Uphill Struggling

So, here we are, newish leaf and all that - food from home instead of canteen meals, thanks to d, and back to walking every bloomin' where I can. Rather short-circuited by the need to get home tonight pronto, to meet with the diabetic nurse. So, knowing as much, I walked the short walk to my tube station (Plaistow, in case you were wondering), this morning, and when I got to Kensington, decided to walk up the Kensington High Street. In the old days, before the two extra stone that tipped me to 20, this wasn't any particular struggle, but it has been now for some time. It's a weird gradient - not steep by any standard, and particularly not by the standard of any self-respecting Welshman, but pretty insidious, and probably, when all is said and done, longer than my usual evening walk across Hyde Park.

To be honest, this was an act of fairly stark desperation. In preparation for tonight's nurse visit, I was sort of obliged to weigh this morning, to give her vaguely accurate statistics of weekly weight loss, and so get her to agree to re-sign me on the Xenical for another month. The news was far from good, but I won't share it with you just yet - we'll save that delight for tomorrow, when I'll be weighing again. Still, it was enough to force me up a long insidious hill, and it made the journey feel like I was wearing three extra rucksacks. One step forward, two steps...

As it happened, when I got to the nurse tonight (walked from Stratford station, as I had time), I couldn't actually bring myself to share this week's weight news with her. I told her about the first two weeks I'd been on the Xenical, because they'd had good results. But this week's results stuck in my throat.

There's a danger here of course. After last week's headline-fest, there's a huge likelihood that not only will I not have moved forward tomorrow, but that I'll have been pushed back, and have at least some of the struggle to do over. d's very good and pragmatic about this - don't sweat the small stuff, she tells me, or when you get to the real plateaus, you'll go mad. She's absolutely right of course, and in previous, wild-eyed attempts to lose this weight, I'd have done something stupid and extreme, and phenagled the result tomorrow, and been on a slippery slope back to nowhere. But this time, it seems to be all about sweating - and indeed celebrating - the small stuff. Two pounds, as I've said before, is the prescribed healthy amount of weight you should be able to lose in a week. Which, when we recall that this week I've swung along a difference-curve of five pounds from being full of water in the night to being empty in the morning, seems utterly pointless in the tracking, the fretting, the planning, the steps taken forward to lose just that small, solid amount each week.
And there, right there, is the danger, of course. That voice again, that slithering little voice that whispers "What are you doing this for? Two pounds is pointless. Hell, at this weight, even ten pounds is pointless. You might see the difference, but at 19 or 20 stone, ten pounds gone still leaves you being stared at on tubes as the fat fuck..."
And the impetus to quit washes over you in the thought. Especially, in my case, in the thought of the number-crunching bureaucrat this dieting process turns me into. Worrying over a pound and a half here, two pounds there, like a miser chasing after pennies, when my natural spirit rings more with Henry VIII or Falstaff - eat, drink, be merry, tomorrow we die.

Except the whole point of this of course is that maybe, hopefully, tomorrow we don't.

So, tomorrow there'll be work to do over, in all probability. The point remains to do it, and do it, and keep doing it irrespective of the voice that says it's pointless and the allure of the chocolate aisle and the pasta mountain and the urge to simply crawl into a big fat Buddha-ball and eat the uncertainty away.


Strong urge, that.

Strong, strong urge...

Sigh...

To the Fat-Bike, Fatman...