Movin' And Shakin'

Barely made it outside the door of the flat today, except to go and collect my boiled rice and fried onions - I swear, for all thirteen years of being married to a foodie has done for me, a couple of days on my own and I'm reverting to pigging monasticism. Don't have that much hair to shave off, and the saffron might clash with my complexion, but hey, robes are good and flowing for those of us of the more enormous persuasion, and the only difference between ranting and chanting is the intensity, so who knows? Might be an option. Bowl of crispy rice in the morning and bowl of boiled rice at night, sorted.

It's all about the carb, of course. In the words of Garfield the cartoon cat, I never met a carbohydrate I didn't like.

Anyhow - barely made it outside the door today because there was Stuff To Do. Shifting of chunks of furniture, opening and emptying and crunching of boxes and suchlike. Made, in real terms, barely a dent, still can't get to our bed, the kitchen's filling up nicely with stuff to be found a place by d, and there's more to come tomorrow. Which is why this is a short and, if not sweet, than at least carb-heavy entry. There's more to do almost immediately I'm done.

One thing I got done today though was the shifting of one half of the fridge magnet collection.

Don't laugh, it's a reasonably big job. And it actually makes something of a difference to where some pieces of furniture can go, so I'm counting it as a reason to feel like progress has been made, along with the boxes removed from the pile and crushed and shoved out for recycling, which from what we can see, nobody else bothers with in the block. So...yeah - lowish exercise day, but I'll tell you a thing. I'm getting twinges. Not old-man back twinges of hamstrings or any of that, but if I move something, it actually feels like the muscles between my ribs on one side or the other - but never both - go into  frigging spasm. Which was interesting at about two o'clock this morning, when, having decided I had the gumption for a late surge, more or less spurred on by Bruce Dickinson and Bryan Ferry (separately, obviously, not together. Cos that would be weird. Interesting, but weird), I shifted a couple of bookcases round and found myself breathing weird till my ribcage straightened up and flew right.

So, not so much a Disappearing day - buggerall aerobic exercise, perhaps the tiniest bit of moving-man-style weight training. But also not by any means a carnival of excess. Sometimes, you've got to take the little victories and let them be enough to get you to the next day, and the next. Today, I emptied boxes, shifted furniture and yes goddammit, I rearranged half the magnet collection.

Tomorrow...more comes through the door...

Disappearing Tip #1 - Some days are diamonds. Some days, getting out of bed is a victory. Accept and embrace them both.

Disappearing Tip #2 - You can never have enough fridge magnets. At least while you still have a fridge.

Buried

Woke up this morning, as the blues singers sing, entirely free of the godawful bug of yesterday. More or less expected very little on the exercise front though, because today was 'Transport A Second Vanload Of Life To The Seaside' Day - incuding my book, CD and DVD collections, in more boxes than can comfortably be conceived.

The point is that the morning was mostly taken up in a panic of shifting stuff around so the new stuff coming in would sort of, vaguely, if you squint a bit, fit. And much of the afternoon was spent feeling not even slightly guilty watching the movers schlepp half a life up a flight of stairs.

By the time the mover, who also delivered The First Vanload to us, was done, he shook me by the hand and said 'I hope we never meet again.' It was a sentiment with which I could heartily concur - and indeed, we probably won't - Vanload Three arrives Friday, in someone else's van.

By the time they left, I also couldn't find my exercise bike. I mean, I knew roughly where it was, but there were boxes obscuring it no matter whichever angle you looked from. It was like the bike was practising the art of Box-Chaos Camo.

I'm perfectly aware, of course, that there would have been calories for the burning in the uncovering of the bike, but to badly misquote Jerome K Jerome, you'd be surprised how tiring it can be watching others work.

I buggered off for a walk instead, to the accompaniment of UNIT Encounters from Big Finish in my lugholes. I know, I know - there's a certain type of person who's now screaming at me that surely part of the point of going for a walk along a coastal path where the sea crashes up almost to meet you like a young labrador is to experience the sounds of the sea. And...well...yes, I suppose that's true, if you actually hear the sounds of the sea, and not the sounds of your own brain having 16,000 concurrent conversations and ideas the second you stop distracting it with Any Damn Thing Else. For now, me and UNIT, thank you very much.

Walked to Wiseman's Bridge and back, and it wasn't till I was coming back through the last tunnel into Saundersfoot town that I realised there was probably a reason I felt like I'd been hit with bricks. I'd had a bowl of cereal for breakfast, and then hadn't gotten lunch, more or less because I couldn't get to anything to make for lunch, and the movers were trooping in and out and up and down during the traditional lunching hours.

Due to a sliiiight oversight in which the movers had piles boxes up against the fridge in which we keep the milk, and the fair certainty that I didn't have it in me to hack my way through the undergrowth of boxes to liberate the cowjuice, I popped into Tesco. Came out with staples that could see me sorted for a day or two of box-wrangling - more oatmeal, milk, a tin of tomato soup, a loaf of bread, that kind of thing. Then I went to a local Chinese takeaway, and brought home some plain boiled rice and some fried onions.

Now - yes, technically, fried is off the list of acceptable stuff for me. But this is where my 'perspex boxes' get weird. They stretch, they change, irrespective of verifiable reality. For instance, I won't eat yoghurt at the moment, because in the wiring of my brain, that's a dessert, even if it's not eaten after a meal, and the way my brain works, once I've had one dessert, I could have another - and, while I know this is absurd and a slave to logic, I wouldn't discriminate between healthy yoghurt and a triple choc nut fudge sundae. Similarly, they may claim to be fried onions, but to me, they're 'just frigging onions for god's sake, how bad could they be?' - so my brain doesn't register them as being fried in the forbidden sense. Onion rings, yes. Fried onions, no.

Did I mention the perspex boxes are weird?

Ate my Chinese mini-feast at the newly-arrived table, and have more or less faffed about for the evening, just about getting this out to the world ahead of midnight. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow...Tomorrow, there will be progress - if only because the next lot of movers arrive Friday...

Disappearing Tip #1 - Make space for the individuality of the way your brain works. Going against the grain of that will always feel wrong. 

Disappearing Tip #2 - Always rescue the milk before the moving men arrive.

Going Buggy

Today has been taken up by a strange combination of circumstances.

Last night - as if sensing the exorcism of bad habits - my body was distinctly unimpressed by me. Nausea, queasiness at the thought of food, all that joy. We went to bed and slept more or less badly, as d was jumping in a cab for 7ish this morning, to head back to Merthyr and organise the second vanload of our possessions to come to our new place, which happens tomorrow. That meant we were up at Neanderthal o'clock, with me grunting potentially unfortunate sentences like 'You want me come?' and d rushing around to give bits of dishware an unnecessary wash before buggering off on what is a surprisingly long journey by public transport.

I had been intending, with the optimism of the newly-begun, to gert up at the same time as her and take my morning walk to Wiseman's Bridge and back. That simply didn't happen, because of course, as I may have mentioned yesterday, it's November, which means it's pretty damn dark at 7-some-odd in the morning, and there are a couple of ankle-wobbling obstacles en route from here to there, none of which would be improved in the slightest by doing it at that damn fool time of day. I retired back to bed with the audiobook of Genesis of the Daleks - because what could be more relaxing than screaming Nazis in tin cans, right?

Woke up twice more but the time that stuck, it was 9.44. And I felt ghastly. Still nauseated, still queasy, with rubber legs, a pounding head and absolutely no energy for anything. One thing I did though was to get my first official weigh-in done.

Our start weight is 20 stone 2lbs - 282 pounds, or 128 kg.
So I'm roughly, give or take a pound here or there, twice the man I ought to be.  Hence the need to Disappear.

Now, without getting unduly indelicate, not half an hour after the weigh-in, my digestive system went into full revolt, and I've not moved from the flat more than a couple of times throughout the rest of the day - each time I tried, I got nauseated, rubber-legged and woozy. The idea of doing my daily walk went by the board early on, as the day turned from bright and blue to bitter and fraught with rain and hail. I went out at lunchtime to a local cafe, to try a bowl of soup. Three spoonfuls, that was as far as I got. The idea of doing some biking more or less made me go to sleep, because it exhausted me even to think about. I went out later in the evening to try and find something to tempt myself with, but the idea of eating any damn thing just made me want to hurl. Eventually, aware that something needed to get into my system, I mixed up two sachets of instant oatmeal, milked it, nuked it and managed to keep it down.

Perversely, round about now, at 11 at night, I feel more or less human for the first time today. The oatmeal is sitting relatively happy in my system, but I'm completely knackered and washed-out from what I'm assuming was one of those annoying 24-hour bugs. So, more or less a write-off day after such optimistic beginnings yesterday. But on the upside, very little has been put into my system to counterbalance the utter lethargy of the day. So, let's think of it as a passing-grade day, and move right along.

Tomorrow, I can't afford to be lying about all day - the vanload of stuff arrives around 9ish, after which moving round our flat will be nigh on impossible, so there'll be work to do of the 'lumping and shifting' variety, as well as - at least potentially - walking and biking to do.

Disappearing Tip #1 - There will be days when you can do nothing. Do not bug out about them, just resolve to get back on track as soon as possible.

DIsappearing Tip #2 - Never underestimate the power of oatmeal.

Winky

So – hoorah. Started pre-Disappearing today. For the uninitiated, pre-Disappearing is what happens before the first official weigh-in, which given that d made a mercy dash to a local hardware store this afternoon, will now be tomorrow. Pre-Disappearing is nothing terribly special, it’s just not doing the things I used to do, and doing some new things instead. 

Was going to be up in time to growl at larks on the wing and flick snails off the thorn and all that, but…what can I tell you, I live at the seaside now, and that seems to bring a lethargy with it that allows larks and snails to race about the place unimpeded. To be fair, I was up at 6…something-or-other to enjoy that delightful middle-aged need to pee in the night, but it was still pitch black outside at that time, because  it’s November and the sun’s having none of it either. So, I turned over, listened to an episode of Survivors (a bleak audio drama about the world after a pandemic plague wipes out more than 90 per cent of us – check it out, it’s from bigfinish.com, and it’s excellent), and then, when d woke up, all smiles and bounciness and greeting the day, I felt the need to humph, turn over and snore. Cos I’m just Mr Personality like that.

So – got a post-lark-and-snail start on the day, but, determined to make it at least a Disappearing start, got dressed and naffed officially off on the first walk of the week. Nothing dramatic, nothing overly taxing, just a slowish walk from Saundersfoot to Wiseman’s Bridge and back, but my phone (Oracle of All Things as it is), tells me that amounts to 7691 steps, 5.89 km (with a twiddly uphill bit at the end), and a somewhat cracking 543 calories burned – which given that it felt like more or less tokenism, I’m happy to take before breakfast. It only rained torrentially down on me twice during the walk too, so that was a result, and something else happened along the way.  

You know how, if you’ve been desperate to pee, and worried about making it home in time, you reach your bathroom, finally, blessedly, and it’s like all the pressing concerns of the world condense into one thought – that you’ve made it, and you’re alright – and as you pee, you smile because something that was in doubt has been safely achieved, and for those moments, you don’t care about anything else in the world?

It was like that, only less urinocentric. On the way back from Wiseman’s Bridge, I felt the sudden need to look out to sea, and did, and it was like crossing the point of no return, only for a different kind of relief. I breathed deeply in, and slowly out, and the stress of the last year, of trying to sell our flat, and having buyer after buyer frustrate us, of being made redundant right at the point when we were hoping to start looking at mortgages, of the last undotted i’s and the last uncrossed t’s that meant further and further delay as the money ran out and we were flung upon the kindness not of strangers but of friends and family, all shuddered out of me on that out-breath, and the smile that grew on my face probably disturbed the ever-living fuck out of an elderly couple coming the other way with the perverse determination to walk a Dachshund.

So, in stress, if not in actual blubber, I feel lighter today.

Then, of course, the deep fat fryer arrived, like the Fuck-You of the Gods.

I’m joking, really – I knew it was coming. d has phases of learning and re-practice where she feels the call of the culinary deities upon her shoulders, which is why, for instance, she makes kickass bread, and fudge and the like. When the money from the flat came through, her single indulgence was to get a deep fat fryer. It’s not that she’s about to set herself up in competition with the many exquisite fish fry restaurants in the area – honest. It’s more that there are things called cannolis, and these other things called doughnuts, and so there’s a need for deep domestic fat.

Not, now, of course, for me, but in general these things are needed, and so now, we have one. I’m calling it Winky…or possibly, for reasons no-one will understand, P’diddle, at least until its presence becomes a giant mocking outrage in my grease-starved life, which is at least a little down the line. And at which point, I’ll probably start calling it ‘Pieces of Winky.’

Popped into the local Tesco Express on the way home, and the attitude adjustment hit me. ‘Ooh, chocolate biscuits,’ I thought. ‘Fuck that, fool, the chocolate bars are right here,’ said a different, rather more Mr T part of my brain. Then in floated the Inner Hippy. ‘We don’t do that any more,’ he said, in precisely the tone of voice most likely to get the shit kicked out of him. The thing is of course, in my recently post-stress relief, he was easy to listen to. Things will by no means always be that way, but today at least, in what I like to think of as the real battle of Man Versus Food…Man won.

Man came home with a box of Weetabix in fact, for easier, more measurable breakfast cerealing than Rice Krispies allow. To show willing though, I downsized the size of my Krispie bowl this morning. And didn’t add a base layer of cookies. And didn’t ‘mount’ the bowl with double cream and sugar, so as to get that ‘Executive Rice Krispy Treat’ coagulation going on.

No – really. That’s been my breakfast, and occasionally lunch, for weeks now. You want lessons on force feeding, come to Papa.

Lunch was going to be beans on toast, but as it happened, d grew increasingly busy with an editing client on the phone, and lunch became dinner prep. I’ve just eaten two home-made cheeseburgers – as in patties made from scratch, grated cheese, bought buns, along with two small but gorgeous potato cakes, which were technically shallow fried, and so which, gorgeous as they were, I won’t be having again for a while. And some beans, left over from the beans on toast idea.

And that’s me done. When I finish and post this – broadband is still non-existent here in our new place, and the wifi’s ropy at best – I’m going to jump on the exercise bike and pedal for at least half an hour, so as to begin reintroducing my body and my brain to the idea that this is a thing it does now. That’s the game for now, I think – reconditioning. No chocolate biscuits, but a short walk and a short biking session each day, so the brain and the body start to build new patterns of expectation.

Thankfully, as I say, entirely due to a mercy dash from d, there will be the first weigh-in tomorrow morning, which is when the Disappearing starts in earnest.

The deep fat fryer may be winking at me, but tonight at least, I have a date with a bike.

Disappearing Tip #1: Retrain your brain.

Disappearing Tip #2: Yes, this will suck.

Disappearing Tip #3: It’s supposed to suck. Get through it, and eventually, it will feel like normality. This is a good thing. Honest.

The Seaside Years

Err...hello?

Is this thing on?

This is The Disappearing Man, a blog about one fat bloke's efforts not to die quite as soon as he's currently scheduled to do, through the application of sheer bloody-minded stubborn-bastardy.

This blog's been in existence now for about seven or eight years. When it started, I was living in London, and was 20 stone 7.25 lbs, or 287.25 lbs for my American friends, or...oh hold on, talk among yourselves, I haven't quite got enough fingers for this bit...just over 130 kg, the web informs me.

That was heavy. My doctor had decided it was heavy enough to recommend me for bariatric surgery. And that was a genuine option for me. I faced a long dark tea-time of the stubborn bastard, and decided I couldn't personally go for the surgery until I'd tried my own implacable determination against the training I'd had in being a fat bastard and killing myself, mouthful by mouthful.

I did it for a little over a year, and lost six stone, or 84 lbs, or 38 kg. Along the way there was much fun, much ranting and sweating and hatred of the human race, and a progression from being the bloke who struggled to put on his own socks to a marathon-walking, spin-classing, gym-understanding bloke who confidently swore he'd never go back to the way he was before.

The thing is...my brain, as I'm coming to realise more and more as the years go by, works a little differently to many people's. Intellectually, I'm all about doubt and grey areas and live and let live - I'm among the hippiest of hippies in many ways. But in terms of my own existence, I seem to live a binary, inflexible life - one thing or the other.

The way I got to be over 20 stone was by allowing myself total, childlike freedom. If I wanted something, I had it, and devil take the consequences. I was at one and the same time entirely content with this approach and deeply self-loathing - I was Schodinger's Fat Fuck.

The way I Disappeared the first time was to radically and rapidly change the nature of my behaviour - to switch from total liberty to almost-total self-denial. I made a decision, and instantly, overnight, cut out fried foods, chocolate, desserts, fizzy drinks and overt sugar, while changing my approach to portion size, protein and even the dreaded salad vegetables (which I maintain to this day are more or less nature's garnish and should not be taken at all seriously as a food group). I began walking - first short distances, then longer, and longer. I invested in an exercise bike heavy enough to take my ass (not as easy a thing as you might think to find), and I began to pedal that ass viciously off, plugging in my iPod to keep me up to pace and avoid the running stream of obscenities in my brain. I started drinking water for the first time in my life, replacing all my seductive fizzies with clear boredomjuice.

And the way that worked was what I think of as my 'perspex boxes.' I have to live in a world where other people are able to eat and drink what they like, and not want to pound their skulls in - I'm married to a foodie with a baking fetish and mad skills, it simply can't be an option to ban all the good things in life from my world. That means I erected these 'perspex boxes' all around me. I was in the box, and all the tempting, delicious stuff was outside - visible but unreachable as far as my brain was concerned.

As I say, it's not for everyone, but it worked for me. During the course of that year I moved, with d, my wife, from London back to my childhood home,  the Welsh Valleys town of Merthyr Tydfil. And it was there that, one night, d asked me whether I could, after that successful year, experiment with re-introducing treat-foods into my diet. It began with a battered cod and chips.

And the boxes were broken. The digital, black-and-white world in which I live couldn't sustain just one treat, in the way an alcoholic's world can't really sustain just one drink.

Over the next handful of years, I tried time and time again to resurrect my boxes, and failed. And the weight came back as more and more I ate and drank precisely what I wanted. Precisely what I wanted, of course, wass mostly carb, and fried things, and sugar, and chocolate. Because Dopamine, right?

We don't live in Merthyr any more. In the last two months, we've finally achieved a long-held dream and moved to the Welsh coast, to the Anti-London that is Saundersfoot. The last year has been insanely stressful for us both, as we've been trying to sell our Merthyr flat, while both being made redundant.

This week, the flat finally sold. Money transferred. Debts were paid off.
The new chapter of our lives, this seaside chapter that hopefully sees us through to the end, began this week. And I'd made a pledge that after a year of extra-special stress-eating (something to which I've never knowingly been prone before - I always copped to eating for the sake of gluttony, or just because I wanted the tasty stuff), when the flat sold, and the stress lifted, I would get the hell back to my Disappearing.

The blog's part of the process, it seems - that sensation of reporting to someone on the ups, the downs, the issues of Fat Fuckery and Stubborn Gittishness, and which will win in a clash of those titans. It's like having an electronic Father Confessor, an audience, a bunch of eyes I have to meet if I go wrong. So here we are again, preparing to erect the perspex boxes. Preparing to bike, and walk, and ignore the fact that I now live in one of the many HOMES of battered cod and chips, with tea shops, cake shops and chip shops everywhere I look.

The rule is that I AIM to lose the medically-safe amount each week - 2lb. There'll be regular weekly weigh-ins on a Tuesday morning (slightly hampered at launch by the fact that a great deal of our stuff is still in Merthyr - including my scales), by which progress and setbacks will both be recorded. Suffice it to say that I firmly believe I'm now heavier than I was when I began my first Disappearance, but the official launch weight will be whatever the scales first records when it gets here. That means the goal will be to lose 104 lbs in the first year - 2lbs per week, on average, over 52 weeks.

That's goal 1: Lose nearly 7.5 stone in 52 weeks. I have no expectation of actually achieving that of course, but having the goal is useful as an aspirational stick with which to beat myself. If and when I DO achieve the 7.5 stone loss marker, I'll still have around 2.5 stone to go to be at my medically advised weight, being a shortarse at just 5ft 6. But one goal at a time, eh?

As is the way with most people about to embark on a diet, we've just more or less finished all the 'bad' food in the house. While writing this, I ate the last slice of d's homemade Thanksgiving apple pie, and a chunk of Christmas pudding. It's in me now, and it's done. This part of my life is done.

Perspex boxes - up.

Come along for the ride if you like. Welcome to The Disappearing Man: The Seaside Years.