rained since I've started this, but if I'm doing it for an entire year, from March to March, the time is going to come when it's not gonna be bright, and I'm still going to have to find a way to get the walking in, getting the exercise in to keep pushing the weight down.

Can't say I found a solution. I fell asleep, dribbled down my beard and pretty much fell head first off the toilet. Me and Elvis, we're like that.

Maybe, by the time the weather genuinely becomes a factor, I'll have forgiven gyms enough to join another one. Who knows?

When I woke up at sensible o'clock, my hips ached, and the smile spread across my lips.
"Oh well," I said to d, who's still extremely sick. "Can't walk this morning. Still pouring down, is it?"
"What the heck are you talking about?" she asked.
"The rain," I said.
"Nope," she said. "No rain...not for a while now."

Mama Conchita and I bit our lips and dragged our aching hips up the Goddammedsonofabitch of a hill...again.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to drag the Brazilian hooker on a ten mile bike ride...

Bugger, bugger, bollocks and sods...

Meeting Trish

Call it a mid-life crisis if you like, but married or not, I'm having fantasies about another woman.

Her name's Trish. She's blonde, and Irish, and as far as I know, she lives in Paris.

I met her properly just last night, and I wasn't looking my best - I was pale, and sweaty, and, as it happened, butt-naked and farty.

Trish was making French raspberry tart, and as she explained about the making of creme patisserie, and multiple macaroons, and wonderful early-morning Parisian bread, I began to let my mind run away with me, and the fantasies came thick and fast. I imagined pushing her gently down, and stretching out her arms...and hammering the nails through her hands, and feet, and pulling her up and grunting in satisfaction as she dangled there, bleeding like jam from a dougnut.

Erm...
Ahem...It's not often I get fantasies of crucifying people, I should say. Most of the time, I'm pretty laid back. Be who you are, think what you like, say what you will, I'm fine. Well, that's either laid back or intensely self-absorbed, I'm not entirely sure.

Annnnd fine, if you really go into it, I don't actually have anything against Trish Deseine. It was simply bad timing that she popped up on my TV screen presenting a show about Parisian patisserie during one of my 'special' moments, as I happened to be halfway through a ten-mile cycle. If I'd flipped the channel, I daresay I'd have had fantasies about immolating Raymond Blanc in Armagnac, or strapping Michel Roux Jr to four horses and slapping them all on the ass...

Actually, come to think of it, I get that one regularly, sugar craving or no sugar craving.

Ahem...where was I? Oh yeah, crucifying Trish. It's fortunate really that my random fantasies of battering John Torode over the head with a leg of lamb, or sewing up Gordon Ramsay's mouth and giving him a duck liver pate enema, or even gently pan-frying Rick Stein with garlic and onions, are confined to people to whom I have no access, and - as I say, with the exception of Michel Roux Jr - only tend to plague me during my sugar-deprived, exercising, why-the-Hell-am-I-doing-this moments. Curiously, there are very few women to whom I want to do culinary harm in those moments. I mean, Delia, obviously, for her wretched sponges and her lime obssession, but not really Fanny Craddock - too scary! - and not Julia Child - simply too good - and, in case you're wondering, absolutely not, ever, my wife, who of course, while I was sweating my ass off on the bike, actually had control of the remote.

Maybe there's a spa or a rehab I should go into to deal with these occasional sugar-crazed homicidal tendencies? Whaddaya reckon? Celery Therapy and Flagellation? Tomato Juice Baths and Tofu Wraps?

Nah, screw it, it's not worth it. I'll just keep fantasising...

So Near And Yet So Far...

See, the thing about being a journo, or indeed a would-be writer, is that it's incredibly tempting to go for the story over the cold, hard, undoubtedly slightly more boring facts of the matter.

Most of the time in this blog, I've resisted that temptation, but this morning's weigh-in brought the thing tantalisingly home to me, because this is the news today.

Weight: 20 stone, and three-quarters of one pound.
Given that I started off exactly a month ago at 20 stone, seven and a half pounds, it's jusssssst a smidgen, just a quarter-pound away from a full half-stone (seven pounds) of weight loss in four weeks. Now, while it's less than I'd hoped for, a full half-stone in a month is a great concise headline - Bang, there it is, that's what I've done, hurrah, what's next.

And so the temptation sets in.

The temptation to just say that's what I've done, so people understand it, and I can sit back on my laurels and go - "See that half-stone? No you don't, cos I've lost it, nehh! I did that, with help from my friends. I conquered a whole half-stone of impulse eating in just four weeks..." I know, I know, it starts to sound like an ad for Tony's Patent Pound-Loss Plan doesn't it?

But that impulse to smooth away the rough factual edges is deeply engrained in me, because when all is said and done, it's a better story than what I've actually done this week - which is lose 2.5 pounds.

And then the headline-instinct begins to merge with something more insidious, and something which I'm sure a lot of dieters feel creeping up on them - the urge to think they've done better than they really have, because they need to keep going. If I tell you that on the way to work this morning, I was having internal debates with myself along the lines of "Well, my very first weigh-in was done after my first morning bathroom visit, but today I didn't have time for that, so really, if I'm being scrupulously fair and accurate, I've probably lost more than that when I'm empty..." you might begin to recognise the syndrome. And it is a syndrome - it'll drive you mad, having that kind of internal debate. But more than that, it can lead you to that other tried-and-tested way of losing your grip and slipping back to bad habits - the self-congratulation day.

The slithering little impulse that says "Wow...if we compare like for like, I've done better than I thought. How cool am I? It's really working...I deserve a little something for achieving this, don't I?"

Give in to that, and you're pretty much sunk. Sure, there are 'safe' options for some people, the people whose brains don't work the way mine does, and can have such things as 'safe treats'. As I've said before, I can't do that, there's no such thing as a genuinely safe treat. By virtue of being a treat, it's unsafe. But still, the impulse does slither up your spine and whisper in your ear, puffing up your pride to make you fall.

It occurs to me as I'm writing this language that I can see where religion comes from. If you're trying to walk a narrow, tightly-constrained path, your own instincts for pleasure begin to work against you, and begin to seem like external voices trying to persuade you off your path. And what that normally means is that your path is utterly wrong for you, I think. If it wasn't, you wouldn't get the warring voices inside. Needless to say, history is littered with examples of people who wore their mental girdles too tight, and ended up going a bit peculiar. And to some extent, it's true of me too. I love pleasure. Pleasure, as far as I can see, is worth stopping for...that's how it earns the name of pleasure in the first place. I've always been an advocate of the fact that the very point of temptation is to give in to it. So this whole exercise is very very counter-intuitive for me and again I feel like I have to say this - I'm not doing this for fun. I'm doing it as a kind of cheap mid-life crisis, having been pretty squarely told that a life dedicated almost entirely to pleasure and self-indulgence is going to start to properly kick me soon, and probably won't stop until I fall off the edge of the world. So every step of this is a step against my truer, more relaxed, pleasure-seeking instincts...which maybe explains a little something about why there are no safe treats. But certainly, the longer I do this, the more the idea of forbidden fruits and whispering serpents, and even the frankly monstrous idea of sin begins to make a kind of sense to me. Obviously not in the kind of way that makes me think "Oh, right, so there must be a god and a devil and choirs of angels and all that," but certainly in a Freudian sense of "inner demons" and the like - our sublimated desires refusing to go to sleep or die.

I wonder if that's why so many dieters ultimately fail? Because what they're actually trying to do by dieting is go against their own deeper will for extended periods of time, and without a kind of granite-hard motivation, the real them will always ultimately win...?

Hmm. Anyhow, enough cogitation for now. I have a park to walk across and a ten mile cycle waiting for me. But here's to progress anyway...I...(sigh)...lost two and a half pounds this week. Next week, goddammit, I'll have lost a full half-stone, and broken my first stone barrier. Next week's headline will involve the words "19 stone". Hmm...actually, that's a delayed gratification that's worth being honest today.

Falling By The Wayside

A strange feeling the night before the one month weigh-in.
I feel healthier by far, certainly, than when I started this thing, and - if we want to get all spooky and in touch with our feelings here, I feel slimmer and trimmer and as though this might be starting to head in the right direction - but that's probably a dangerous feeling the night before the only weigh-in where I haven't sneaked a single peak, and so have nothing factual to base my feeling on. It's a slightly weird feeling for Mr Mouthy Atheist to be relying on what is essentially nothing but faith. Setting myself up for a big fall, maybe?

My cycling is increasing, but there are things that have vaguely fallen by the wayside from my original plan. You might remember I was planning to post blood test results daily - not a single one has appeared yet, and I'm feeling rather self-conscious about that. And my original idea of pushing the metabolism into a higher gear through fruity snacking has kind of drifted a little off the scale. I'm not replacing those snacks with anything, so technically I'm eating less, but still - the plan feels a little out of sync.

Still having insane, rip-your-face-off cravings. Also - and this is undoubtedly a bad thing - am drinking more coffee than I've done in a few years. Time will tell whether that's a stupid idea...orrrr a really stupid idea.

Anyhow - no philosophy tonight, no particular jokes, no particular points - merely trembling trepidation ahead of tomorrow, and a ponder over the effect of week 1 of the voluntary aversion thereapy that is the Xenical treatment.

It's late, I need nothing more than sleep, but am gonna crawl onto the bike for a five miler...Cos...y'know... suffering is part of the point of this thing.

Apparently...

Is Fat A Fundamental Issue?

Fat is famously a feminist issue, but more than that, it's undeniably a psychological one. If you were fat as a kid, you'll know what it's like to be bullied because of how you look - though of course, chances are, you'll know what it's like to be bullied for something, whether you were a fat kid or not. If you were a fat teen, then you went one of two ways - the Wallflower Way, watching all the aesthetically 'normal' people as though they were some alien species going through elaborate courtship and mating rituals that had nothing to do with you, or owning your size by sheer force of personality and winning your share of the game. And if you were a fat kid, and a fat teen, and then in the never-quite-full-enough fullness of time you became a fat fuck, chances are high that this part of yourself has had at least a partial effect in the development of your personality, your self-image, and your life.

The cliches of course are many and easy to spot. The laughers-at-themselves-before-anyone-else-does, who carve themselves into a crowd by being 'the funny one.' The bitter blokes who think they're cleverer or better than all the 'ordinaries' and end up with peculiar, insular hobbies-for-one. The girls who use their fat as an excuse for their painful shyness, and grow up physically illiterate and proud they didn't succumb. The 'easy' girls, who give themselves away, some mistaking sex for love, some mistaking nothing and not willing to be wallflowered. The Good Friends, who seat themselves so close to someone else's life and confidences that they become characters in other people's stories, without ever having stories of their own. The genuinely glandular, who start every conversation with "I'm not fat, I've got glandular issues..." The roaring, screw-you, I'm here and I'm a fat fuck, deal with it or get out of the way types who still, given a chance, nip out of photos or the path of vicious mirrors...

I said a few days ago that being fat gives you an outsider sense of humour. That's true if you grow up with it, I think, because you're fundamentally told at every opportunity that you're really not an 'insider'. People never come out and absolutely say it - at least not to you - but there's a sense of fat being a kind of self-inflicted disability, a self-exclusion from the dreams that everyone else has. With a handful of notable exceptions, you don't see fat heroes or heroines in the movies, famous men who get fat are 'past it' - and the horrendous hounding that women who put on weight get in the tabloids and the magazines is positively shameful to the profession of journalism, but it's feeding the same public conception - fat people deserve to be ostracised. There's even talk of making people bigger than a certain size buy two seats on planes - mainly it seems because the non-fat are inconvenienced by our bulk.

I'm not entirely sure what's prompted this fairly dour entry. Mainly, I think, a rage against stereotypes, and against people who think it's somehow 'right' to treat fat people like second-class citizens simply by virtue of their inability to fit into cultural or aesthetic boundaries. It's to some extent the same lazy thinking that denies the full range of human emotions, dreams, ambitions and frustrations to people with disabilities - except where people with disabilities get condescension and 'pity', fat people get bitterness because 'they brought it on themselves'.

Most of the people I know who are trying to lose weight are actually trying to do it for health reasons, rather than social or aesthetic ones, but there will undoubtedly be social, aesthetic and psychological side-benefits. The question, I suppose, is how much being fat is a part of who you are at a fundamental level, and what happens if you radically change that - do you become more human in in the eyes of some people, and how much of how you see yourself changes. If you've been 'the funny one' all your life, do people still think you're as funny if you're not as fat? If you've had your social and sexual life determined for decades by by being an outsider, how do you change the person you've become if you suddenly become an insider?

Ach, ignore me. I only started in this philosophical vein because surely not every day can be 'ate this, rode that, shat my brains out twice...'

The Subtle Art of Distrac-Oh Look, Prunes...

I've mentioned before the power of music as a distraction from the pain and the boredom and the otherwise unmitigated misery that exercise can bring for the semi-professional lardarse. Music is mood, and if you're not in the mood, all that's left is the misery.

This was brought home to me today when, to assuage another weekend day largely composed of growing pages on my novel and carbuncles on my ass, I jumped on the bike for another ten mile stint. Today, I didn't go under the influence of my iPod, and so instead watched TV while I peddled what were quite honestly the ten hardest miles I've ever cycled.

We were watching a recording of today's Saturday Kitchen at the time, and while normally I can get into most anything, today, it seemed impossible to get into a groove, or to slide my brain into neutral, so not only was it the hardest ten miles I've ever cycled, it was also the longest and slowest - for the first time, it took me over an hour. I shuffled, I jiggled, I squirmed, and the miles just wouldn't bloody well GO. I'd like to say it was like that nightmare you have where youre running and not really getting anywhere...except of course that's exactly what a stationary exercise bike is supposed to be like.

About 2.5 miles from the end though, I zoned in to what was on screen - hey, someone was making a sticky toffee pudding and toffee sauce, c'mon... - and before I knew what was what, I'd finished. I say again, the best way to exercise is like the best way to get up on stage and sing, or dance, or act - stop thinking about it and just get on and do it.

Oh, and a side-note: When we saw the sticky toffee pudding, d and I groaned together in a mutual lust.
"Mmmm...might just have to go and make one of those..." she murmured.
"Noooooooo..." I begged. "Really? D'ya have to?"

I know, I know, it would have been wonderful to sniff, but right at that moment, seven and a half miles into Hell, it was one temptation too many. Even my bastard-stubbornness has its limits, y'know?! Maybe I should just try and distract myself while she eats it?

Thing is, a TV show about a sticky toffee pudding is perfectly good enough to distract me from pain, suffering and everything else attached to the hideousness of exercise. Without resorting to a glistening, inventive multi-sexual orgy in front of a wall-sized flat-screen showing 80s Doctor Who, and a series of hosts and hostesses handing round nibbles and cocaine, I'm not sure anything on Earth is diverting enough to distract me from a real, hot, steaming, wonderful home-made sticky toffee pudding tonight...

Shaking My Own Maraccas

It's Paaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyydaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy!!!

Not mine, of course - that's not for weeks yet, and is usually marked by a sudden spike in Amazon share-prices. But one of the traditions of payday for either of us is Date Night - a meal out, a wander, even an 'adventure' - which is what we decided fairly early on to call it when we got on a random bus and saw where it took us. I'm led to believe other, perhaps more rational, human beings call this 'Getting Lost', but that's really by the by...

The Xenical has made itself rather more effusively welcome in my system today, and I wasn't at all sure why until talking to d. After all, I had a devastatingly inoffensive lunch of pumpkin risotto - just before all sorts of orange, oily Hell broke loose. I was rather put out by that. So as I say, it wasn't until I talked to d about it that it kind of...erm...fell into place, as it were. I've taken to having an honest-to-goodness, no-drippy-grease Cumberland sausage bap for breakfast...

Sooooo. Oatmeal it is from now on then.

The things is, we didn't have this discussion till we were sitting having our Date Night discussion (I always like to work explosive bowel movements into Date Night chat whenever possible. I'm just that smooth...). It's probably worth mentioning at this point that our choice of Date Night meal tonight was Mexican...

Oddly enough, since having the Mexican - one starter, one main, shared between the two of us - not a thing. No rumblings, no gurglings, not a...well, not a sausage, evidently.

I only mention all this because Date Night was another example of the wafer-thin distinctions between what's permissible under my tortuously tangled rules of dieting and what isn't. Another whole set of fortune cookie conundra, in fact. I arrived late, and d already had tortilla chips with salsa and sour cream on the table. I dived in and dipped, crunching heartily before realising the fairly obvious truth that I haven't eaten crisps (potato chips for the Americans) since this thing began, but simply on the basis that they were made of corn, these were somehow permissible. Likewise, the sour cream dip - perfectly fine, whereas cream in a dessert setting, big no-no.

I think in all honesty, that's the difference - it's the setting that matters. I realise of course that's illogical in the extreme, but it all comes back to that damned perspex box. Cream in a dessert setting means it's a dessert, so all desserts are permissible. Cream as a dip is akin to ketchup. Likewise, eating tortilla chips as part of a meal doesn't equate to eating potato chips as a snack, and so doesn't pose a threat to my bastard-stubbornness.

Now I'm perfectly aware that chemistry doesn't work like that - cream is cream, deep fried is deep fried and so on. But this, I guess, is me shaking my own maraccas - doing things my own way - because losing weight over a long time period isn't just about the hard-and-fast equations of chemistry. It's about the altogether more foggy and fluffy discipline of individual psychology. It's about finding your own rhythm, and dancing to it. For me, the psychological connections are apparently more important than the hard calorific values involved - and I stand by that idea, as a way of getting through the long haul, rather than freaking out over individual cases and losing the will to go on with the dance.

So, on that note - Ariba! - and on to the bike...

Pushing Boundaries

Well...the Xenical works.

I know this because, without being an idiot about it, I was interested in where the boundary of safe behaviour was. I think the boundary was lunch today - individual lasagne with two slivers of garlic bread. Given the cheese on the top and the garlic butter, the pills announced their presence mid-afternoon, but more with a nod across the battle lines than a full-scale assault. So that was useful to know.

Speaking of lunch, this blog is not in any sense 'Tony's handy hints to lose weight,' but one thing that has already helped me is making a change at lunchtime. Where I work, there's nothing doing in terms of choice of places to go for lunch in the locality, so if you don't bring your own, the downstairs canteen is the place to go. The first thing one of my colleagues told me when I arrived in the job five years ago was to set up an account with the canteen, and I've been using it the whole time. What that does is it stops you worrying about the price of things - which in Kensington is insanely dangerous. Not worrying about the price of things also of course has a secondary effect - you eat more. You have one of those, and one of these and one of those...oh and a couple of those...and by the end of the week you've spent £50. On lunch. And no, they haven't given you platinum sandwiches or anything, but you've really, truly, eaten all that money.

Since I started this experiment, I've been paying cash for my lunch. Which has meant I've spent less, and eaten less. It's a sledgehamer-subtle approach to calorific economics, but it seems to work.

I've also pretty much pushed through another boundary - having spoken to d about it on the weekend and added a five mile cycle on Sunday, I've started to formalise that relationship; one day, ten miles, next day, five miles. That means by the end of this week, I'll have ramped up from 30 cycled miles to 55, without particularly feeling like it's killing me.

Am feeling the urge to go sneak a peak at the scales, but am avoiding that because a) everyone, including me, says that's just stupid!, and b) at the moment, I feel positive. I realise I've only lost a handful of pounds, but I actually feel smaller - more focused, more able to achieve things (I've been feeling less sluggish in work too - Hell, watch this space next week, if I start walking up the several flights of stairs to my office, I might need hitting with a cricket bat). It feels like my brain is working better, and my creativity is sparking (had an idea for a whole short satirical story walking home tonight...). I don't want to slap a 2 by 4 of reality across that feeling right now, so even though every insidious whispering Nagini of doubt is nagging at me to go and do it...I'm not going to, so nehh, I'm pushing through the boundary of impulse-control too...

And after yesterday's love-fest, it strikes me that there's one more boundary I'm pushing through. When I started, I was so full of myself, with the 'It's just me and my stubbornness against the flab...' lark, but actually, when I look around me, there are so many of my friends and family who are doing this with me. d of course is the star, having lost her 2.5 stone before I even joined the party. But Mae's working to lose weight. Tig's working to lose weight. Even my mother is working to lose weight - she's doing Weight Watchers, and it's working for her. And everybody who's reading this is pretty much doing it with me, so it actually helps - it doesn't feel like it's just me and my 'bastard-stubbornness' any more, it feels as though we've pushed beyond that to 'doing it together,' so not doing my utmost would be letting you lot down. So, thanks for that, genuinely. It feels like spreading the load...
Ahem...no, really, that's not a Xenical gag.

Promise.

There But For The Grace of Cool People...

In a world where countries are shuddering to bits and huge waves are destroying lives by the thousands, and half the world is rising up against its leaders and the other half is sending armies to support them in the chaos...ohhhh yeah and the biggest recession in recent decades hasn't actually gone anywhere, meaning hundreds of thousands of people are newly poor and State-dependent...it's fantastically easy and straightforward to do the 'There But For The Grace..." thing, and hold everything we have that little bit more precious.

And then there are fuckwits. People who make living each day more miserable and full of hassles than it needs to be. Friend of mine has some disabilities, and is also trying to lose some weight, gained during a year of medical palaver. She's trying to pick herself up and not only live her life as normally as possible, but she's doing extra to try and lose the weight that will make her life that little bit easier. She went swimming today for the first time in a while, only to be shouted at by the lifeguards, humiliated, made to feel more disabled than she is and generally like some sort of burden on society, which she isn't...and all because she went swimming to try and lose some weight.

See? Fuckwits.
So, apart from trying to support my pal, it's really made me focus on exactly how lucky I am. If I wanna go swimming, I can go. No hassle. Granted, I wouldn't go without wearing a T-shirt, cos the whole 'Great White Whale' thing is a never-ending font of fun for teenagers with fists, but I could go without being hassled by the staff. I have loads of friends, all of whom are supportive of my attempts to not die quite yet, and to whom I'm extremely grateful, both for practical help and for kind words. So even in small, generally insignificant things like trying to lose this weight, I have so many advantages. So - no punchlines or funnies today, just a genuine thank-you to all you lot - you know who you are - and a call to not let the fuckwits win. We have the power to make sure that everyone in this country has access to what they need, and access to the full range of pleasures of life - all we need to do is educate out the fuckwittery, and the architecture will follow...Who's up for a cool new world of fuckwit-freedom?

Xen and the Art of Aversion Therapy

Alrighty, so first thing's first. At the third week weigh-in, the news that's fit to print was as follows:
20 stone, 3.25 pounds.

Ahem.

That's a single quarter-pound lower than at the week 2 weigh-in. So essentially, I've lost one good hard ogrefart.

On the upside, it's still technically going in the right direction, which I was in no way sure it would be until this morning. So, join me in waving the world's smallest rattle in celebration, before we knuckle down and focus properly for next week.

Then I went to see the doctor. All in all, it was a good meeting - he revealed a whole lot of stuff, which pretty much breaks down like this:
My echocardiogram result from Hammersmith Hospital came back completely clean - every atrium, every ventricle, every valve - a o-freakin'-k.
New information for most people - last year, I went to Newham Hospital for a whole range of tests because, not to put too fine a point on it, I was bleeding when I pee'd, and - and here it will pay you not to have a visual imagination - in certain other situations. So in November 2010, I went to the hospital for a bladder examination, kidney ultrasound, the whole shebang. When I was on the table, and they tried to stick a camera into my urethra, they discovered that they couldn't get the normal camera into me. I have to tell you now, when you're lying on an operating table with a burly Mediterranean gentlemen grasping your genitalia, there are certain words you hope not to hear.
For my money, "Oh Hell, we'll need the wide-bore and the spreader" pretty much takes on all...erm...comers.
They proceeded to stick something the shape and size of a golf tee into me, and completed the investigation.
When they were done, the line "Oh, while you're here, we might as well do a prostate test" really didn't endear them to me any further.

For the record, and just to make sure we're on the same page - not my favourite day.

Now, apparently, the results have come back. I have platinum-standard kidneys, a bladder that's fine but doesn't appreciate being poked, and a kink.

That's right - I'm a kinky dick. You all knew that by now, right? Apparently, it's not a serious thing, and the way to properly cure it is to go back to the world of the screw-in golf tee, so I don't see that happening any time soon.

And then we discussed this project. He was positive, liked the fact that I've lost four pounds and an ogrefart in three weeks, loved my stories of what I'm not eating and tales of the exercise bike, and offered me a referral to a diabetic dietician.

"Oh, there'a another thing we can do," he added. "We can give you drugs."
I remembered writing on here that I wasn't gonna go the way of drugs - meaning speed - so my Inner Pussy spoke up.
"Oh no," he said, "this isn't speed, this is Xenical."
Xenical, for those who don't know, is a drug that scours your body looking for fat, beats it up and flushes it out of your system. For the Doctor Who fans here, it's Adipose without the alien plot. For everyone else, it's the S' Plan Diet in handy pill form...

It's also pretty much designed to work like an experiment in masochism. It's designed to suck ass...so to speak. And so, by forcing you to spend hours glued to the toilet for any fat-related faux pas, it's basically a chemical truncheon, waiting to beat the shit out of you if you act like a stupid sonofabitch.

So here we go - adding voluntary aversion therapy to the mix. Perhaps not the moment to mention I've had a bowl of cereal and two pizzas today...

Ahem...

Oh, and I'm at another seminar all day tomorrow. In Cambridge. Here's hoping the pizza and the Xenical don't kick the bejeesus out of me jussst yet...

This Is Your Brain On Music

Another week, another fairly ordinary day. Did the walk across Hyde Park for the first time in days, and in the interim, somebody seems to have announced Spring. The railings have been freshly painted, and some of the trees have burst into bright white bloom. Which is all very well and fabulous, but leaves you with a slightly weird impression as you walk towards them. You get the smell of fresh paint, and look up, and for a moment, can't escape the idea that some creative wag has daubed the trees in a quick coat of Dulux matt white. Still, good for a smile.

A word about music.
Always.

It's not ground-breaking in any way to say if you want to exercise, exercise to music, but it's quite remarkable to me how much pleasure music can give me, and, perhaps more importantly, how it can transform what would otherwise be experiences of pure whinging evil or rank boredom into something fun. It can even, I feel, act like an anaesthetic. Case in point - there are two types of walking for me. There's walking on my own, and walking in company. If I'm walking in company, I kind of want it to be more of a meander, to talk, to listen, to point things out and have a laugh with the person I'm with. If I'm walking on my own, I'm walking with purpose, I want to get somewhere. And while, as a teenager, I used to walk through the night just listening to the (admittedly fairly bonkers) soundtrack in my own head, these days, walking on my own without music is just a chore. Because while I'm trying to get somewhere, without the anaesthetic and the energy of the music pouring straight into my brain, all I'm focusing on is the pain in my back and the wobble in my knees, and the sight of the happy couples in the park makes me growl and bitch, simply because they're not in pain and bored with their own brains and a long, long way from home.

With the right music though, I can power on, with a bounce in my step as well as in my flab, the walk has purpose and the couples are an affirmation of love and human hope, and they feed in to the music and the walk and the point behind it all.

Any aerobiciser will of course tell you that high-energy music equals a high energy workout. So under no circumstances try and walk to Leonard Cohen or Coldplay, you'l just end up weeping at the side of the road or pondering the meaning of existence. All very fine and existential of course, but just not what you need. I seem to do best to the music of my youth - hard rock, hair rock, even rage rock or energetic metal. Yep...My name is Tony, and I'm a Bon Jovi Fan...

Tomorrow, there's no walking, as I'm working from home and doing a mammoth session with my doctor. Before I started all this, I sent him a long letter with a whole bunch of questions about the endeavour - I'm hoping tomorrow to get some idea of extra help, maybe from a dietician, to help push this thing forward. I'm also of course hoping that tomorrow's weigh-in isn't too disastrous.

Talk about Livin' On A Prayer...

Revenge of the Sloth

See...here's the thing with my chosen...well, career, hobby, interest and main non-food-related obssession. They're all the same thing, and they all involve me, pretty much, sitting on my arse...just writing. There's a very good reason why they're all the same thing, and involve just pretty much sitting on my arse. Much as I'd love to tell you it's because I have a unique gift for writing, which must be shared with the world or my heart'll explode, really, it's far more simple and far less tortured than that.

It's indoors, in the dry, and I really, really like just pretty much sitting about on my arse.

So while today has been quite productive, novel-wise, in terms of healthiness....notsomuch. Huuuge quantities of sitting around on my...well, you get the picture...interspersed with eating things that d has been bringing from the kitchen. Add to the day the image of a really fat man lying sideways on a couch, and what you get is pretty much Jabba the Hutt in a bathrobe.

So - have decided I'm going to up the activity. I've been working on a vaguely agreed programme of doing walking every weekday and cycling once every two days. But because of my otherwise globular day, am going to ignore the fact that I cycled yesterday, and jump back on the bike tonight. But let's be clear here - this hasn't been my best, most active, most calorie-free week, and frankly, come Tuesday, if I'm the same as last week, I'll be happy. To have lost my scheduled two pounds feels like a mad fantasy at this point. The trick will be not to go into next week going "Ohhhh, it's all dreadful, I've faaaaaaiiiiiled, what's the poooooiiiiint!!!" but to keep on with it no matter what, and look at the thing in terms of 52 weeks, rather than one.

After all, there's nothing less appealing that a wailing, self-indulgent Jabba the Hutt...

Experiments in Masochism

Well, so much for that. You remember the gardening I promised would be done this weekend?

Nnnnnnnnnnnotsomuch. Yeah, I'm heartbroken...

So, again, I was faced with the question of how to get some exercise into the day. Became particularly relevant because as it happened, I didn't do my cycling last night.

As is fairly usual, we waited in for a grocery delivery, but the day was so bright and blue that once they'd arrived and d had written her blog - seriously, go check it out, you'll be drooling - we went out for lunch. Humans being what they are, we saw the error of our ways pretty quickly and came scurrying back to our little cave. d got a cooking jag on, and I got a writing bug, so my novel - did I mention I'm a seriously untortured would-be novelist? - grew a few inches. While watching the - as it turned out, depressingly few - funny bits of last night's Comic Relief, d brought out a surprise she'd picked up while we were in town. A tub of caramel honeycomb ice-cream.

Ahem...

I got on the bike.

Ten fairly punishing miles later (note to self - never get on the bike when you really need to pee) - I got off, and d, bless her, took the ice-cream away.
"I trust you around it," she said, "but it's gone all soggy."

Ever tried to cycle ten miles while someone not only eats some gorgeous ice cream in the same room, but leaves most of it to go all soggy? Next time, I'm thinking of strapping forks to the handlebars and headbutting them on every mile marker.

I'd be lying if I said anything else of note had happened today. Been sat on my ass writing a comedy Armageddon most of the day. I suppose one thing is that I'm entirely failing to take my own advice - have been sneaking more and more peaks at the scales. None of which is remotely helpful. Woke me up at 5AM this morning, going "Oh Christ, I'm going the wrong way..." In case anyone other than me hasn't been listening - DON'T sneak peaks between weigh-ins, it'll just make you absolutely crazy. It's just another experiment in masochism, really.

While I'm on the subject, I read a feature piece at Yahoo! yesterday about how NOT to lose weight...which pretty much listed everything I'm doing as reprehensible, stupid and the absolutely wrongest way to go about things. Don't reduce your portion sizes, it said, you'll only get hungry and eat crap. Don't substitute ordinary snacks for healthy ones, it said - then came out with the most insulting piece of 'advice' I think I've ever read. It was giving calorific comparisons - eat one full-fat yoghurt instead of two low-fat ones, for instance, and it's something like ten calories less. Then it said 'eat a proper portion instead of a smaller portion - and the five chocolate Digestives that inevitably follow, because you're still hungry' - and you save fifty calories. Have you ever heard anything that appears to loathe its intended readers more than this? Why not add in the implied 'ya big fat weak-willed lardasss piece of scum'? The blithe assumption that people who are fat actually don't have the willpower to feel hungry and NOT dive into the chocolate Digestives really pissed me off - though maybe that had something to do with reading it yesterday, when chocolate Digestives were, as you might have noticed, rather strongly on my mind.

So experiment in masochism number three - reading advice from people who despise you. In the words of Baz Luhrmann - "Don't read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly."

This thing is hard enough to do, without punishing yourself unnecessarily.

Leave the Gym, Take the Battered Sausage

Sometimes, there are days when it doesn't come down to particularly great temptations, or particularly onerous challenges. Sometimes, when it comes right down to it, you just want to have the night OFF...
Pal of mine called Sally-Anne, with whom I also work (she took the impenetrable tangerines off my hands) just embodied this concept for me as she was walking out the door. She's recently joined an Am Dram group, convinced of the merit of getting something of a life outside her normal routine. They meet tonight, all the way across town (close to my neck of the woods, in fact, so she'll be privy to my Hellish travel universe), and, as she put it, "all I really wanna do tonight is go home and watch Comic Relief with a sausage-in-batter." To my American friends, yes, that really is what it sounds like - a long British sausage (which d fetchingly describes as having the texture of 'boneless baby fingers'), dipped in a fish fry batter, and then deep fried. It's basically a greasy offal-tube, coated in goo, and then covered in more hot grease.

Oh sure, cos the land that serves applesauce as a side dish and brought the world the idea of maple-covered bacon would never do anything gross!

Anyway, I don't know what to tell you - they absolutely shouldn't work, I agree, but they do. They're gorgeous. Especially when accompanied by glorious, vinegar-soggy, equally-dubiously-greased British fish shop chips.

Like the ones they sell just up the road from my house...

Dammit, dammit, dammit!
I'm so suggestible. But they're so digestible (see what I did there? Yeah, did me no good whatsoever, cos while I was wondering how to spell 'digestible', I thought of Digestives, especially dark chocolate Digestives, the biscuit of the chocolate gods, and arrrrrrgh!).

Clearly, this has to stop. Must get a grip on myself. But she's right, dammit - sometimes, you just want to relax, and not think about what you should and shouldn't do, and just do what feels RIGHT! And that's the scary thing of course - had something like this discussion with Mae yesterday - Right now, in my insane, suggestible, craving moment, it feels more right than anything else on Earth to go home by way of the chippie, pick up as much carb and grease as I can carry, stop off at the grocers on the way for a packet of dark chocolate Digestives and go home and slob out in front of the TV all night. Actually, while I'm at the grocers, I could pick up a tub of ice-cream...could use the Digestives instead of a spoon....Fuck it, get two packets, use one for the ice-cream, and another to dunk...

Aaaaaaargh! Shut up shut up shut up....It's like...well, Hell, it's like a description that only works if you saw David Tennant's farewell in Doctor Who, because in that, a character called the Master is raised from the dead, but it goes wrong and so he's always, always, always hungry, and entirely indiscriminate. He gives a speech about wanting "Meat and beer, cheese and chocolate, great big lumps of red, hot blood food..." - I did try and find it on Youtube, cos it's powerful stuff and exactly what I'm feeling right now - but the pixies of Youtube have seen fit to cover every version it with Weird Al Yankovic - thanks for that guys!

I just want to grab...everything. It's like my blood is lacking in essential nutrients like sugar, salt and fat, and I just need to get them into my mouth in great big gallumphing handfuls, and then everything will be alright, everything will be calm and good and right with the world again. And that's where it gets really druglike and insidious...because the next rogue thought to wander through my differently-working brain is that not only will the world be right again if I do exactly that, but that I will be good, and calm, and right again. There's some part of my brain that tells me, in moments like this, that my whole identity, my whole sense of self, is tied up with being a fat fuck. And the worst part is it's not entirely wrong. I've almost always been big. It gives you a sense of outsider humour, which is essential to my understanding of who I am, and to which I'm not sure I'll feel entitled if this experiment works and I lose a socially remarkable amount of weight. I'm actually, actively, scared about who I'll be if this works, and these moments allow the little dark wraith of neurosis in the nub of my brain to come out and dance and play tunes on that fear...

(Takes a deep breath)...

...but...

I've always said this blog is chiefly about letting me rant when I need to and avoid smashing things...or indeed people...without falling off the dessert-trolley. Letting all this out right now has pretty much allowed the moment to roll on by and past me. So I'm going home now, to fish and steamed potatoes, another ten mile cycle, and what looks like a good Comic Relief line-up.

(Takes a Zen breath of purity or some other bollocks).
Get thee behind me, battered sausage and chips.

Mama Conchita, She Is Weary...

Back on the bike, he says.
Yeah...well I did my ten miles last night, and this morning marked a stage that I've been waiting for, and which I'm surprised has taken this long to get to.

I appear to have swapped hips with a 60-year old double-shift Brazilian hooker.
Couldn't walk this morning - or rather, I could walk, but only in the kind of way that makes you wonder if John Wayne and Donald Duck ever had a love...erm...egg.
The bike has finally bitten me - as I say, I'm surprised it's taken this long, but there you go - two weeks and two days in, the damn thing has left me bow-legged and brittle, and discarded me like a broken toy. This is me - broken toy-boy.

Of course, on the other hand, as d is quick to point out, I spent the entirety of my teenage years hoping, begging, even, yes, praying to earn myself a walk like this. I was just hoping that achieving it might be more fun!

Perhaps it's just as well that today was another broken routine day in Teddington. So - no morning walk...although by the end of the day I did a bit of walking home - which is what happens when the taxi drivers of Teddington conspire to insist that one place is actually somewhere else entirely, and abandon you there. Walked - or rather, waddled - home from Stratford Station too. Not exacly on a par with the ten mile cycle, but still, you cram this stuff in wherever you can.

There were plenty of positive elements about the day though, so, unusually for me, I don't particularly want to bitchslap people till they bleed today. Maybe I'm coming down with something.

I had a good experience today though - another pal of mine who I've been pathetic at keeping up with popped up out of nowhere to tell me she's following the blog. Tig is one of the people responsible for getting d and I together in the first place, and her son is one of a select handful of small people who I've actually met and yet oddly, don't want to stuff up a drainpipe. So it was great to hear from her. She told a tale of another friend of hers, to whom I would take off all but my silliest of hats. He's apparently gone from 28 stone to 16 over a year and a bit. That's a loss of 168 pounds, which is either gloriously inspiring or incredibly slap-worthy.

It's a good day, and with the Wayne/Duck waddle, I'd probably miss if I tried, so I'm gonna belay the slap and say it's inspiring...Yeah, I know, I'm quixotic, sue me.

So on to tomorrow. Hopefully, with my own hips...

Food Porn Vs The Disappearing Man?

A dull day all in all - I actually wussed out of the bike last night, and, in an unheard-of move, I also wussed out of walking tonight. In the first place, I was simply knackered, and in the second, I was having a Camille moment. For most of the day, I've had what I'm now glad to report was simply colossal, Prince Regent-style wind. However, far from simply rumbling round my lower intestines, this particular affliction left me with a pain in the centre of my chest, and a corresponding pain in my upper chest. Now, while, most of the time, I try to be as down-to-Earth as possible, I fall into a positively Dickensian grotesque when it comes to weird, inexplicable pain. So, faced with the pain and the difficulty in breathing and the prospect of walking across Hyde Park, yes, Goddammit, I wussed out and took a bus. Shoot me, why don'tcha? As it happens, I'm determined to get my ass on the bike tonight, as soon as I'm done writing this, so I'm hoping the rot hasn't set in permanently so early into this experiment.

A friend of mine raised an interesting point today though. In fact, it's a point that Mae raised during the Flatleython last Sunday, but today, it was put to me in a way that made me laugh.
"So," said my pal Crystal, "your wife's a food pornographer of the highest order...and you're trying to be a disappearing man. Isn't that a contradiction in terms?"

It's a reasonable question, I suppose, but it's a misunderstanding of the way d and I work. Certainly though, Crystal's appraisal of my wife is spot on. d loves food, not really so much as a consumer, but as a creator. It's a fascination for her in terms of what it can do, what it means to people, certainly how it tastes, and what it represents - she's said to me often that if you understand a culture's food, you can understand any culture. And she's taken me on a beautiful, rich, colourful journey into cultures of which I had no inkling, all through their food, their cooking, their culinary traditions and recipes. To some extent, I think, d sees food as love, as community, as a common denominator between all human beings throughout time and space, and I think in that she's right.

What's more, she has a gift. Actually, she has hundreds of gifts, but the one people notice who hear her talk about food is her skill with food porn - or more accurately, food erotica. To hear my girl describe the making of a cheesecake, or a pork dish, or her traditional family pizza, is to sit mesmerised as she spins a sensory web around your mind and your taste-buds, and to feel your jaw slowly drop open and your mouth fill with drool, as you see the thing come together in her words. She can whisper chocolate masterpieces into being in front of you, or make you dribble down your chest as she describes the seasoning of pies or stews. I've seen it happen time and time again, and Crystal herself can attest to the power - the very first time the two of them met, I saw Crystal's eyes glaze over and she had to excuse herself for a minute to break the spell.

Did I mention, my girl has a gift?

So how does that fit with my quest to become much much less of a man?
Well of course, firstly, we're not one dimensional archetypes - yes we have bookcases full of cookbooks, but that's not all d's about, any more than the bookcases of science fiction novels mean I'm just an anorak-wearing geek. d knows that this is important to me, and supports me whole-heartedly. I know that as surely as I know that contuning to breathe is a good idea. And likewise, I support her in her love and her interest. I'm still enjoying the journey, from Julia Child to Nigel Slater, to Top Chef and MasterChef and Hell's Kitchen and Cake Boss and, our latest find, the delight that is ChockyWockyDoodah. Yes, I whinge and bitch when I see the glorious desserts on screen, but that's pure envy, plain and simple, and normally, d will hand me her dessert for a good hearty sniff, and then I'll shut up, because she knows what I need, and she loves me enough to support me in my time of trial.

Also, quite apart from the fact of our three-dimensionalism, and if you want to get down to brass tacks, both d and I know that what this is is a way of getting me free. If I succeed in this, there's little reason why I won't be able to enjoy the whole range of tastes and flavours and sensations in this world. If I fail, and have to go the surgical route, I'll be forever condemned to having just a handful of bites of things. That's a worse fate than this year of whining and bitching and self-denial.

Besides - surely the time you need food porn most is when your genuine food options are more restricted than they've been in the past?

Sermon over, folks, move along now. As for me...I'm going back to the bike...

Straightening Out The Banana

OK, so - much to my surprise, at my second weekly weigh-in, this was the result:
20 stone, 3.5 pounds.

That means in two weeks, I've lost four pounds. Which is pretty much as planned. Although of course, given that I lost more than three pounds in the first week, this week's loss is technically behind schedule. That said, I'm refusing to blame the gorgeous crunchy sweetness of the fortune cookie for that.

Not while I have another perfectly good scapegoat standing by.

I've discovered something about the whole 'eating fruit to stimulate the metabolism' thing. Basically, bananas shouldn't count. I know, I know, anyone who's tried to diet properly in the last 20 years is now looking at me going "You're a moron, you know that?" - but I've just discovered that bananas...have a rather binding effect. Especially when you eat quite a few of them in one day. The day before you weigh yourself.

All the potential flushing effects of yesterday morning and the diabetic medication mix-up appear to have been pretty much for nought, because right now, I have to tell you, I'm still carrying most of yesterday's meals around with me. I mean, I know I said I was getting into a chipmunk mentality, but storing whole meals in my colon for days on end - not what I had in mind!

Note to self: Bananas - yummy, but counter-productive.

So I'm sort of assuming that when - oh, when?! - the grip of the bananas around my colon is relaxed, I may in fact lose some more from the recorded weight of this morning...but hey - that'll be a way to cheat this week!

The S' Plan Diet and the Chipmunk Mentality

When I started this (all of, y'know, two weeks ago), I said I was gonna try everything possible to avoid the surgery. Clearly, this is nonsense. Things I'm not going to do:
The Mark Addy, Wrap-Yourself-In-Cling-Film solution from The Full Monty. If I wanted to to be laminated, I'd feed myself into the machine at work.
Joining A Club. Unless it absolutely needs to come to it, I'm not going to be the only guy in some group of women talking about calorie values and how celery has fewer calories in it than you expend eating the stuff and yadda yadda yadda. Can't really get into a group hug situation cos someone's lost a pound. To paraphrase Peter Kay - "I shit a pound!" So unless I get desperate, this is just me, the people around me, the flab and the folly.
Drugs. d says there's only one drug she ever misses, and that's speed. Because speed is good for diets. Kicks your metabolism into high gear (hence "speed"!) and helps you burn fat faster. But it's time for another confession - I'm a pussy when it comes to drugs. Always have been, probably always will be. So diet drugs are just not for me.

Although...having said that...
Yesterday, as I said, I was out from quite early till quite late, and ate two meals while I was out. Sadly, because I was out early, and didn't take my rucksack, I also ended up without my diabetic meds. So when I got in at about 8.30, I took all six of my diabetic pills. At once.

Ahem.

I think it was Billy Connolly who first introduced the world to the concept of the S' Plan Diet - otherwise known as the 'Shit Yourself Thin' approach to weightloss. Well I'm here to tell you, if you take a daysworth of diabetic meds, then go to sleep...you wake up with an urgent awareness that you're about to weigh a great deal less, very very soon.

I thought my intestines had stopped talking to my stomach this morning. There was noise and danger, and then I turned largely into liquid.

Sooo that was a good start. And I have to admit, even though I felt like...well, you know what I felt like...when I was done, there was a nasty, insidious thought at the back of my head going "Oooh...that could be handy come Mondays, to skew the results on Tuesday mornings..."

Can't help it - I appear to be self-programmed to find a schemey, scammy way around things. Again, it's probably my inner journalist asserting its instincts. So that was the start of the day.

Now - in an attempt to jumpstart my metabolism without resorting to serious drugs, d has devised a kind of trail mix for me; nuts, dried fruit - all good stuff. The thing is, while I'm all over the whole perspex-boxy kind of self-discipline, where I don't go near things that are out of bounds...if you give me a BIG box of something healthy, and tell me it has to last the week, I'll sit there doing my work, nibbling and picking like a freaking chipmunk. I saw myself today. I'd dip in, take a couple of nibbles, trype a few sentences, take a couple of nibbles, do another few sentences, nibble some more. Then - and this is the sick thing - I'd think "Wow, that was quite a bit of nibbling" and put the lid back on the tupperware box, and lock down all four sides of it. Then I'd type a couple of sentences, open up all four sides, take a handful of nibbles, do some more work and...

So I seem to have eaten about half a week's trail mix in the space of a day. I'm sensing a flaw in the plan here. d says she's going to send me to work with tiny, pill-box sized tupperwares in future, with three raisins and an almond in each. That might actually work.

So - Tuesday morning tomorrow, and my second weigh in. It's not looking good for any kind of weight loss, I have to tell you.

Erm...

Anyone know where I can score some speed?

Fine. Bastards. If you need me, I'll be out in the kitchen, fighting with the Cling Film...

Lord of the Pants

I cannot tell a lie...

Well of course, that's ludicrous, I'm a journalist and press officer, and a would-be creative writer - 98% of what I do every single day is tell lies. But let's not get distracted. I cannot tell a lie in this blog, because that would utterly defeat the purpose of even signing in to it. So, in the interests of full disclosure, I should tell you that I was about to get on the bike last night and guilt-ride away my fortune cookie. I looked at the bike...
"Go ahead," it smirked. "Make my day..."
"You don't really have to do that now, honey, do you? I mean, if you don't really feel like. You could always do it tomorrow..." said my poor sickly wife, with an irresistible mix of kindness, snot and the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
"Really?" I asked - the concept of free will dawning on me like a world of forbidden fruit opening up. "Could I?"
"Of course you could honey," she assured me. "The bike is not the Boss of you..."
"Hahahahahaaaaa....quake with fear, you tiny fools," said the bike, for reasons I didn't quite understand.
"You're...right," I said, backing away from the bike, which I think is getting ideas above its station. "Right. Bugger it, I'm going to bed..."
And so, the Chinese and the guilty fortune cookie went unatoned, and I frankly didn't think about it again, snoring my fool head off all night.

Today dawned, and I left my snot-filled sickly girl in bed (cos I'm basically a heartless bastard - you have to be, or they don't let you graduate journalism-school), and went to meet my pal Karen (known, for complicated reasons, as Mae) across the city, for an afternoon that my wife would probably describe as "no no, really, he's not gay, he's just Welsh!" - a 3D movie of the latest version of Michael Flatley's "Lord of the Dance."

What can I tell you, it's a foot-tapping thing.

Haven't actually spent time with Mae in about five years, despite us living in the same city. Many of my friends have similar stories of my lackadaisical approach to relationship-maintenance. I'm basically useless in Real Life.
So it was great to catch up, and - in case you're wondering, the show is...erm...interesting. Including what seemed to be the Dance of the Erotic Lesbian Flower Fairies, the Dance of the Fascist Shock Troops, and at least one section that was basically Hot Women Do Irish Dancing In Their Underwear, it's definitely worth a look - though possibly notsomuch with the 3D, 'cos when Flatley gets going with the high-kicks...well, you get the picture...

Had a great day, and walked to and from my usual weekday tube station, so fought the insidious joy of the fortune cookie a little. In fact, on the way home, I had an experience that topped the day off nicely.

My wife, bless her, has fought my natural instincts for slobbery for years, and it hasn't been easy. She's forever trying to get me to wear a belt, for reasons I don't, any longer, even pretend to understand. This week she succeeded, and I've worn the thing all week, fastened at the flab-comfortable level for which it was bought (had to scour the city for this thing, because normal, off-the-peg belts don't go anywhere near around my girth...hmm, good word, girth...). On the way down the hill tonight, I felt my pants (Damn, it's true what everyone says about what's happened to my idiom since being married to an American. I categorically mean 'Trousers' to the non-Americans here) slipping down my ass. I yanked them back up. A handful of steps further on, they were falling down again. I pulled them up again, and pulled the belt open, yanking it to the next notch.

It was comfortable. It was right. And my pants stopped falling down.

Sure, Flatley can move his feet fast enough to burn a hole in the stage, but tonight, goddamnit, I am the Lord of the Pants!

Came home, and did my ten miles, pedalling with Irish violins in my head. If I dance my way up the hill tomorrow, I'm gonna hunt Michael Freaking Flatley down and bitch-slap him. Just...because...

The Fortune Cookie Conundrum

A low key day all in all. I started by waking up, ate a bowl of cereal and frankly was back in bed by 2PM. This is a weird side effect that I haven't had cause to mention before - I love cereal. You remember I spent hours in the cereal aisle at Wal-Mart the first time I went to the States? It was pretty much food porn of the highest order. Back when I was a teenager, I'd get the biggest bowl I could find, and combine three or four types of cereal, with milk, broken up chocolate biscuits, actual chocolate (preferably dark), bananas, and mount the whole thing with cream. That was breakfast. And possibly (during my unemployed years) lunch too. I was essentially building my own slutty dessert, with a cereal base. In fact, I did the same with ice-cream, come to think of it - did I mention it takes dedication to end up looking like me?

Anyway, these days, I still love cereal, but it kills me. Almost literally - knocks me on my ass and makes me sleep for hours. This morning was the first time I've eaten cereal in weeks. I poured some Shreddies into a bowl, thought it might kill me, and put several gallumphing handfuls back. Thought I was safe...but so much for that. Snored my ass off for several hours.

Woke up, and neither of us could go anywhere until Argos had delivered a...erm...a device, for trying to tame our garden. I haven't taken it out of the box, or even looked at it yet, but I'm told it will help kill the Triffids that have strangleed the roses, eaten the fence, and, I'm fairly convinced, killed the fish in the pond while we were away.

So, the whole idea of having an active, gardening day dribbled away into a pleasant but sluglike afternoon of sitting on my ass, watching movies and cooking shows. Hard life, innit?

Now, it's important at this point that I mention that d is sick. My darling girl has more strengths than a hundred ordinary people (not least her patience, cos she puts up with me!), but she also, bless her, has sinuses that might as well be made of nettles and lungs made of rice paper. That means that a single nostril of dust...or cheap perfume...or pretty much anything weird...can take her from coughing to a sore throat to a full-blown snotfest sinus infection in about an hour. That happened to her Thursday, and she's still immersed in mucus. That means she's not keen on cooking anything, which is entirely fair enough.

The only problem with that is that...well, not to put too fine a point on it, our kitchen hates me. It didn't used to hate me, in all fairness, but over the last few years, we've got a new oven, and I think it's turned the rest of the room bitter. Quite apart from the fact that getting anything off the shelves or out of the cupboard is like something from Mission: Impossible, so things fall on me and snap at my legs if I go near them, there's the oven that, I swear, is numbered in Aramaic and appears to have three levels of 'on'ness, which surely can't be right.

Anyhow, that, and the fact that the only people I've ever cooked for are...well, me, and you've got a sample of my palete in the cereal-fest described above, and my wife has a genuine palette and culinary standards, means I don't cook. So...when d is poorly, we order in. Last night, I skated close to the wind with a small cheese and tomato pizza, and tonight, it was chicken curry and rice from a local Chinese. I scarfed my way through it, and had already finished when d said "Wow...you've eaten the fortune cookie too?"

I hadn't thought about it, but yeah, I'd scarfed my way through the crisp little biscuit-thing too.
"Oh," I said. "Bugger..."
At which point I made a rational executive decision, not remotely based on the fact that the last sweet flecks of cookie were on my lower lip at the time.
"Oh well," I said. "I've never counted them as sweet things before...not starting now".

Still...it feels like something that might come back to haunt me on Tuesday morning. Any thoughts, anyone? Fortune Cookies - passable, or utterly evil, for the seeker after slenderness?

So all in all, a gloriously indulgent but dangerously calorific kind of day. Back on the bike for another ten miles, I guess...

The Curse of the Peak-Sneaker

It was three days ago that I had my first official weigh-in, so I know better than to do what I did this morning. After my morning ablutions, I caught a glimpse of the scales out of the corner of my eye.
"Don't do it," I thought to myself. I paused, preparing to bugger off out of it and star tmy morning walk.

"Buuuuuuuut," whined the scales. I looked back.
"You did so welllll last night," they cooed. Vanity fluffed up the fuzz on my head and plumped the wobbly man-breasts underneath my T-shirt. I had, I agreed. Last night, after writing the blog, I got on the bike and rode for ten miles. Probably my best and longest trip in one stint...ever. Surely, the vanity reasoned...surely, if there was ever a day to have a quick sneak peak and see how well I was doing it, today was that day. I mean, the flab couldn't ignore my best and longest, ever, could it?

I pulled out the scales, breathed out and stepped on.
20 stone, 4.5 pounds.

Exactly what it was three days ago.

"Haaaaahaaaaa!!!" laughed the scales. "Gerroffme now, ya saddo!"
I nodded. I shouldn't have buckled under the temptation, but vanity is a fantastically powerful thing.

Now of course, it would be a better story if I said I'd gone through the whole day feeling dispirited and pondering whether the whole thing was worth it. But, c'mon, that only works in beach fiction. After all, it's only been ten days, and there are four more days before I weigh in again. What it did was serve as a salutory lesson - weigh in when you say you're going to, and only when you say you're going to - sneaking a peek inbetween weigh-ins only serves to either fulfill your vanity and make you go soft, or trounce your vanity and leave you wishing you hadn't given in.

So stand strong - avoid the curse of the peak-sneaker, and push on. It's the only way.

Do Rage and Hate Burn Calories?

Did I mention there'd be days that just suck giant rhinocerous ass? Days where your shoes fall to bits and your feet find every puddle, and the bus never comes, and your routine goes to Hell, and the people you have always known are idiots insist on treating you like you're the moron, and the world is extra full of chavs and gits and teenagers, until you're having Ally McBeal-style fantasies of whipping out a semi-automatic and spraying blood and bone and brain all over the place, and oh yes, by the way, you're on a fucking diet!

This, I suppose, is the time when comfort eating slithers into your brain and whispers "C'mooooonnnn...you know you want me. I'm good. You know how good I am. I'll make everything just that little bit better...promise."

Oddly enough, today, even though I'm having fantasies of slapping practically everyone - the colleague who's being an arse, the facebook foe who thinks long words stop nonsense being nonsense, the teenager on the bus, every single one of America's prospective next top models on my TV screen - it's not dessert that's calling me. There's no ice cream sundae dancing the dance of the seven wafers in front of my mind's eye. No, oddly enough, it's carb. Genuine, warming, comfort food - I feel like I want to be wrapped in creamy, buttery mashed potato from head to foot, and have warm gravy poured on my head, as though that would rock away the day's rough edges until I drop off to sleep.

(Sigh...)

But no. The minute I'm done with this, it's back on the bike, probably for longer than ever before, because - and this might explain a lot about the rage and hate that have characterised my mindset today, I suppose - I've spent the day in Teddington on a work assignment, which means I've done neither my morning nor my evening walk, and despite having eaten correspondingly little, my brain seems to have already trained itself to feel guilty when these things get missed on a weekday.

So I'm going to go away for now. I'm probably no good to anyone right now anyway, the mood I'm in. Tomorrow promises to be another bitch of a day, then the weekend - though this time, I most definitely have Things To Do. Working in the garden Saturday, and going to see a movie...of sorts...with a pal on Sunday.

Onward, to the bike!

I Want To Ride My Bicycle...

I cycled six miles last night without leaving my living room. Have to say, I heartily recommend it as a way of getting some extra exercise.

Now, there will be those among you who hear such enthusiasm and go "But Tony...how redundant is that? If you're going to spend all that time pedalling, why not get a real bike, feel the wind in the scalp where your hair used to be, feel healthy and actually get somewhere...."

Number one, I live in London. Any questions? If you do, I suggest you sit down and listen to President Denis Leary ranting about suicidal cyclists in Manhattan, change the geography to Ye Olde London Towne and remember that his mentality is the very same thought process running through the brain of every homicidal maniac in charge of a couple of tonnes of fast-moving steel on the city streets. Then I suggest you stay the Hell indoors or if you have to go out, use every inch of public transport you can get your privileged, oh-excuse-me-let-me-get-chauffered-around-everywhere-I-go ass on, alright? Public transport is a privilege. Private motorised transport is a goddamned luxury, specifically designed so that you don't have to take your life in your hands on a couple of bits of tubing and two wheels in places like London, OK?

Annnd number two...I can't ride a bike. There, OK, I said it.

I tried. As a kid, I'd watch the other kids - the necessarily cooler kids - ride up and down...well, mainly down, cos I grew up in a town in Wales that's basically composed of seven different big-ass hills, and neither gravity nor the energy capacity of a small human being is on your side trying to ride up those sonsofbitches...the streets, some in groups, like in the movie ET. Others, in fairness, in groups like the future-criminals-who-couldn't-afford-getaway-cars-yet they were. I was chased down by a bully on a bike for every last penny of my lunch money (hey, I was a fat kid, chances were it was a heist worth pulling), and as I walked home, snot and liquid humiliation running down my face, I remember distinctly thinking "Gee, it would be so cool to be able to ride a bike right now, so I could not only get away, but also so I wouldn't have to walk all the way back home..."

But the thing is this: by the time I actually got my hands on a bike, I'd grown into an arrogant little ass. It's a thing to which only children are particularly prone - you do things on your own, and you do them your own way, or very often they just don't happen and you sit around with your thumb up your ass until it's time to eat again.

We were never rich enough during my childhood to afford a proper bike, but one year for Christmas, a friend of my mother's sold her her bike - her proper, grown-up, seen many many better years bike. And my mother, being a kindly woman at heart, duly presented it to me on Christmas Day.

Which was fabulous, except number one, it was a proper grown-up bike. I'm 5 ft 6 now, and I hadn't had what I still think of with a bitter chuckle as my 'growth spurt' yet. So the bike was pretty much bigger than I was. Number two, by the time the bike arrived in my life, we'd moved to a first floor flat (or a second floor one, if you're reading this with an American brain), so hauling the bike to the ground was pretty much enough to make the idea of riding around on it seem like taking the whole notion of physical fitness to a dangerous extreme. Number three, we lived on a new and fairly feral council estate, where the kids would, if you gave them reason, probably actually kill you for the fun of it (we were well ahead of the social curve in my area). Number four, everybody kept telling me that I'd soon get the hang of riding a bike "once you've fallen off a couple of times." In case you have a child of your own, or know one, can I just say - DON'T FREAKIN' TELL THEM THAT! Kids are all about the preservation of self unless they think they can get sympathy. If you practically guarantee for them the fact that they're going to fall over and hurt themselves, if they're anything like me, they'll try and find a way around it, rather than embracing the necessity of pain.

And number five...Well, number five is that, as I mentioned, by the time the bike arrived, I'd become an arrogant ass.

So - faced with the idea of hauling the bike down a few flights of stairs (don't ask me how, but we contrived to have two flights of stairs on a first floor flat - it was the 80s, it was a crazy time), definitely falling over and hurting myself, and then in all probability being set upon by a bunch of feral kids who would have eaten those pussies from Lord of the Flies for breakfast, my arrogant-ass brain came up with a much better solution.

I would ride the bike outside, I declared, only once I'd mastered the art of not falling off it - indoors. People tried to tell me that a stupid idea, but I wouldn't be told. My bike, my rules, right?

Now, I'm assuming by this point that we're all familiar with the laws of physics involved in not falling off a bike, and how most of the trick is in the continual motion of the thing. You ever tried to balance on a stationary bike that wasn't in some way nailed to the floor?

I have. 

I was that dumbfuck, desperately trying not to move at all, wedged between our staircase and the wall, frantically counting the seconds before I fell into either one.

Perhaps understandably, I never took the bike outside. Not once. Not ever.

So - I don't ride bikes. Bikes and I - not a good match. Quite apart from anything else, I discovered in later life that I have what might even be described as a special skill for falling over. I mean it - I can fall over just standing in my kitchen. I've fallen over and broken my leg, fallen over and broken my ankle, fallen over and broken it again...Falling over and I are an excellent match, it has to be said. So me and bikes - notsomuch.

So why do I have one in my living-room? Mainly because I don't have the co-ordination to do cross-training - seriously, it's like what would happen if you made a chicken jog up and down stairs while doing calculus, it's just not pretty - and because, when I got the bike, walking was something I could do, out there in the real wind-in-the-hair world. So walking to get home...only to get on a treadmill and walk some more seemed to cross that border between redundant and just plain stoopid! Also, there's something about the name - I don't have an exercise bike, I have a recumbent bike. Recumbent...that's a great word to include in any sales pitch for a piece of gym equipment you want to sell to a fat fuck, it kinda carries the idea of "I'll just take a nap here for half an hour, burn some calories, then go out for pizza..." Besides, as I discovered at the gym, while honing my loathing for the muscular, lycra-clad physical nightmares who actually had to work to feel the burn, the recumbent bike takes a lot of pressure off your back while still allowing you to get some sort of a workout. Plus of course, with the right soundtrack and your eyes closed, you can imagine you're some sort of sweaty Dennis Hopper, cruising down the highways on some sort of Flintstones, pedal-powered Hog.

You've really gotta want to see it...

So enjoy, all you 'real' cyclists, especially all you desperate and terrified businessmen who've taken to jumping on the 'Boris Bikes' and cutting up legitimate traffic on your leg-powered bank adverts. I'll be at home with my iPod on.

Now where was I? Oh yeah...

"Get your motor runnin'..."

Mile - Stones

Well, here's the news from the 1-week weigh-in. Down 3.5 pounds, to 20 stone, 4 pounds, or 284 pounds for my American friends. So, a solid, if hardly Earth-shattering start. The idea was to lose the safe amount each week, but I can take a little kickstart as my body goes "What the Hell is going on here?", because there will be weeks, and they will be many, when absolutely nothing good happens later on down the line.

And I guess the point is that with another week that is perhaps just slightly better than this, or two weeks exactly like this, I'll be able to announce my first milestone has been achieved - getting under 20 stone for the first time in about a year.

Now I know this is a tricky one for the non-Brits, but I will probably always think in terms of stones (14 pound-increments), because there's a solidity both to the word and to the concept - in the UK, we tend to have to do the mental maths if someone says "280 pounds", and it doesn't have an immediate picture associated with it. But 20 stone? Unless the person's lucky and tall, you can be pretty much guaranteed that at 20 stone, you're talking to a fat fuck.

And the solidity of the concept works in reverse too - If you lose "a stone", to the British mindset, it seems somehow more final and positive than simply losing "14 pounds". I suppose it's the same logic that makes having any significant birthday feel more definitive than the one before - when you turn 30 or 40 or 50, it feels somehow more solid than turning 29 and twelve months...

So while I'll always give pound-equivalents, my brain is measuring this adventure in stones and half-stones, and therefore, with an obvious if rather delicious logic, mile-stones.

Just a quick recap for anyone who's joined us in the last week. I've started trying to lose a shedload of weight, and have made the following changes to try and make that happen:
(no sweet things, desserts or sugars - has been in place for the last year. As has no fizzy drinks).
This week:
Lower carb
More water
Walking, both in the morning and the evening.
More regimented eating - three meals a day.
Some degree of portion control, though not starvation rations.
Begun a home exercise regime, on a recumbent exercise bike.
Less fried food.
More healthy snacks, in an attempt to engage the metabolism.

All this has so far achieved a 3.5 pound weight loss.

I'm gonna be flagellating myself with celery sticks by the end of this, I can see...

Tangerine Dream On

First thing's first - for those who are waiting with baited breath, yes, I actually did get on the exercise bike last night. Though it wasn't that straightforward. I finished the last blog entry, and got up from watching the DIY. Went around to the bike, took some of the hats and other clutter off it.
"What the hell are ya doin'?" asked d, not unreasonably.
"I'm ridin' my ass off baby," I replied...as it turned out, entirely unreasonably. You see, since the last time I got on the bike, we've moved the room around, and, as it turned out, the power cord for the bike no longer reached any available socket. Now, my previously noted DIY skills (ahem) pretty much reached out, covered me in confusion, and made me breathe out and scratch my head and go "hmm."
"Seriously, what are ya doin' over there?"
d was getting pissed off, because I was quite seriously interrupting her increasingly desperate attempts to like Nicholas Lyndhurst in something other than "Goodnight Sweetheart", and because I'd waited till late in the night to decide to get healthy.

Then she read the blog, and laughed.
I laughed too, and came and sat down, giving up on the idea of getting on the bike. d got up, found an extension lead (personally, I think she has a thing going with the extension lead fairy), and plugged it in.
So, thanks, as ever, to the wonder that is my wife, I managed to cram some exercise into Sunday too.

But today's subject is fruit. As you know, I've been trying to raise my metabolic rate by eating fruit between meals, and continually stimulating the system. But in the spirit of "I cannot tell a lie", I need to come clean on something.

All last week, I said I was eating tangerines. I'm here to tell you, that's simply not true.
Turns out I was eating clementines.
Simple mistake, right?

Can I ask - has there been some weird Homeland Security Act covering tangerines in the last few years that I wasn't previously aware of? I mean, when I was a kid, everything that was round and orange and wasn't an orange...was a freakin' tangerine as far as anyone in Britain knew! But you could get into them with a thumb and a bit of persuasion. Now there are tangerines, clementines, tangellos, mandarins, and half a dozen other small, peelable orange...things. But I'm here to tell you, while the proliferation has been wild, the original tangerine has become one tough-ass sonofabitch. I tried to get into one this morning and nearly broke a thumb. I scraped and pulled and refused to bite into the damn thing, and ended up sawing into it with a letter-opener. It was like someone had encryped the juice with multiple security files and dropped it a vault at the CIA or something. By the time I was done, there was peel everywhere, and juice splattered over everything...including my computer. I have a sticky z key now...

So, to be clear, if you wanna get into a modern, tough-ass 21st century tangerine - give up, it's really not worth it. Yes, Clementines may be small and relatively tasteless, but ease of access is...pretty much everything.

Beware Weekends Bearing Gifts

See, here's the thing. When embarking on a mad and generally irritating scheme that depends solely on your ability to stick to a routine, the patience and help of those around you and your own bastard-stubbornness, weekdays are good. Weekdays - at least if you're lucky enough to be employed in this insane economic climate - are structured: you have to get up at a certain time, go to work, have lunch within a set window, come home at a certain time, and so on. Within those parameters, you try and crowbar in some activity, to get your heart going and your fat burning and yadda yadda yadda.

Then you get to the weekend. The weekend is freedom, and freedom from the working week is wonderful for the couch-potato in your soul, because if you don't want to, you don't have to get up at any particular time; in fact, you don't have to get out of bed all weekend unless you really want to.

Yesterday, I was lucky - I still had to get up, because we had a grocery delivery booked. What's more, I had to get dressed and leave the house, to pick up some diabetic meds. So I was up and dressed and out, and so I was able, still, to get some walking into Saturday. Last night, again, freed from the restrictions of an ordinary weekday, d cooked her traditional family pizza (and also a goulash for today), and I ate more of this bready delight than I should have - simply because a) it was gorgeous, and b) my brain was tricked by the broken routine into (and really, I'm not as stupid as this makes me sound), forgetting I was doing this whole thing. I followed up the pizza with a bowl of the goulash at around 10PM - about two to three hours later than I've been eating all week. So suddenly I was back to feeling huge and bloated and like a grumpy Humpty Dumpty when I went to lay down to sleep. Technically of course, no rules were broken, and I didn't exactly gorge myself on deep fried angel wings dipped in chocolate, but still, while the food was glorious, the feeling was painful and moderately dispiriting.

Today, I slept till about midday, and have spent the day in my nightgown (Oh yes, I'm a style guru, me - have a thermal, Edwardian-style nightgown. Am resisting the idea of a pointy nightcap and pom-pom slippers with every fibre of my being), doing fun, creative things (making progress on my novel, mainly), but not, in fact, moving my planet-sized arse off the couch. I've also, just for the fun of the record, been watching small, freakish Australians cook amazing food most of the day (Junior Australian Masterchef - did I mention d loves to cook?), to the point where I'm seriously thinking about flying out to Australia to slap the little Wunderkinder senseless for tormenting me with brandy snap baskets, four-tier chocolate cakes and millefeuille all day! Oh and by the way, Buddy Valastro, if I ever get to Hoboken, I'm gonna come and head-butt you through the wall, Cake Boss!!

(Sighs deeply, takes several cleansing breaths). Where was I? Oh yeah, so I've spent the day sitting on my arse watching people make cakes, and occasionally eating, when d has brought me food. (Could I be more of a Sultan, waited on hand and foot?). No exercise whatsoever today. Hardly moved enough to justify breathing, really.

It's now quarter to nine in the evening and I'm thinking seriously about finally plugging in the exercise bike (like I promised to do at the start of this adventure, remember?), and maybe pedalling slowly for a couple of hours while we watch people do DIY on TV. (I've never been sure whether the correlation between watching people cook and d cooking is supposed to carry through to watching people do DIY, and me actually doing DIY, but if so, d hasn't been paying attention to the guy she's married to. My dad gave me a kickass toolkit when we got married. d took it out of my hands like a bomb disposal expert removing a ticking suitcase from a plane, and I've hardly ever seen it since).

Or I could just sit here for a while, until I get the energy to go to sleep. Let's see what happens, shall we?

Oh and talking about things I promised to do before now, I got everything I need to take daily blood samples yesterday, so should be able to add the delightful little details about how much sugar's in my blood from tomorrow.

You're thrilled, aren't you? I can tell...

The Metropolitan Desert

Err....yes, that's desert, the big sandy or snowy place, not dessert, the big tasty yummy thing.

Had a weird experience last night. (You're gonna be sick of hearing that soon, aren't you?)
I was meeting a friend of mine called Wendy at Euston Station. She's only in town occasionally, being something of a brilliant techie-boffin and international jet-setter, so it was a chance to spend an hour and a half catching up with her while she waited for a train. And it was fab to hear what's new in her life, but the weird experience was...well, where we did it, really.

Normally, when Wend comes to town, there's nothing she wants more than a proper drink and to be somewhere convivial, like a friendly pub. And, perhaps understandably for an infrequent London visitor, to slap some people sideways. It's a metropolitan thing.

This time though, we stayed in the environs of Euston, and instead of seeking out alcohol and the buzz of city-boy wanker-banter, we went to what was basically a food court, and had coffee while we nattered. But there was just a moment when we'd had the coffee that I asked if she wanted anything else, or some food...and I looked up, and around me. And then I realised that my new perspex box was going to make my future of fast food really rather tricky. Because as I looked around, it was as though every frontage slammed big, loud, black iron bars and slid heavy locks of don't-even-think-about-it-punk into place.

Burger King - SLAM!
Harry Ramsden's Fish and Chip Shop - SLAM!
Pret - (Goddamn Mayo!!) - SLAM!
And so on, around the room. And it dawned on me that if I'm not going to crack a wall in this new, health-conscious perspex box, I'm going to have to think ahead of time, or become one of those awkward cusses who says "Oh no, I can't eat there...let's go here instead," messing up everybody else's evening for the sake of their own. So, just a quick message to my friends and family, and to everyone they know who has the misfortune to run across me in the next year:
I won't like doing it, I won't be comfortable about it, and I do realise it'll make you think I'm a precious, self-righteous, self-regarding, indeed self-revolving tosser.

But rest assured, I won't let that stop me.

Of course, actually being a precious, self-righteous, self-regarding, indeed self-revolving tosser probably helps in that regard...

The Mayonnaise Minefield

I hate mayonnaise more than most things in life. Mayonnaise, to me, is the stuff that Satan scrapes off the inside of his posing pouch after a hard day's priest-roasting. It's the worst idea to hit gastronomy...I think, ever. And bear in mind, that's a field that includes the invention of popcorn chicken and the deep fried Mars bar.

What's worse, I'm in an incredible minority on this. Most people - including you, I know - will look at the invective I spill about mayonnaise and go 'Jesus Tony, it's just an emulsion, lighten up, what has mayo ever done to you?"

I'll tell you, shall I?

It's everywhere. And the cultural assumption is that everything tastes better with mayo, so most of the time, it's not even advertised as being in the things they put it in. In restaurants, I've now been married to an American long enough to send things back without feeling waves of cringing consumer-guilt (In Britain, the customer's not only always wrong, but is always, also, scum). But it's in pre-packaged foods that the thing reaches new peaks of insanity. I only mention this because d very kindly made me a gorgeous and entirely edible gammon sandwich for lunch today, but for sundry reasons I won't bore you with, my lunchtime plans changed, and I had to trek out to Oxford Street and back. So I thought I'd buy myself a pre-packaged sandwich to eat on the run.

Not one...NOT ONE sandwich in any of three stores...contained no mayo. Now I know what you're thinking - oh well, that's just the type of thing people normally put in sandwiches...right?

Well then explain to me what Earthly place the wretched gloopy stuff has in a TURKEY AND STUFFING sandwich! Seriously, these are two things which under no rational circumstances should need the addition of an eggy, oily goo. Truly, the world has got mayo on the brain...

Not that I'd ever claim to be easy to please, culinarily speaking. Just so you get an appreciation of how tricky this whole 'healthy eating' thing is from my point of view, here are some other pet peeves of mine.

Lettuce - It's like chewing wet rubber, and about as satisfying.
Prawns - What happens when a cockroach and a lobster love each other very much.
Melon and Cucumber - Make my mouth come up in pustules.
Blue Cheese - What happens when mould gets delusions of grandeur.
Walnuts - Essentially a testicle in a nutshell.
Pate - Admittedly, probably the only reason any sanely ordered universe would allow geese to survive. Still not really reason enough.
Oysters - Anything that looks like you've sneezed and tastes like seawater is just begging to be ignored.
Any dressing that looks like sour cream, but isn't - Is pretty much like eating a sniper.
Offal - There is no good reason to eat the innards of animals if you can afford the flesh that used to keep them inside. Not being able to afford flesh is a reason to go vegetarian, not a reason to eat organs.
Black Pudding (or blood sausage) - It's blood and fat. Any questions?
Things dragged up from the darker recesses of the ocean and presented under the misleading misnomer - "fish".
Salmon - Clearly IS a fish, but that's no excuse.
Tuna - Likewise.

You can probably see one of the main reasons I grew to love carbs as much as I did - because, clearly, according to my tastebuds, salads are the food of damned souls in Hell, and there's no good reason to go anywhere near them while there are other, tastier things to eat. So c'mon people, gimme some sandwich leeway here - I want to be good, quit making it so difficult!

My Brain Works Differently

One of the kind-hearted things people do when they're close and they care about you and you get to be my size is they try to find you alternatives to the things you really want. If you think about that too long, it's enough to make you weep. That people care that much is really incredibly moving.

And I daresay, for a whole lot of people trying to lose a shedload of weight, it's the only way to go - finding substitutes to ease the pathway, to make each day a little bit more bearable till the weight starts coming off, and then to allow a safe reward for progress made. These are normal people, good people, and more power to all of them as they do what they need to do.

My brain works differently.

Don't panic, I'm not about to embed links to weird cultish weight-loss sites. It's a YouTube clip from one of my two favourite TV shows of all time, The West Wing. And it's the most resonant writing I've ever heard to describe how I feel about food. Go ahead, click and watch it, we'll wait here.

I should say, this wasn't what I was going to write about today - I was going to try and do another funny entry, but as it happened, these words came back to me today because I've run into that feeling again today.

You see, this last year of not eating 'sweet things' has been governed by my own, probably bizarre, set of rigid rules. It's like I put everything that qualified, to me, as a dangerous sweet thing into a big clear perspex box and welded it closed. But those rigid rules are also nonsensical, and terrifyingly brittle. That's not new information to me, but it came up both yesterday and today - yesterday, d wondered about the possibility of getting me some low-fat yoghurts, to make things a little easier for me.

But to me, somewhere in the tangled, weird wiring of my brain, yoghurts are sweet, and are eaten in a dessert-or-snack-time slot. And I know that if I allowed myself to eat one, one harmless little low-fat carton of fruity goo, that one of the perspex walls would shatter, right there in front of me. And I wouldn't have just the one, reasonable, low-fat yoghurt. I'd have four. And then tomorrow, I'd have a huge tub of full-fat, extra thick and creamy, sugared-up-to-the-eyeballs yoghurt, because the wall would have been broken, the last year would be invalid, and I 'might as well feel like this longer'. And the day after that, yoghurt wouldn't do it for me, and I'd buy a four-pack of custard tarts from Marks and Spencers - trust me on this, I can hear them calling my name right now as I write this. And on it would go. And you'd notice the difference in me, honestly you would - I'd be funnier more often. I'd be the absolute life and soul, because I'd be sugar-rushed and happy and somehow deliciously, defiantly proud of my ability to do all this and go sailing, screaming, racing over the edge of a custard-flavoured cliff.

I guess all I'm trying to say here is that I'm not really a substitute-capable kind of guy. I'm very much a one-day-at-a-time kind of guy. Does that mean food - and sweet, carbohydrate-rich food in particular - is an addiction to me? I don't know, I'm scared of overdramatising. But if it looks like an addiction, and tastes like an addiction, and more to the the point if it responds to the same kind of treatment as an addiction, I think I could make a convincing case for calling it an addiction.

Which is absolutely not, under any circumstances, to say that I want to be treated like I have an addiction. Sitting around with my fellow fat fucks admitting to our powerlessness over food and all that gubbins is categorically not for me. I suppose, in a way, that's why, when the doctor offered me the surgical option, I couldn't go ahead with it without trying this first, without pitting my bastard-stubbornness against my deep and growling instincts to eat everything in the Western World - because to go straight for the surgery in my case (I make no judgment on anyone else, you understand?) would feel like giving in to my own incalculable weakness, and I'm not ready to do that just yet.

Thing is, sometimes the perspex walls can go up without me knowing it. Today, d asked what I felt like for dinner, and she suggested gammon, eggs and chips. I vetoed the chips without thinking about it.

"These are oven chips I'm talking about," she explained, "not fried."

But again, I felt the connection making itself in my brain - oven chips may be dry and very definitely not covered in hot sizzling oil...but tomorrow, they wouldn't be good enough for me, and I'd go in search of proper chips (and I should point out here, I'm absolutely not above searching for real chips, guzzling them down, and then going home and not admitting them, and eating a proper, diet-friendly meal - we're sneaky and mad like that, we differently-wired fat fucks). And then I'd be back to McDonalds for breakfast the next morning, while probably lying, right here on this blog, about how I was keeping up the good work.

I'm not going to do that. But it was interesting to me that I didn't know that my brain had put out an injunction against "fried foods" until the question came up.

You want to know the really stupid part? The injunction doesn't apply to fried eggs - and I have no idea why, it's just the way my brain appears to have constructed its new perspex box. Doesn't surprise me though - my "sweet things" box didn't appear to include breakfast cereal, despite my intellectual understanding of the fact that they pack that stuff full of sugar...

Ahem...did I mention? My brain works differently...