Last week I wrote this blog three days after my weigh-in, and, in that kind of maudlin, silent signalling of self-inflicted martrydom that I vaguely believe I learned from my bio-dad (He had a knack with a muscial choice, did my bio-dad, throwing down the late Elvis tracks like Suspicious Minds and My Boy, and singing his heart out to affect the mood of the room, while claiming he'd just fancied the sound of them), but which I can justly claim to have refind into a rather more fully sickening brow-clutching 'Woe is me! No, really, I'm fine' double standard, I reported that, in the wake of having dropped two pounds in a day and then maintained that level for a week, I would probably celebrate by injecting chocolate into my eyeballs or somesuch.
The point of which of course is that I wrote it on Friday, not Tuesday. So by Friday, I already knew what the intervening three days had looked like - sedentary, and while not exactly crammed from end to end with intra-venous chocolate, certainly not by any stretch as seriously dedicated to healthy eating as I should have been. So I prepped you for disaster by that throwaway line of what would 'probably' happen.
This, by the way, is the kind of hamster-wheel that circles all. The. Time in my brain. Reality, perception, work, non-work, how to justify and find the appropriate answers, the appropriate pose. Now, imagine that kind of acidic over-analysis applying to every single thing. Every single choice, every single action, where to stand, how to be, what to say and not-say-now, what to do and why not to do it till it's almost too late, and how, above all, to wage war. war on myself, war between the selves that want to succeed and want to fail, want to do what they set out to do and want to coolly revel in the epicness of failure. The war between the urge to triumph and the urge to self-destroy, and round, and round, and round, and round it goes, never stopping, never pausing, never ever shutting up - just in case you were wondering why I wear headphones 80% of the time, it's to block out this ungovernable nonsense in my brain.
I tried explaining this to a doctor once - he gave me more diet pills.
And yes, of course, incidentally, I know that this particular entry sounds like I just did an 8-ball of coke and have nowhere to go. Partially, that's because that's what it sounds like inside my head all the time, partially, it's because it's vaguely cathartic to get this out of my fingertips for a moment, and partially of course it's because some level of hamster-wheeling said 'Let them know - THAT'll be fun!'
All of which is by way of explaining that last week's entry was written with insider knowledge that I'd probably go up this week.
Then there was a Walk.
A walk I agreed to when there seemed fewer clouds in the sky and less work to do and fewer encroaching deadlines, and a walk which, when I woke up an hour before it was due to start, I gave a hearty 'Oh fuck!' about because by then I really didn't want to do it, because it was a 'led' walk, with Other Human Beings, which if you've been here a while you'll know I applaud in the abstract but detest in the reality. Nevertheless, the hamster-wheel turned, and the idea of having to explain I'd booked a place on the walk and then had been too put off by the proximity of humans to actually go through with it gave me a result of at the very least looking like I was having some kind of real problem with the outside world and its humans, and so, to disprove the appearance of that, irrespective of the reality of that, I should get my arse out the door and go.
So I went.
The walk itself was fine. The having to be sociable sucked - I'm not entirely sure why. They were nice people, good people, each with their own interesting backstory, but something deep in my heart resented the fact that I was obliged to be sociable with them, to ask them questions to which I could give not the most shrivelled of figs for the answers, to try and make them smile and laugh and, frankly, fail - tough crowd, your average ramblers, it appears - and JEEESUS, I swear I'm not on coke right know, but if you're reading this with spaces between the words it's only because my fingers are more courteous than my brain and they're cutting you a break. Anyyyyhow, did the walk. Longish walk, over 10,000 steps, many of them uphill, came home, collapsed, whinged in muscle-ache for the next day and a half, did nothing.
Weighed in this morning.
17 stone 4.
Might not sound like much to you, this half-pound of progress, but really, honestly, I will take it and kiss it and stroke it, and I shall call it George, because the onnnnly goddamn thing that can have got me there is yomping through the local nature with a bunch of people I'd much rather have shut out behind the safety of some earbuds. So - yay to them.
I know, right - this didn't go quite where you were thinking it would go, probably, because of all the high-octane fatalism at the front end, you probably expected a result of grandiose failure - hell, I kind of did. Again, thank the fingertips, they're far more often where the actual processing power of my brain is located - the majority of my ACTUAL brain is locked into spirals of hamster-wheeling about every decision from 'Tea or coffee?' to 'What do we need to do with the day?' to actually get anything constructive done, which is why a) the processing power's in the fingertips, and b) that's a good thing.
I think perhaps the thing is that this blog's been written not on cocaine, nor even on the grandly self-castigating melodrama of 'Oh woe is me, I've put on weight!' I have just checked my bank balance though, which rather spurred the self-revolving lemming in my brain to a series of monotonous 'Oh fuck''s, and it's probably that that started me off in such an insane spirit in this blog. Even as I write this, I can feel the panic levels falling, dropping, the boiling hot fear of crashing myself into the ever-loving ground eeeeeasing, even though nothing whatsoever has actually changed in that reality since I started writing the blog. Don't get me wrong, the hamster-wheel absolutely does revolve in the way I've detailed, all the time, without end (though crucially, gazing at the sea sometimes helps), but I can feel myself coming down from the abject, world-punching panic and fear of peering down the gunbarrel of financial oblivion, as the hamster-wheel revolves. Send the emails one needs to send. Get the money in the door. Pay the bills one has to pay, Revolve, revolve, revolve...
If this is now just sounding like splurge on a page, there's one important piece of connective tissue. Saw the weigh-in this morning, was all kinds of 'Cool - I'll take that this week. Saw the bank account, went 'Bang!' and started revolving at coke-speed. First thing I did? Went to Tesco, grabbed a sleeve of chocolate biscuits.
That's not even comfort eating, that's panic-eating. I didn't even particularly want them, I'm not, today, especially motivated by the sweetness and the chocolatey fantasticness of things. But get this - in response to a moment of stone cold panic, I spent money I do not have, on food that's practically guaranteed to elevate my blood sugars and is likely to be stored, in the absence of exercise, as fat. I paid...to self-harm.
I had four, as the basis of a bowl of cereal. Breakfast of self-defeating windbags, right there.
Now of course, I've come clean about them to you here, which means I'm not going to eat any more of them. But ultimately, the point is that the way my wind works is a constant wheel of questions, choices, judgements and random moments of panic.
And the immediate, unthinking response to a moment of panic was to grab the chocolate biscuits.
Did I mention that I ttried to explain this to a doctor once? Yyyyeah - diet pills.
While I know that the fundamental equation of weightloss is straightforward - take in less of the 'bad' stuff, do more of the good stuff that burns up the bad stuff, hoorah, all is well in the land of Oz - it is possibly worth acknowledging that what you're dealing with in many people's cases is not the calm, sunny-weathered mental landscape that can simply follow this equation to Positivityville. More often, you're throwing the equation (and the pills) into a cyclotron full of forks and expecting it to survive and make sense, even when the cyclotron panics.
My cyclotron panicked this morning. Fortunately, of course, it panicked after the weigh-in. Here's to not panic-eating evvvvvverything in the district before we do this again.
Showing posts with label madness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label madness. Show all posts
Tuesday, 14 May 2019
Tuesday, 19 February 2019
The Surprise Benificence
Ha. Well, OK.
Wasn't expecting that.
Have done precisely buggerall to deserve that.
Down today to 17st 8.25.
There's no really plausible explanation for that, as I seem to be building a hibernation nest around myself. Sometimes, I guess, the universe just likes a tosser. Not often. Certainly not often enough to depend on. But occasionally, it throws you a bone and allows you to throw victorious V-signs at the Nazi Scales. Honestly, as weeks go, this has been another stupid one, with occasional bits of sense flung into the abyss of fried breakfasts and Valentine's Day gorgeousness and suchlike.
Blood's been haywire this week - the morning after Valentine's Day it was up to 16.0 - which is basically two people's ideal blood sugar, coursing around one system. #BadTony
But otherwise, if this blog isn't to deteriorate again into just a series of posts of what I should do, what I intend to do, and what I didn't do again because Reasons, there's not an enormous amount to report from this week. Stayed indoors a great deal, edited a great deal, ate a faaaairly great deal. So no - no real idea how I'm even down at all on last week.
Thanks, Universe!
I supppose the motivating point from all this is similar to what it was last week. If I WERE to get my shit together, knuckle down, eat more sensibly and maybe, just maybe, move my ass a little this week, I technically could break a barrier - could go beneath 17st 7, into the lower half of the 17s, which would feel like disproportionate success, and would also, not for nothing, deal with the blood issues.
Yeah - that's motivating as all get-out, and I knew that this morning after I got off the Nazi Scales. Which didn't, somehow, stop me having chips for lunch.
Yes, absolutely, sometimes I need beating upside the head.
Onward though - with a little wink from the universe - hopefully to a more sensible week and even better, less fluke-based and therefore more rational results next week.
Wasn't expecting that.
Have done precisely buggerall to deserve that.
Down today to 17st 8.25.
There's no really plausible explanation for that, as I seem to be building a hibernation nest around myself. Sometimes, I guess, the universe just likes a tosser. Not often. Certainly not often enough to depend on. But occasionally, it throws you a bone and allows you to throw victorious V-signs at the Nazi Scales. Honestly, as weeks go, this has been another stupid one, with occasional bits of sense flung into the abyss of fried breakfasts and Valentine's Day gorgeousness and suchlike.
Blood's been haywire this week - the morning after Valentine's Day it was up to 16.0 - which is basically two people's ideal blood sugar, coursing around one system. #BadTony
But otherwise, if this blog isn't to deteriorate again into just a series of posts of what I should do, what I intend to do, and what I didn't do again because Reasons, there's not an enormous amount to report from this week. Stayed indoors a great deal, edited a great deal, ate a faaaairly great deal. So no - no real idea how I'm even down at all on last week.
Thanks, Universe!
I supppose the motivating point from all this is similar to what it was last week. If I WERE to get my shit together, knuckle down, eat more sensibly and maybe, just maybe, move my ass a little this week, I technically could break a barrier - could go beneath 17st 7, into the lower half of the 17s, which would feel like disproportionate success, and would also, not for nothing, deal with the blood issues.
Yeah - that's motivating as all get-out, and I knew that this morning after I got off the Nazi Scales. Which didn't, somehow, stop me having chips for lunch.
Yes, absolutely, sometimes I need beating upside the head.
Onward though - with a little wink from the universe - hopefully to a more sensible week and even better, less fluke-based and therefore more rational results next week.
Tuesday, 18 December 2018
The Deadlined Decembrist
Brr.
Double brr and buggery.
Firstly, it's been freezing, and positively pissing down much of this week, which has a natural tendency to make me curl up into a ball, pull a duvet over my head and hang a sign round my neck saying 'Fuck You Till Spring.'
Secondly, I've been on a tight deadline all week, which is now at the stage in a Bond movie where the villain pushes the hero's face closer and close to a bandsaw and Connery (let's face it, it's always Connery in metaphors, whoever your own personal Bond may be) grimaces and tries to summon some Scottish grit so he can donkey kick the villain in the balls and break free. That's meant that, even had the weather been lovely, I wouldn't have had time to take its kindness personally and go walking. This has been a week where staying indoors and eating and drinking hot things has been Plan A for several, extremely rational, reasons.
Which is why this morning, I weigh in at 17st 10.25.
Static. Hey, it's the deal, right? You move, the weight moves. You stay still, at your very luckiest, the weight stays still.
So that means it won't be till at least the last week of January that I see a 16 on the face of the Nazi Scales. Joy.
What's less, but still concerning, is that I've had blood sugars in the 7s and 8s all week, except today, when clearly, my personification of the universe is out to kick me, and I baaaarely scraped acceptability with a 9.9.
The obvious result of course is that when things don't go your way for the first time in a Disappearance (and probably at several more such points on the way down), your immediate impulsive reaction (or mine, anyway - it may be an only-child thing for all I know), is to sulk and pout and whine and storm off to the store for the biggest bar of chocolate you can find. It's Christmas, you can find some really huge bars of chocolate right now. There's a bar of Galaxy in our local Tesco Express that's only about a head shorter than I am. I know. I just checked, in a fume. it's a popsitively toddler reaction of throwing your toys out of the pram - 'Well, if being good isn't going to bring me results, I might just as well be bad, so there!'
Ride this idiocy out, or you'll fall, right there and then.
Perversely - and get a lot of the titanium testicles on THIS guy - my house is currently full of home-made fudge. After Eight Fudge. Bounty-studded Fudge. Fudge made by the fair hand of my wife, who has on occasion this week offered me 'just a smidge, to test.' But no. I eschew the Fudge of love ('...and STILL you don't lose!' roars my toddler-brain) - were I to go on a rampage, frankly, you wouldn't hear about it till afterwards, when I was penitent and ready to confess, and I wouldn't got o town on d's homemade fudge. I'd go to Tesco and get an enormo-bag of M and Ms and eat them without tasting them, in secret, for the sheer visceral pleasure of self-defeat - did anyone miss the fact that in my case, this weight shit is frequently compulsive, and secret, and self-harming? Fairly sure I covered that, but might not have been for years...
But no. Bought myself a small bottle of apple juice (Because ooh, the pleasure) and a new box of breakfast cereal, came home, spat these words into the computer, and am going back to the bandaw in a moment). This week, I'm clearly not the Disappearing Man. This week, I'm the Staying-At-Home-In-The-Warm-And-Moving-Nowhere Man.
It happens. I know it happens. It's how you deal with it happening that's the key.
Onward, and downward, we go.
Bastard...
Double brr and buggery.
Firstly, it's been freezing, and positively pissing down much of this week, which has a natural tendency to make me curl up into a ball, pull a duvet over my head and hang a sign round my neck saying 'Fuck You Till Spring.'
Secondly, I've been on a tight deadline all week, which is now at the stage in a Bond movie where the villain pushes the hero's face closer and close to a bandsaw and Connery (let's face it, it's always Connery in metaphors, whoever your own personal Bond may be) grimaces and tries to summon some Scottish grit so he can donkey kick the villain in the balls and break free. That's meant that, even had the weather been lovely, I wouldn't have had time to take its kindness personally and go walking. This has been a week where staying indoors and eating and drinking hot things has been Plan A for several, extremely rational, reasons.
Which is why this morning, I weigh in at 17st 10.25.
Static. Hey, it's the deal, right? You move, the weight moves. You stay still, at your very luckiest, the weight stays still.
So that means it won't be till at least the last week of January that I see a 16 on the face of the Nazi Scales. Joy.
What's less, but still concerning, is that I've had blood sugars in the 7s and 8s all week, except today, when clearly, my personification of the universe is out to kick me, and I baaaarely scraped acceptability with a 9.9.
The obvious result of course is that when things don't go your way for the first time in a Disappearance (and probably at several more such points on the way down), your immediate impulsive reaction (or mine, anyway - it may be an only-child thing for all I know), is to sulk and pout and whine and storm off to the store for the biggest bar of chocolate you can find. It's Christmas, you can find some really huge bars of chocolate right now. There's a bar of Galaxy in our local Tesco Express that's only about a head shorter than I am. I know. I just checked, in a fume. it's a popsitively toddler reaction of throwing your toys out of the pram - 'Well, if being good isn't going to bring me results, I might just as well be bad, so there!'
Ride this idiocy out, or you'll fall, right there and then.
Perversely - and get a lot of the titanium testicles on THIS guy - my house is currently full of home-made fudge. After Eight Fudge. Bounty-studded Fudge. Fudge made by the fair hand of my wife, who has on occasion this week offered me 'just a smidge, to test.' But no. I eschew the Fudge of love ('...and STILL you don't lose!' roars my toddler-brain) - were I to go on a rampage, frankly, you wouldn't hear about it till afterwards, when I was penitent and ready to confess, and I wouldn't got o town on d's homemade fudge. I'd go to Tesco and get an enormo-bag of M and Ms and eat them without tasting them, in secret, for the sheer visceral pleasure of self-defeat - did anyone miss the fact that in my case, this weight shit is frequently compulsive, and secret, and self-harming? Fairly sure I covered that, but might not have been for years...
But no. Bought myself a small bottle of apple juice (Because ooh, the pleasure) and a new box of breakfast cereal, came home, spat these words into the computer, and am going back to the bandaw in a moment). This week, I'm clearly not the Disappearing Man. This week, I'm the Staying-At-Home-In-The-Warm-And-Moving-Nowhere Man.
It happens. I know it happens. It's how you deal with it happening that's the key.
Onward, and downward, we go.
Bastard...
Tuesday, 22 May 2018
The Bloody Truth
Hello again. Three weeks or so since I blogged last. Reasons for that are many and silly, but mostly bound up in a) weight gain, and b) arsery. Arsery which has seen me notsomuch fall off the wagon as leap off and burn the fucker to the ground.
Here's the thing though - that ends right now.
First thing's first, it's Tuesday. Ermmmm, last I recorded, I think I'd gone back up to 19 stone dead, or 266 pounds, which was irritating.
Following week I went up to 19 stone 1 pound.
Week after that, up again to 19 stone 2.25.
Clearly, there's drift going on, but given that I've done bog-all exercise and have been slugging and slothing my way through life for the past three weeks, it was going up alllllmost as slowly as it was previously coming off. But not quite, obviously.
Today, weighed in at 19 stone 2.25. Static from last week. Right now, I'll take that.
Now. Have been, as anyone who reads this will possibly remember, getting set up with the doctors in this area. Did the usual HBA1C blood test for long term blood sugars a few weeks ago. No sooner had I done it than they sent me a letter to say 'Balls. Need you to come and do that again.'
The image of course went through my mind of the diagnostic machinery going into overdrive, lights flashing, warning messages flashing, and then the whole kit and caboodle exploding in a puff of smoke when trying to process my blood. So I went and had it done again. Alllmost immediately the letter came back to say 'Yyyyeah, we can't afford to lose another machine. You need to get your ass in to see us, cos this shit ain't clever.'
Went today.
To explain the HBA1C, they like you to have a reading of under 50. I've previously managed under 50, but over the last few years, I've had a tendency, as the weight's crept back onto my bones, to hover in the low to mid-50s. Turns out last October, when we moved here, I had quite a bad result of 76.
Latest scoors on the doors? 117. One hundred. And then another 17. So, over twice what it should be.
#BadTony.
Badder Tony than the slow-ass drift of a pound a week here and there ever lets you know.
The nurse gave me a simple finger-pricking blood sugar test today. Again, in the UK, you're looking for numbers between about 6-8. Yyyyeah - 22.8. So - roughly three times what it should be.
'How are you not walking around with a huge dose of thrush?' she asked.
'Erm...should I be?'
'I'm surprised you're not, yeah,' she said, a touch too breezily for my liking.
'Oh, well, I won't panic when that happens then,' I muttered.
'I'm surprised your skin's not dreaful too,' she added.
'Oh it is, it's more or less turning to ash in the sun.'
'Aha!'
'We're happy about that, are we?'
'Visible symptoms,' she explained. 'Thing is, while your blood sugar's shot through the roof, your body's adapted to it quite well by the looks of things.'
'Thank you,' I said.
'But what we can't see is the untold damage it's doing to your systems inside,' she added.
'Oh.'
'First thing I'd be worried about is your heart.'
'Oh. I've already got an atrial fibrilation...thing going on,' I told her.
'I see that,' she agreed - I like to think she saw it in the notes on the screen in front of her, rather than being possessed of some weird and wonderful NHS juju that could let her spot fibrilation cases by eye.
'There are extra pills I can give you - we've got lots more stuff than we had even just five years ago,' she enthused. 'Weightloss injections and suchlike. The one I'd like to really get you on is for people with good kidneys. You have excellent kidneys.'
'I know,' I smarmed - back a decade or so ago, my mother, who at the time was more of a Tory, had shelled out to get me a BUPA head-to-toe check. They told me I had platinum-level kidneys. It's absurd, but it turns out my kidneys may be my best feature.
'The pill would let you use them to maximum efficience, so you'd pass the sugar out that way. Lose you about 300 calories a day. Also, your current pills aren't really touching the sides just now.'
I came clean that I'd been taking them with screaming irregularity pretty much since we got here - at first because there was a delay in registering and a month when I wouldn't have been able to get any prescriptions from them, and subsequently because I'd just gotten into bad pill-forgetting habits.
'Hmm,' she considered. 'Alright. Take your blood sugar measurements every morning. Some evenings too if you like, but essentially mornings. We'll see what you're like then. Oh and take the pills as prescribed, eh?'
'Will do,' I promised.
So, the stupid shit stops here and now. She gave me a testing machine to take away with me, so now I intend to bore you on a slightly more regular basis with measurements of blood sugar. Just because I can. More water, more walking, the bike is uncovered and just waiting for me. Less carb, less batter, less altogether stupid shit. The plan is to live here at the seaside. That means LIVING here at the seaside, and that in turn means doing what's necessary to stay alive as long as I can here at the seaside. So. Stupid macho posturing face on, and let's do this thing.
Here's the thing though - that ends right now.
First thing's first, it's Tuesday. Ermmmm, last I recorded, I think I'd gone back up to 19 stone dead, or 266 pounds, which was irritating.
Following week I went up to 19 stone 1 pound.
Week after that, up again to 19 stone 2.25.
Clearly, there's drift going on, but given that I've done bog-all exercise and have been slugging and slothing my way through life for the past three weeks, it was going up alllllmost as slowly as it was previously coming off. But not quite, obviously.
Today, weighed in at 19 stone 2.25. Static from last week. Right now, I'll take that.
Now. Have been, as anyone who reads this will possibly remember, getting set up with the doctors in this area. Did the usual HBA1C blood test for long term blood sugars a few weeks ago. No sooner had I done it than they sent me a letter to say 'Balls. Need you to come and do that again.'
The image of course went through my mind of the diagnostic machinery going into overdrive, lights flashing, warning messages flashing, and then the whole kit and caboodle exploding in a puff of smoke when trying to process my blood. So I went and had it done again. Alllmost immediately the letter came back to say 'Yyyyeah, we can't afford to lose another machine. You need to get your ass in to see us, cos this shit ain't clever.'
Went today.
To explain the HBA1C, they like you to have a reading of under 50. I've previously managed under 50, but over the last few years, I've had a tendency, as the weight's crept back onto my bones, to hover in the low to mid-50s. Turns out last October, when we moved here, I had quite a bad result of 76.
Latest scoors on the doors? 117. One hundred. And then another 17. So, over twice what it should be.
#BadTony.
Badder Tony than the slow-ass drift of a pound a week here and there ever lets you know.
The nurse gave me a simple finger-pricking blood sugar test today. Again, in the UK, you're looking for numbers between about 6-8. Yyyyeah - 22.8. So - roughly three times what it should be.
'How are you not walking around with a huge dose of thrush?' she asked.
'Erm...should I be?'
'I'm surprised you're not, yeah,' she said, a touch too breezily for my liking.
'Oh, well, I won't panic when that happens then,' I muttered.
'I'm surprised your skin's not dreaful too,' she added.
'Oh it is, it's more or less turning to ash in the sun.'
'Aha!'
'We're happy about that, are we?'
'Visible symptoms,' she explained. 'Thing is, while your blood sugar's shot through the roof, your body's adapted to it quite well by the looks of things.'
'Thank you,' I said.
'But what we can't see is the untold damage it's doing to your systems inside,' she added.
'Oh.'
'First thing I'd be worried about is your heart.'
'Oh. I've already got an atrial fibrilation...thing going on,' I told her.
'I see that,' she agreed - I like to think she saw it in the notes on the screen in front of her, rather than being possessed of some weird and wonderful NHS juju that could let her spot fibrilation cases by eye.
'There are extra pills I can give you - we've got lots more stuff than we had even just five years ago,' she enthused. 'Weightloss injections and suchlike. The one I'd like to really get you on is for people with good kidneys. You have excellent kidneys.'
'I know,' I smarmed - back a decade or so ago, my mother, who at the time was more of a Tory, had shelled out to get me a BUPA head-to-toe check. They told me I had platinum-level kidneys. It's absurd, but it turns out my kidneys may be my best feature.
'The pill would let you use them to maximum efficience, so you'd pass the sugar out that way. Lose you about 300 calories a day. Also, your current pills aren't really touching the sides just now.'
I came clean that I'd been taking them with screaming irregularity pretty much since we got here - at first because there was a delay in registering and a month when I wouldn't have been able to get any prescriptions from them, and subsequently because I'd just gotten into bad pill-forgetting habits.
'Hmm,' she considered. 'Alright. Take your blood sugar measurements every morning. Some evenings too if you like, but essentially mornings. We'll see what you're like then. Oh and take the pills as prescribed, eh?'
'Will do,' I promised.
So, the stupid shit stops here and now. She gave me a testing machine to take away with me, so now I intend to bore you on a slightly more regular basis with measurements of blood sugar. Just because I can. More water, more walking, the bike is uncovered and just waiting for me. Less carb, less batter, less altogether stupid shit. The plan is to live here at the seaside. That means LIVING here at the seaside, and that in turn means doing what's necessary to stay alive as long as I can here at the seaside. So. Stupid macho posturing face on, and let's do this thing.
Tuesday, 13 February 2018
The Nonsensical Result
This begins to make no sense at all.
Last week, I was pretty good, and lost all of 0.75 of a pound.
This week, I've still been technically sticking to a Disappearing regime, but have misssed a couple of days' walking due to bad weather and deadline panic, plus had a Sunday dinner out at a restautant, and apparently as of this morning, weigh 19st 3.75 - down a full regulation two pounds.
I have no idea how that works - possibly a lack of obsessive weighing and fanatical stressing, while sticking to principles and suchlike. Either way, while it makes little sense to me when I compare the two weeks side by side, I'll happily take the nonsensical result and run with it - two more weeks of this and I see an 18. So, in case there was ever any doubt doubt about this, I'm going pro-nonsense in terms of my Disappearing.
I mean, there's nonsense and nonsense - I'm not about to go pro-Brexit or anything, but a touch of nonsense in terms of giving less of a determined crap about the mini-weigh-ins and the 'Ohhhh I touched a potato on the Sabbath, I must flog myself silly' mentality, and just crack on with the business of Disappearing, pound by irritating, slow, exhausting pound.
It's worth mentioning that last night I had a somewhat lighter supper than I'd intended, which probably played a part in the nonsense of today's result, but hey - whatever works, right?
Onward, to Nonsenseville and seeing the 18 in the stones column. Technically I don't feel like I'm properly Disappearing till we reach a 17, but if I can get the first half-stone (seven pounds) done, it'll feel like progress, and to get beneath 19 again will feel like even more. So yay - nonsense for evvvveryone.
OK, low-cal, artificially sweetened nonsense for evvveryone!
Last week, I was pretty good, and lost all of 0.75 of a pound.
This week, I've still been technically sticking to a Disappearing regime, but have misssed a couple of days' walking due to bad weather and deadline panic, plus had a Sunday dinner out at a restautant, and apparently as of this morning, weigh 19st 3.75 - down a full regulation two pounds.
I have no idea how that works - possibly a lack of obsessive weighing and fanatical stressing, while sticking to principles and suchlike. Either way, while it makes little sense to me when I compare the two weeks side by side, I'll happily take the nonsensical result and run with it - two more weeks of this and I see an 18. So, in case there was ever any doubt doubt about this, I'm going pro-nonsense in terms of my Disappearing.
I mean, there's nonsense and nonsense - I'm not about to go pro-Brexit or anything, but a touch of nonsense in terms of giving less of a determined crap about the mini-weigh-ins and the 'Ohhhh I touched a potato on the Sabbath, I must flog myself silly' mentality, and just crack on with the business of Disappearing, pound by irritating, slow, exhausting pound.
It's worth mentioning that last night I had a somewhat lighter supper than I'd intended, which probably played a part in the nonsense of today's result, but hey - whatever works, right?
Onward, to Nonsenseville and seeing the 18 in the stones column. Technically I don't feel like I'm properly Disappearing till we reach a 17, but if I can get the first half-stone (seven pounds) done, it'll feel like progress, and to get beneath 19 again will feel like even more. So yay - nonsense for evvvveryone.
OK, low-cal, artificially sweetened nonsense for evvveryone!
Friday, 26 January 2018
The Trouble With Tesco Express
Disappearing is, for the most part, the quest to not go mad while you change your life and expectations utterly.
It's odd that when I began this blog, I lived in London, where anything was available for a price. then I moved to Merthyr, where we had a big, two-storey 24-hour Tesco just up the road from us.
We're not in Merthyr any more.
We're sure as shit not in London.
Make no mistake about it, while I loved London, and was bound to Merthyr by ties of contemptuous familiarity, as well as family and a scattering of good friends, it's a good thing that we're not in either of them any more. This is where we want to be, and, for instance, after walking along the coastline for two hours today, I spent a good half-hour simply looking out at the sea and the sky, and that's worth enormous sackfuls of dosh and lifetime to me. I love it here in Saundersfoot town, with its five streets and its harbour wall, its beach and its absolute invasion of dogs.
But, as has been a thread going through this week, in terms of buying for a Disappearing diet, it's interestingly challenging.
We have a Tesco Express and a Spar in the town centre, as far as picking up groceries is concerned.
And here's the thing about a Tesco Express when you're Disappearing.
There's virtually buggerall in it that you're allowed to see. Or rather, buggerall that you're allowed to eat. Lots of fun stuff - pies, pasties, M&M milkshakes, a doughnut aisle, a confectionery aisle, a frozen section full of pizzas and a magazine rack, and that's more or less your lot.
'I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to do for dinner,' d texted as I was sitting there, looking out to sea. 'Maybe get some new potatoes, and go on - treat yourself to some of the GOOD tomatoes.' She meant the branded, Italian tinned tomatoes, all of 50p per tin. So I did - but then, I started roaming the aisles like a distrubed person, looking for what else I could possibly take home for dinner.
Cup-A-Soups and a packet of pens. That's what I brought home.
Not just any old packet of pens, mind you, a £7.50 packet of pens, for which I have neither a burning need in my life, nor the funds to go lavishly splashing about.
I think if I'd stayed in there two more minutes, I'd have ended up buying some Lottery instants and sucking off the silver, just out of sheer desperation.
Needless to say though, d did...ridiculous wonders with what was in her store cupboard.
I ended up with a dinner of gloriously succulent 'Firecracker Chicken' - chicken tenders in a lemon and pepper sauce that were like a joyful savoury lollipop of pure pleasure. There were sprouts, oh god yes there were - one does not go on an epic greenery quest and then neglect one's sprouts. And there was a dish of stewed tomatoes of such bite and flavour and complexity that the recipe has more ingredients in it than seems entirely feasible - but hot damn, people! I should perhaps have mentioned this before we started - I do have one enooooormous advantage over each and every one of you when it comes to Disappearing, and that is d. The palate she has, the instinctive and the learned knowledge of flavour profiles, (as well of course as the emotional support and the humour and the ability to nod at me when I've gone quite clearly round the bend) means she can make cardboard taste damn good if she needs to. Tonight, I dined like a king, and flicked repetitive V-signs at the aisles of our Tesco Express, lovely and useful as it is, for I have d, and right now, she's what's saving me from a chewy mouthful of expensive pens.
It's odd that when I began this blog, I lived in London, where anything was available for a price. then I moved to Merthyr, where we had a big, two-storey 24-hour Tesco just up the road from us.
We're not in Merthyr any more.
We're sure as shit not in London.
Make no mistake about it, while I loved London, and was bound to Merthyr by ties of contemptuous familiarity, as well as family and a scattering of good friends, it's a good thing that we're not in either of them any more. This is where we want to be, and, for instance, after walking along the coastline for two hours today, I spent a good half-hour simply looking out at the sea and the sky, and that's worth enormous sackfuls of dosh and lifetime to me. I love it here in Saundersfoot town, with its five streets and its harbour wall, its beach and its absolute invasion of dogs.
But, as has been a thread going through this week, in terms of buying for a Disappearing diet, it's interestingly challenging.
We have a Tesco Express and a Spar in the town centre, as far as picking up groceries is concerned.
And here's the thing about a Tesco Express when you're Disappearing.
There's virtually buggerall in it that you're allowed to see. Or rather, buggerall that you're allowed to eat. Lots of fun stuff - pies, pasties, M&M milkshakes, a doughnut aisle, a confectionery aisle, a frozen section full of pizzas and a magazine rack, and that's more or less your lot.
'I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to do for dinner,' d texted as I was sitting there, looking out to sea. 'Maybe get some new potatoes, and go on - treat yourself to some of the GOOD tomatoes.' She meant the branded, Italian tinned tomatoes, all of 50p per tin. So I did - but then, I started roaming the aisles like a distrubed person, looking for what else I could possibly take home for dinner.
Cup-A-Soups and a packet of pens. That's what I brought home.
Not just any old packet of pens, mind you, a £7.50 packet of pens, for which I have neither a burning need in my life, nor the funds to go lavishly splashing about.
I think if I'd stayed in there two more minutes, I'd have ended up buying some Lottery instants and sucking off the silver, just out of sheer desperation.
Needless to say though, d did...ridiculous wonders with what was in her store cupboard.
I ended up with a dinner of gloriously succulent 'Firecracker Chicken' - chicken tenders in a lemon and pepper sauce that were like a joyful savoury lollipop of pure pleasure. There were sprouts, oh god yes there were - one does not go on an epic greenery quest and then neglect one's sprouts. And there was a dish of stewed tomatoes of such bite and flavour and complexity that the recipe has more ingredients in it than seems entirely feasible - but hot damn, people! I should perhaps have mentioned this before we started - I do have one enooooormous advantage over each and every one of you when it comes to Disappearing, and that is d. The palate she has, the instinctive and the learned knowledge of flavour profiles, (as well of course as the emotional support and the humour and the ability to nod at me when I've gone quite clearly round the bend) means she can make cardboard taste damn good if she needs to. Tonight, I dined like a king, and flicked repetitive V-signs at the aisles of our Tesco Express, lovely and useful as it is, for I have d, and right now, she's what's saving me from a chewy mouthful of expensive pens.
Wednesday, 8 February 2017
The Slackass Variant
So - yesterday, woke up at 18st 6.
This morning, woke up a chunk heavier than that, having not been back in a bathroom since the night before last, and having had what were technically four meals during the course of yesterday. Was I worried about that?
Nah. It'll sort itself out over ther course of the week.
Today has been mostly desk-bound, but went to do a different walk this evening, because I had to pick up my medication prescription in the town centre. Ended up walking a fairly paltry 7,500 steps. That feels like a slackass day, given my recent history, but honestly, my brain feels like...
Y'know the opening of Wall-E, where he gathers up all the trash and turns it into compacted cubes? That's what my brain feels like - day-job, company, Disappearing, everything else, crunching my damn brain into cubes, day by day.
Fuck it, if this has to be a slackass day, that's what it has to be. I honestly don't particularly feel like I'm coping right now with the plate-spinning - if this one has to slow its spin down to keep some other things on track, so be it.
This morning, woke up a chunk heavier than that, having not been back in a bathroom since the night before last, and having had what were technically four meals during the course of yesterday. Was I worried about that?
Nah. It'll sort itself out over ther course of the week.
Today has been mostly desk-bound, but went to do a different walk this evening, because I had to pick up my medication prescription in the town centre. Ended up walking a fairly paltry 7,500 steps. That feels like a slackass day, given my recent history, but honestly, my brain feels like...
Y'know the opening of Wall-E, where he gathers up all the trash and turns it into compacted cubes? That's what my brain feels like - day-job, company, Disappearing, everything else, crunching my damn brain into cubes, day by day.
Fuck it, if this has to be a slackass day, that's what it has to be. I honestly don't particularly feel like I'm coping right now with the plate-spinning - if this one has to slow its spin down to keep some other things on track, so be it.
Thursday, 26 January 2017
The 500 Mile Challenge
'You should do that.'
As a sentence, it's the kind of thing from which great endeavours of cataclysmic foolishness are built.
This time, the line was delivered to me on Facebook, by a pal named Denise.
And she was talking about a song.
I'm fairly sure you all know the song, but maybe you're young or have been living in a particularly impenetrable cave, so here you go. If you don't know the song, it's called 'I would Walk (500 Miles)' and it's sung by gloriously Caledonian tune-lovers, The Proclaimers. Very catchy songwriters, The Proclaimers, and 500 Miles is one of a handful for which they're known outside their hardcore fan-base. It's a song that extends round the world, for both its joyous marchability, and its seeming note of lyrical, personal dedication. Good song. Great song.
Ahem...Here's a geeky-visualed version of the song. Hey, whaddaya want from me, I'm a geek, alright?
The reason the song suddenly appeared back in my life yesterday is simple to explain. Having started doing two walks a day in order to reduce my ridiculous and unsustainable girth, I ended up walking the equivalent of 8.9 miles yesterday. Not by any means miraculous,
'And I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more...' quipped Denise, before adding the fatal words. 'You should do that.'
You don't TELL me things like that. You really just don't. Those are seeding words. Those are words that sprout.
It took but the work of moments and a trusty calculator to work out that 500 miles, at 8.9 miles a day, worked out to be 56 days of walking. Say 60 days to deal with what should probably be known as the radical bloody-minded inclemency of British weather, the occasional bursts of life-having and suchlike.
60 days is two months.
Which is where the beginnings of a ridiculous plan started to form.
As a sub-challenge of The Disappearing Man, why not actually try to do that? Walk 500 miles. All the figures seemed to claim it should be doable, if not by any means easy. Lose weight, but give it some sort of definition, some challenge, some scope...
And then I started to ponder. If you're going to do something like that, if you're going to actually walk 500 miles - which is the equivalent of 25 marathons, by the way, in terms of pure distance - it would surely be a crying shame for it to go to...waste, so to speak. Why not do it for something? A sponsored walk of Proclaimers' proportions.
But who to do it for. There are plenty of deserving causes in the world. My first thought was Diabetes UK, given that a) I'm a UK diabetic, and b) the Disappearing Man weightloss effort was first inspired by the real, paralysing fear of the potential consequences of that disease.
And then it hit me. An organization that does astounding, much-needed work, but which is under actual threat. An organization that supports work I believe in, and which typifies the freedoms on behalf of which a whooooole lot of people recently did a good, effective bit of walking.
Planned Parenthood.
I recently did the Sister Walk in Cardiff. I'm a member of the UK Women's Equality Party. Could well be time to put my feet where my convictions are. I would walk 500 miles for Planned Parenthood, if you'd donate to them. I would do it in 60 days, because there has to be a structure to these challenges. I'd set up a separate 500 Mile Walk blog to chart progress, separate from The Disappearing Man, which has a history of getting rather sweary and scatalogical. Progress would be marked on my Samsung smartphone's S Health step-counter (unless some delightful techie-firm wanted to donate a properly hardcore pedomenter), and progress would be logged daily, so supporters could see how far I'd walked by that point.
What do you think? Would you support a walk like that, Disappearers?
Now, I should say, this is all top-of-the-head thinking at the moment. I haven't even found out whether Planned Parenthood accepts donations from sponsored events like this. But if they did, would you sponsor me to get my Proclaimers on and walk 500 miles to support them?
I've never done this in a Disappearing Man blog entry before, but if you'd be willing to sponsor such a madness, drop me a line, either through Facebook, Twitter (@FylerWrites) or via Fylerwrites@gmail.com (annnnd for all I know, cue the anti-PP hate mail...)
The 'official' walk won't begin till I've set up blogs and got sponsors and so on. For now, they're all just 'practice walks.' Speaking of which, I have to dash - Walk #1 for today is way overdue. But before I go, if you want to cut to the chase and simply support vital healthcare that's under threat from political dogmatism, they do take donations direct - go here and help them out right now.
As a sentence, it's the kind of thing from which great endeavours of cataclysmic foolishness are built.
This time, the line was delivered to me on Facebook, by a pal named Denise.
And she was talking about a song.
I'm fairly sure you all know the song, but maybe you're young or have been living in a particularly impenetrable cave, so here you go. If you don't know the song, it's called 'I would Walk (500 Miles)' and it's sung by gloriously Caledonian tune-lovers, The Proclaimers. Very catchy songwriters, The Proclaimers, and 500 Miles is one of a handful for which they're known outside their hardcore fan-base. It's a song that extends round the world, for both its joyous marchability, and its seeming note of lyrical, personal dedication. Good song. Great song.
Ahem...Here's a geeky-visualed version of the song. Hey, whaddaya want from me, I'm a geek, alright?
The reason the song suddenly appeared back in my life yesterday is simple to explain. Having started doing two walks a day in order to reduce my ridiculous and unsustainable girth, I ended up walking the equivalent of 8.9 miles yesterday. Not by any means miraculous,
'And I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more...' quipped Denise, before adding the fatal words. 'You should do that.'
You don't TELL me things like that. You really just don't. Those are seeding words. Those are words that sprout.
It took but the work of moments and a trusty calculator to work out that 500 miles, at 8.9 miles a day, worked out to be 56 days of walking. Say 60 days to deal with what should probably be known as the radical bloody-minded inclemency of British weather, the occasional bursts of life-having and suchlike.
60 days is two months.
Which is where the beginnings of a ridiculous plan started to form.
As a sub-challenge of The Disappearing Man, why not actually try to do that? Walk 500 miles. All the figures seemed to claim it should be doable, if not by any means easy. Lose weight, but give it some sort of definition, some challenge, some scope...
And then I started to ponder. If you're going to do something like that, if you're going to actually walk 500 miles - which is the equivalent of 25 marathons, by the way, in terms of pure distance - it would surely be a crying shame for it to go to...waste, so to speak. Why not do it for something? A sponsored walk of Proclaimers' proportions.
But who to do it for. There are plenty of deserving causes in the world. My first thought was Diabetes UK, given that a) I'm a UK diabetic, and b) the Disappearing Man weightloss effort was first inspired by the real, paralysing fear of the potential consequences of that disease.
And then it hit me. An organization that does astounding, much-needed work, but which is under actual threat. An organization that supports work I believe in, and which typifies the freedoms on behalf of which a whooooole lot of people recently did a good, effective bit of walking.
Planned Parenthood.
I recently did the Sister Walk in Cardiff. I'm a member of the UK Women's Equality Party. Could well be time to put my feet where my convictions are. I would walk 500 miles for Planned Parenthood, if you'd donate to them. I would do it in 60 days, because there has to be a structure to these challenges. I'd set up a separate 500 Mile Walk blog to chart progress, separate from The Disappearing Man, which has a history of getting rather sweary and scatalogical. Progress would be marked on my Samsung smartphone's S Health step-counter (unless some delightful techie-firm wanted to donate a properly hardcore pedomenter), and progress would be logged daily, so supporters could see how far I'd walked by that point.
What do you think? Would you support a walk like that, Disappearers?
Now, I should say, this is all top-of-the-head thinking at the moment. I haven't even found out whether Planned Parenthood accepts donations from sponsored events like this. But if they did, would you sponsor me to get my Proclaimers on and walk 500 miles to support them?
I've never done this in a Disappearing Man blog entry before, but if you'd be willing to sponsor such a madness, drop me a line, either through Facebook, Twitter (@FylerWrites) or via Fylerwrites@gmail.com (annnnd for all I know, cue the anti-PP hate mail...)
The 'official' walk won't begin till I've set up blogs and got sponsors and so on. For now, they're all just 'practice walks.' Speaking of which, I have to dash - Walk #1 for today is way overdue. But before I go, if you want to cut to the chase and simply support vital healthcare that's under threat from political dogmatism, they do take donations direct - go here and help them out right now.
Friday, 20 January 2017
The Monetization Mania
I woke up this morning with a keen interest in money.
This is weird in itself - I rarely have a keen interest in money, it doesn't rule me most of the time, and as d has more than once aptly put it, 'Money is not the currency of life, love is.' But January is always an utter bastard when it comes to money, a post-Christmas hangover that seems like the longest month between pay cheques, and such an extra-special fuck-you in the mid-section when you have buggerall in the bank account and still...Jesus, how long till payday?...that you start to regret not having children cos there's bound to be a chimney sweep who could productively shove them up chimneys for grocery-money, because (flings hand to forehead in melodramatic pose) heaven forfend we should drink tap water!
Still - the day was the day, mostly by virtue of the fact that if the day were the night, it would have freaked a lot of people out, and there would have been running and screaming and suchlike nonsense.
Then this afternoon, a Facebook friend request was approved from someone I'd forgotten I'd ever sent the request to. By all accounts a groovy person, and someone connected to someone else...of whom I'm a fan.
Long story short, I'm a fan of a bloke named Mitch Benn - comedian, singer-songwriter, Who-fan, novelist. For a while when I first discovered him, I was probably riiiight there on the boy-crush/Misery borderline of fandom, because I, as it turns out, am pigging useless when it comes to people whose talent I gneuinely admire. It happens rarely, but when it does, I'm utterly hopeless. I met Billy Connolly after a gig once, and while the whole thing is a bit of a blur in my mind, I'm faaairly sure I did that thing that six year-old girls do - standing on one leg, swaying exaggeratedly left and right, saying nothing but gazing adoringly. I'm certain at one point he asked me if I was alright, or if I was having a seizure...
Anyhow - as I say, big fan of Mitch. Erm, this was Mitch, by the way, singing a pretty apposite song to the whole Disappearing Man thing, back in 2009:
As you can see, in the immortal words of Irish comedian Dara O'Briain, Mitch used to 'winter well.'
Not long after this video was shot though - in fact, semi-simultaneously with my initial Disappearing (Ohhh, the notions of sympatico that raced through my brain! I swear, I'm over it now!), Mitch took radical steps and lost a shit-ton of weight.
This was Mitch far more recently:
So there's that.
The point is, having had this Facebook friend request accepted, I got to learn what he's been upto lately (See, see, not a stalker any more, honest, didn't even know stuff...). He's just started a Patreon page. Go check it out, you'll get the idea pretty quickly.
I'd never heard of Patreon either, but it's a kind of gentle crowdfunding thing. You support artists, writers, creatives etc on a 'Per Thing' basis, and can cap your support at X-amount-per-month that you're comfortable with.
Ohhh the wheels that whirred in my tiny mind at that concept. So, say 10p or 10c per blog entry means a monthsworth for around $3. Multiply that by the number of readers and what you end up with is a seriously good motivation to blog every day. In addition, say $1 for every seven pounds lost and you wouldn't believe how focused I'd become on melting the blubber.
Now of course, this is pie in the sky (Mmm...pie...), because a) most of my readers are reassuringly poor, and couldn't afford to subsidise my gibber that way, and b) I'm not sure even I would actually pay money to read this stream-of-consciousness gibber, so I'm fairly sure what would happen is that the number of readers would either plummet, or, because of course there's no coercion or bar involved, the number of people willing to pay to support the Disappearing Man with actual moolah would be meaninglessly small. That's the difference of course - the reason Patreon works is because it supports actual art and artistry, rather than some bloke ranting about calories and walking and Nazi Scales.
But if nothing else, it got me thinking about motivations. When I learned of the Patreon concept I was all set to go off and set up some sort of payment plan for production of the blog and loss of the weight - inspired, it seems, by money. And yet the goal in and of itself is actually more important than money. It's health. It's potentially living longer, doing more, still having working kneecaps and eyeballs and kidneys (oh my!). Somehow, that goal felt more diffuse in my brain, less worth working hard towards than a handful of cash in the middle of January. Utter folly.
Clearly, it's time to get a bit of a grip. Twelve thousand steps later, my bit has been done for the day. It won't surprise you to learn I dug out some of my old Mitch Benn albums and they helped to power me up the first long hill.
It might surprise you, though being me it probably won't, that I scared the living daylights out of a jogger. I have a disturbing tendency to be...erm...very Welsh when I walk, which is to say I sing along, out fairly loud, to whatever's on my iPod. Which is fine if you're singing Mitch Benn songs on a first long hill. It gets perhaps a litttttle bit creepy when, at 5ft 6 and still flirting with the borders of 19 stone, while belting along what seems like a dark, deserted street, you break into the Frankie Valli part of 'Sherry,' suddenly and from nowhere.
Still, I'll give him his due, that jogger could put a sprint on when he felt the need...
This is weird in itself - I rarely have a keen interest in money, it doesn't rule me most of the time, and as d has more than once aptly put it, 'Money is not the currency of life, love is.' But January is always an utter bastard when it comes to money, a post-Christmas hangover that seems like the longest month between pay cheques, and such an extra-special fuck-you in the mid-section when you have buggerall in the bank account and still...Jesus, how long till payday?...that you start to regret not having children cos there's bound to be a chimney sweep who could productively shove them up chimneys for grocery-money, because (flings hand to forehead in melodramatic pose) heaven forfend we should drink tap water!
Still - the day was the day, mostly by virtue of the fact that if the day were the night, it would have freaked a lot of people out, and there would have been running and screaming and suchlike nonsense.
Then this afternoon, a Facebook friend request was approved from someone I'd forgotten I'd ever sent the request to. By all accounts a groovy person, and someone connected to someone else...of whom I'm a fan.
Long story short, I'm a fan of a bloke named Mitch Benn - comedian, singer-songwriter, Who-fan, novelist. For a while when I first discovered him, I was probably riiiight there on the boy-crush/Misery borderline of fandom, because I, as it turns out, am pigging useless when it comes to people whose talent I gneuinely admire. It happens rarely, but when it does, I'm utterly hopeless. I met Billy Connolly after a gig once, and while the whole thing is a bit of a blur in my mind, I'm faaairly sure I did that thing that six year-old girls do - standing on one leg, swaying exaggeratedly left and right, saying nothing but gazing adoringly. I'm certain at one point he asked me if I was alright, or if I was having a seizure...
Anyhow - as I say, big fan of Mitch. Erm, this was Mitch, by the way, singing a pretty apposite song to the whole Disappearing Man thing, back in 2009:
As you can see, in the immortal words of Irish comedian Dara O'Briain, Mitch used to 'winter well.'
Not long after this video was shot though - in fact, semi-simultaneously with my initial Disappearing (Ohhh, the notions of sympatico that raced through my brain! I swear, I'm over it now!), Mitch took radical steps and lost a shit-ton of weight.
This was Mitch far more recently:
So there's that.
The point is, having had this Facebook friend request accepted, I got to learn what he's been upto lately (See, see, not a stalker any more, honest, didn't even know stuff...). He's just started a Patreon page. Go check it out, you'll get the idea pretty quickly.
I'd never heard of Patreon either, but it's a kind of gentle crowdfunding thing. You support artists, writers, creatives etc on a 'Per Thing' basis, and can cap your support at X-amount-per-month that you're comfortable with.
Ohhh the wheels that whirred in my tiny mind at that concept. So, say 10p or 10c per blog entry means a monthsworth for around $3. Multiply that by the number of readers and what you end up with is a seriously good motivation to blog every day. In addition, say $1 for every seven pounds lost and you wouldn't believe how focused I'd become on melting the blubber.
Now of course, this is pie in the sky (Mmm...pie...), because a) most of my readers are reassuringly poor, and couldn't afford to subsidise my gibber that way, and b) I'm not sure even I would actually pay money to read this stream-of-consciousness gibber, so I'm fairly sure what would happen is that the number of readers would either plummet, or, because of course there's no coercion or bar involved, the number of people willing to pay to support the Disappearing Man with actual moolah would be meaninglessly small. That's the difference of course - the reason Patreon works is because it supports actual art and artistry, rather than some bloke ranting about calories and walking and Nazi Scales.
But if nothing else, it got me thinking about motivations. When I learned of the Patreon concept I was all set to go off and set up some sort of payment plan for production of the blog and loss of the weight - inspired, it seems, by money. And yet the goal in and of itself is actually more important than money. It's health. It's potentially living longer, doing more, still having working kneecaps and eyeballs and kidneys (oh my!). Somehow, that goal felt more diffuse in my brain, less worth working hard towards than a handful of cash in the middle of January. Utter folly.
Clearly, it's time to get a bit of a grip. Twelve thousand steps later, my bit has been done for the day. It won't surprise you to learn I dug out some of my old Mitch Benn albums and they helped to power me up the first long hill.
It might surprise you, though being me it probably won't, that I scared the living daylights out of a jogger. I have a disturbing tendency to be...erm...very Welsh when I walk, which is to say I sing along, out fairly loud, to whatever's on my iPod. Which is fine if you're singing Mitch Benn songs on a first long hill. It gets perhaps a litttttle bit creepy when, at 5ft 6 and still flirting with the borders of 19 stone, while belting along what seems like a dark, deserted street, you break into the Frankie Valli part of 'Sherry,' suddenly and from nowhere.
Still, I'll give him his due, that jogger could put a sprint on when he felt the need...
Monday, 9 January 2017
The Cramps Of Doom
Can you think of anything worse than sudden and unpredictable stomach cramps?
I can.
Sudden and unpredictable stomach-cramps, five thousand steps into a 12,000-step walk, when you're in the middle of Bumblefuck, Nowheresville.
Yep, on balance, I'd have to say that's worse.
I'd have to say that after tonight's experience. Having been rather pleased with yesterday's Numb Zone walk, I set out to do it again, and it was going just swimmingly, until, almost exactly 5000 steps in - wallop! Waves of nausea that ran up my spine, hit my throat, slipped down to my stomach and set my whole digestive tract doing La Cucaracha, with what we'll euphemistically call 'the business end' whiplashing like a speared snake.
Ladies and gentlemen of the Disappearing World, I'd like to sing a song of praise, if you don't mind.
A song of praise to the humble sphincter - of which of course we have far more than we imagine.
Much clenching was done. Much eye-shutting mental screaming of the words 'No no no no no!'
Much sweating too, as I walked possibly the fastest 6000 steps of my life - it is perhaps indicative of my particular perversity that rather than, for instance, pulling my phone and calling a friend or a taxi, even in such sudden distress, I thought 'Fuck that, I want the steps!' and simply turned around to complete the walk.
Then, ossly, suddenly, there was a plateau, and I was able to walk without fear for some time.
Then wallop! La cucaracha! Clench, clench, clench, No, no, no, no, no!
Annnd relax. Walk, walk, walk!
Wallop! La cucaracha!...
And so on. For 6000 steps (sue me, I took a short cut over yesterday's 12,000-step version!).
A word to the wise - when you're having one of these battles...don't cough. Just...just really, don't.
Having deployed the likes of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song to power me in very many very short strides down a long stretch just before the final run, I thought I was safe. I made it to within 500 yards of home.
WALL-the fuck!-OP! IN CASE YOU'RE REALLY NOT GETTING THIS, LA PISSING CUCA-BLEEDIN'-RACHA, PILGRIM!
Clench, clench, clench...Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. Clench, you mother puss-bucket! CLEEEEEENCH!
There was a moment when I simply knew that I was out of the driving seat. Either this final intense bout of clenching would be enough, and I'd get home safely, or La Cucaracha would keep building and building and building and finally overpower my capacity to clench, and 500 yards from home, I would end up a hideous mess.
CLENCH, CLENCH, CLEEEEEEEENCH!!!
Ahhh....
The clenching won. This time.
I got home with barely seconds of clenching and resolve left in me.
And as my will to walk and, frankly, lunch, poured out of me, as that turning of my insides to horrifying smoothie took control, I knew I was on a Disappearing journey. Because the only thought that swam clear to the surface of my brain was 'Fantastic! Monday night! This can't be bad, the night before a weigh-in!'
Sigh. That's the Disappearing Mindset for you right there, folks.
I can.
Sudden and unpredictable stomach-cramps, five thousand steps into a 12,000-step walk, when you're in the middle of Bumblefuck, Nowheresville.
Yep, on balance, I'd have to say that's worse.
I'd have to say that after tonight's experience. Having been rather pleased with yesterday's Numb Zone walk, I set out to do it again, and it was going just swimmingly, until, almost exactly 5000 steps in - wallop! Waves of nausea that ran up my spine, hit my throat, slipped down to my stomach and set my whole digestive tract doing La Cucaracha, with what we'll euphemistically call 'the business end' whiplashing like a speared snake.
Ladies and gentlemen of the Disappearing World, I'd like to sing a song of praise, if you don't mind.
A song of praise to the humble sphincter - of which of course we have far more than we imagine.
Much clenching was done. Much eye-shutting mental screaming of the words 'No no no no no!'
Much sweating too, as I walked possibly the fastest 6000 steps of my life - it is perhaps indicative of my particular perversity that rather than, for instance, pulling my phone and calling a friend or a taxi, even in such sudden distress, I thought 'Fuck that, I want the steps!' and simply turned around to complete the walk.
Then, ossly, suddenly, there was a plateau, and I was able to walk without fear for some time.
Then wallop! La cucaracha! Clench, clench, clench, No, no, no, no, no!
Annnd relax. Walk, walk, walk!
Wallop! La cucaracha!...
And so on. For 6000 steps (sue me, I took a short cut over yesterday's 12,000-step version!).
A word to the wise - when you're having one of these battles...don't cough. Just...just really, don't.
Having deployed the likes of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song to power me in very many very short strides down a long stretch just before the final run, I thought I was safe. I made it to within 500 yards of home.
WALL-the fuck!-OP! IN CASE YOU'RE REALLY NOT GETTING THIS, LA PISSING CUCA-BLEEDIN'-RACHA, PILGRIM!
Clench, clench, clench...Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. Clench, you mother puss-bucket! CLEEEEEENCH!
There was a moment when I simply knew that I was out of the driving seat. Either this final intense bout of clenching would be enough, and I'd get home safely, or La Cucaracha would keep building and building and building and finally overpower my capacity to clench, and 500 yards from home, I would end up a hideous mess.
CLENCH, CLENCH, CLEEEEEEEENCH!!!
Ahhh....
The clenching won. This time.
I got home with barely seconds of clenching and resolve left in me.
And as my will to walk and, frankly, lunch, poured out of me, as that turning of my insides to horrifying smoothie took control, I knew I was on a Disappearing journey. Because the only thought that swam clear to the surface of my brain was 'Fantastic! Monday night! This can't be bad, the night before a weigh-in!'
Sigh. That's the Disappearing Mindset for you right there, folks.
Sunday, 8 January 2017
First World Problems and the Numb Zone
Exercise is fundamentally an odd thing when we do it not for any purpose but itself.
I mean, in years and centuries gone by, the condition of Mankind was that it worked hard to survive, to get sufficient bread and meat and water in its bellies to keep both hope and strength alive from one day to the next. For vast swathes of Mankind today, that's actually still the way of life - children pickking over rubbish dumps, men and women both in fields, women frankly doing a damn site more besides because their work is undervalued and not seen to have a designated end in any day. Labourers with hands and backs doing jobs that demand fuel and run their bodies at a high metabolic rate.
Then there are people like me.
Indisputable first-worlders, with, to coin a phrase, 'world enough and time' to have grown both fat and lazy (though it's important to understand the two are not in any way necessarily synonymous), plying skills that only have any value whatsoever in an information economy, and plying them from behind desks, at which we sit in some degree of comfort. For us, exercise is not a part of the natural rhythm of our lives, and so we do the oddest things in pursuit of it, in our little quests to burn off the calories we take in, in a kind of weird, false hat-tip to our fellow men and women who still burn energy day in, day out as part of the business of keeping their lives together. We go to gyms, and lie about it, pretending to enjoy ourselves. We walk pets in an effort to keep them and ourselves more healthy.
Or in my case, we go for long walks.
This is what I mean by exercise being an odd thing to do just for its own sake. If you have a purpose to your moving about, and you're a man, then when the purpose is satisfied, more than likely, you stop. If you're a woman of course, the thing no-one ever expressly tells you is that the purpose is never bloddy satisfied, but I digress. If you're just walking for the sake of walking, you actually need an equally false marker or moment to get you to stop doing it.
Case in point. I went walking relatively early today, so as to make the most of the dwindling daylight. I went up the road to my familiar gas station (the Norton Gas Station, for anyone who knows it), and the first roundabout leading to Dowlais. By which point, I'd gone a disappointing 2400 steps. I did the maths, and realised if I turned around then and went home, it would be fewer than 5000. But here's the thing. At that point, the exercise was still new to my system today, and was beginning to hurt me. But I shrugged at the numbers, and pushed on up the hill (yes, another hill. Seriously, the town's just made of hills) to a second roundabout, at a kind of second, 'No really, are you sure you want to go here?' gateway to Dowlais (Dowlais seems to be entirely unconvinced people should really want to go there). By the time I got there, the pain of the newness had worn off, but the numbers were starting to look a bit more interesing - somthing over 3000 steps done, meaning 6000 if I just turned round. I seriously considered it. Then I turned left, seeing a bus stop up another divergent hill. 'I'll just go to that, and that can be my past-the-second-roundabout marker,' I thought.
Reached it. Didn't count the steps. Pushed on. I'd entered the Numb Zone.
The Numb Zone is that point where your limbs have become used to the action you're taking, and so the usual markers that tell you 'you should stop now' have been quitened, because you've clicked in to the activity, and gotten 'in' to the doing of it. I walked through Dowlais, past a couple of familiar landmarks, and out into less familiar territory as the January sun thought 'Fuck this for a game of soldiers' and went to hide. I reached the point where I was on an unfamiliar road, by an unfamiliar church or chapel, and had the conscious thought that 'Either this goes round in a circle of the town, down through the Gurnos...orrrr it doesn't, and ends up somewhere in Pontsticill, which is not where I want to be, in the dark, on a Sunday night.'
All hail Google Maps, the Geographic Fuckwit's Friend. Turned out I'd missed the Gurnos turning, and was indeed heading out towards Pontsticill, land of reservoirs, evil bastard hills of distinction, sheep, road with no pavement and not a whole fuck of a lot else.
I turned round, went back to the turning I'd missed, walked along the road to the Gurnos, through an industrial estate, round the back of my old school, down past a house I used to live in, up and over another hill, Sycamore Road, where my grandmother used to live, and where, as she used to say, 'seven winds get together for a discussion on where to blow.' And from there, a simple drop down through the rest of the Gurnos back to house, coming mercifully to it from the top, rather than having to deal with the two evil bastard hills on which I technically now live, and about which I've recently bitched.
All in all, that'll get you over 12,000 steps. And the really weird thing is that as I sit here now, safely home and back behind my desk, I don't feel like I've done much at all, don't feel anything like as dead as shorter distances have recently made me. I'm not fool enough to think I'm yet getting accustomed to the whole wretched business of walking for the sake of it. it's the power of the Numb Zone - when you push past the initial pain of unexpected movement, and you just keep doing a thing. Were the streets better lit and were there not Sherlock to be home for and soup to be had, I could well have carried on for thousands more steps tonight, until the Numb Zone ran out and the next zone of 'No, really, if you keep this shit up, I'm gonna hurt you' kicked in.
So all hail the Numb Zone, and me finding a satisfying new route that gives me my daily step count. Takes a fuck of a long time which may not be practical on a day-job day, but still - at least now I know that it's there.
I mean, in years and centuries gone by, the condition of Mankind was that it worked hard to survive, to get sufficient bread and meat and water in its bellies to keep both hope and strength alive from one day to the next. For vast swathes of Mankind today, that's actually still the way of life - children pickking over rubbish dumps, men and women both in fields, women frankly doing a damn site more besides because their work is undervalued and not seen to have a designated end in any day. Labourers with hands and backs doing jobs that demand fuel and run their bodies at a high metabolic rate.
Then there are people like me.
Indisputable first-worlders, with, to coin a phrase, 'world enough and time' to have grown both fat and lazy (though it's important to understand the two are not in any way necessarily synonymous), plying skills that only have any value whatsoever in an information economy, and plying them from behind desks, at which we sit in some degree of comfort. For us, exercise is not a part of the natural rhythm of our lives, and so we do the oddest things in pursuit of it, in our little quests to burn off the calories we take in, in a kind of weird, false hat-tip to our fellow men and women who still burn energy day in, day out as part of the business of keeping their lives together. We go to gyms, and lie about it, pretending to enjoy ourselves. We walk pets in an effort to keep them and ourselves more healthy.
Or in my case, we go for long walks.
This is what I mean by exercise being an odd thing to do just for its own sake. If you have a purpose to your moving about, and you're a man, then when the purpose is satisfied, more than likely, you stop. If you're a woman of course, the thing no-one ever expressly tells you is that the purpose is never bloddy satisfied, but I digress. If you're just walking for the sake of walking, you actually need an equally false marker or moment to get you to stop doing it.
Case in point. I went walking relatively early today, so as to make the most of the dwindling daylight. I went up the road to my familiar gas station (the Norton Gas Station, for anyone who knows it), and the first roundabout leading to Dowlais. By which point, I'd gone a disappointing 2400 steps. I did the maths, and realised if I turned around then and went home, it would be fewer than 5000. But here's the thing. At that point, the exercise was still new to my system today, and was beginning to hurt me. But I shrugged at the numbers, and pushed on up the hill (yes, another hill. Seriously, the town's just made of hills) to a second roundabout, at a kind of second, 'No really, are you sure you want to go here?' gateway to Dowlais (Dowlais seems to be entirely unconvinced people should really want to go there). By the time I got there, the pain of the newness had worn off, but the numbers were starting to look a bit more interesing - somthing over 3000 steps done, meaning 6000 if I just turned round. I seriously considered it. Then I turned left, seeing a bus stop up another divergent hill. 'I'll just go to that, and that can be my past-the-second-roundabout marker,' I thought.
Reached it. Didn't count the steps. Pushed on. I'd entered the Numb Zone.
The Numb Zone is that point where your limbs have become used to the action you're taking, and so the usual markers that tell you 'you should stop now' have been quitened, because you've clicked in to the activity, and gotten 'in' to the doing of it. I walked through Dowlais, past a couple of familiar landmarks, and out into less familiar territory as the January sun thought 'Fuck this for a game of soldiers' and went to hide. I reached the point where I was on an unfamiliar road, by an unfamiliar church or chapel, and had the conscious thought that 'Either this goes round in a circle of the town, down through the Gurnos...orrrr it doesn't, and ends up somewhere in Pontsticill, which is not where I want to be, in the dark, on a Sunday night.'
All hail Google Maps, the Geographic Fuckwit's Friend. Turned out I'd missed the Gurnos turning, and was indeed heading out towards Pontsticill, land of reservoirs, evil bastard hills of distinction, sheep, road with no pavement and not a whole fuck of a lot else.
I turned round, went back to the turning I'd missed, walked along the road to the Gurnos, through an industrial estate, round the back of my old school, down past a house I used to live in, up and over another hill, Sycamore Road, where my grandmother used to live, and where, as she used to say, 'seven winds get together for a discussion on where to blow.' And from there, a simple drop down through the rest of the Gurnos back to house, coming mercifully to it from the top, rather than having to deal with the two evil bastard hills on which I technically now live, and about which I've recently bitched.
All in all, that'll get you over 12,000 steps. And the really weird thing is that as I sit here now, safely home and back behind my desk, I don't feel like I've done much at all, don't feel anything like as dead as shorter distances have recently made me. I'm not fool enough to think I'm yet getting accustomed to the whole wretched business of walking for the sake of it. it's the power of the Numb Zone - when you push past the initial pain of unexpected movement, and you just keep doing a thing. Were the streets better lit and were there not Sherlock to be home for and soup to be had, I could well have carried on for thousands more steps tonight, until the Numb Zone ran out and the next zone of 'No, really, if you keep this shit up, I'm gonna hurt you' kicked in.
So all hail the Numb Zone, and me finding a satisfying new route that gives me my daily step count. Takes a fuck of a long time which may not be practical on a day-job day, but still - at least now I know that it's there.
Tuesday, 3 January 2017
The Madness of Disappearing Mathematics
Arrrrrrgh!
Hoping to see an 18, did I say?
This morning, in the positively chilly air that swpet majestically through our bathroom on its way to somewhere less scary, I weighed in, pre-bathroom (if you take my meaning), at 19st 1.5.
I waited.
And waited.
And peed. And weighed in again, just before lunchtime. Having pulled on a pair of heavy socks as protection against the cold, I then weighed in at 19st 2.25!
I discarded the socks, swearing calumny and a world of evils on their woolen soles. 19st 0.75.
Three-quarters of a pound away from the border, still 'pre-bathroom.' That, gentle observers of this Disappearing madness, is what I'm recording as my official weigh-in weight on this first weekly weigh-in. Down 6.75 pounds this week, still presumably burning up the excess stored water in my system.
Now let's be clear - this is pretty damn good. There's plenty to celebrate in this - it means since I began my week of 'pre-Disappearing' having seen a result of 20 stone, I've lost 13.25 pounds, probably all of it stored as excess water. But let's also be clear about the Disappearing mindset. This is one frustrating-as-hell result. One pound would have put me in the 18s, which, even if it's by the tiniest squeak, you need to believe me, feels a whole hell of a lot different to being in the 20s. As far as the difference is concerned, you might as well be talking centuries as stones.
And here's the extra-sepecially galling thing. I then had lunch, and for that lunch I had pizza. really quite a lot of pizza - there being no better time to have a heavy-ass day than post-weigh-in on a Tuesday, and there also at the moment being a shitload of really tasty homemade pizza left in our house.
So - much nomming of the pizza. Even before I was done, the urge to be 'post-bathroom' was upon me, and once I'd finished the really rather quite a lot of pizza, I fulfilled the urge in a rather prodigious manner. And yes, I weighed again.
Because I'm a monomaniacal nightmare, that's why.
After the enormo-pizza lunch, and the prodigious purge, I evened out at 19st 2.
Now, you're probably beginning to get a sense for the nature of my insanity, so it won't come as too much of a surprise to you to learn that as this aftenoon wears on, I'm inwardly bemoaning the fact that I didn't weigh the pizza before I ate it, so that I could claim with more legitimacy than hope that 'really' (and please not the absurdity of that 'really'), I'm under the 19 stone mark. I'm not of course, the official number today is 19st 0.75, but yes, everything in me (with the possible exception of the pizza) wants to claim this landmark. This is the madness of Disappearing Mathematics.
At some point, prrrrobably quite soon, I shall be needing to be hit on the head with something fairly heavy to break me out of this cycle of insane addition and subtraction. But for now, people tell me there are other important things to do besides worry about the weight of pizza versus the weight of really-not-pizza-anymore.
They're wrong of course, but I've found they go away faster if you smile and nod and pretend to agree with them.
So this is me, smiling and nodding and pretending to agree with them, and not obsessing at all about the calculable weight of cooked dough...
Monday, 2 January 2017
The Night-Before Nerves
And noooooow, the time is heeeeere, and so I faaaaaace, my first new weiiiigh-innn...
Tomorrow morning, whatever the Nazi Scales, in their black little digital heart, decide to show me, it's what we record. I've had a week of pre-Disappearing, in which I went down from 20 stone to 19 stone 7.5. And then a week of Disappearing proper, including every day walking, during which I will have achieved...whatever the Nazi Scales allow me in the morning.
Naturally, I'm quite nervous about the first weigh-in. I'm nervous because I have a feeling I've fallen into bad, if natural Disappearing habits, such as having only a few meals a day, with nothing in between. That has a tendency, or so I'm told, to slow the metabolism, leave it purring like a kitten that's never known hardship, but doesn't especially help when it comes to shifting the weight. The first week's weight loss of course is mostly water. The second, as far as I recall, is mostly water too, btu these first two weeks can give you quite a boost. You don't need me to tell you that - the first week droppped me almost seven pounds. Who knew I was that subcutaneously soggy? I won't lie to you though, life already feels significantly easier.
Nor will I lie to you about tomorrow - I'd love to see an 18, which would mean losing 7.75 pounds at least over the course of this second week. Unlikely, of course, but one has to dream. More likely I'll be down 'some pounds.' Two pounds or over, and Tony's a happy boy - as much as you have to dream, you also have to temper your dreams to reality and stay the course you've set for yourself.
It's funny though, the way the night-before nerves can get to you. Last night, d made pizza while I went out walking. We settled down around 9.30, and I had three smallish squares of what was frankly gorgeous - note in case this sounds weird, you're actually allowed pizza on my weird, self-imposed regime, you're just not allowed any sort of satisfying amount of it at a time, especially later in the evening.
I spent most of today in Cardiff, at my Starbucks. Yes, you're allowed Starbucks too, but you have to be sensible about it. My own bizarre concoction, courtesy of my mate Harry, who used to work there, is a...(draws deep breath...) Venti Decaff Wet Extra Hot Non-Fat Sugar Free Caramel Misto. A Misto, for those who've never encountered it, is equal parts coffee and milk. And if you Non-Fat it, it's a whole lot of drink for roughly 130 calories a time. Four or five of those a day and you feel relatively full, because of course you are relatively full, and for surprisingly little in terms of calories.
On the way home, d, who knows the night-before nerves of old, asked 'So...pizza tonight then? Or something lighter?'
I squirmed, because the pizza, it should be noted, is fricking excellent. You've never had pizza like this. But am going for the lighter option, simply because it's the night before a weigh-in. That, my friends, is the night-before nerves. I'm having pizza for lunch tomorrow, beyond a shadow of doubt. But tonight...something less, simply because the 'main meals, no snack' routine has slowed the metabolism, or certainly the digestive system down, and I have it within me to actively resent the food that doesn't make it out of my system by weigh-in time tomorrow. I am that idiot.
So this is me, drinking water to try and flush out my system, and having something lighter than pizza for dinner, to pay tribute to the night-before nerves and aim to skew numbers and physics and Nazi Scales in my favour.
Here's hoping.
Wednesday, 28 December 2016
The Disappearing Constitution
Most of you will, I'm sure, already know the deal here. Some of you, mad and glorious as you are, have read much more of this blog than I've ever been back to check out once it's gone, stream-of-consciously, out of my brains and through my fingers. Some of you, clearly, are gluttons for punishment. But in the interests of any newbies out there, this is a pretty simple proposition. It's an honest, warts, pains, madness-moments, failures and all weight loss blog.
I know, I know. Not another one.
But yes, frankly, another one. If you're reading this entry, you'll find you have access to a yearsworth of intensive Disappearing entries, and then five years of more sporadic entries as failure gains march after march on my progress.
Here's what you need to know. Here's the Disappearing Constitution, the history, the rules, such as they are, the likely things that will clog up your life and mine over the next year if you come along.
The History
Five or six years ago, beginning in the year I was due to turn 40, I lost a chunk of weight. I did it because I was 20 stone, 7.75 pounds. That's 287.74 pounds for the Americans, and over 130 kg for those of a metric bent. I was 5ft 6 inches tall, which translates to around 1.6 metres.
These are not healthy numbers.
These are numbers so unhealthy in fact, my doctor was heartily ready to recommend me for bariatric surgery. I was almost ready to sign the papers, when a voice inside me roared. A voice of ten generations of stubborn bastards. I have no problem with bariatric surgery (the so-called gastric bypass) or those who get it. Good on them if it's right for them, I say. But I was seized by a feverish certainty that it wasn't right for me. At least not then. Not before I'd given my stubborn bastardy a red hot go.
Over the course of the next year, I gave my stubborn bastardy a red hot go. And I lost six stone (84 pounds, or a metric shitload of kilos). That was a pretty successful year, all told. As a diabetic, I managed to dramatically reduce the amount of medication I was taking. I could do more, had more energy, better self-esteem, yadda yadda, you've seen this video a hundred times.
Then, one very simple evening, shortly after moving home to the South Wales valley town of Merthyr Tydfil from the Metropolitan grooviness of London, I stopped. I had fish and chips.
The course of the following five years has been a saw-tooth of slipbacks, determined re-starts, excuses, failures, further slipbacks, moderate successes, annnnnd more slipbacks.
The result of which is that a week ago, late in the year in which I turned 45, I saw 20 stone on my scales again.
That can't be allowed to be. It can't be allowed to continue, certainly. And so, despite currently having a number of ridiculous deadlines, I changed my eating habits again. Suddenly, instantly, with no warning, as a prelude to beginning Disappearing again.
The Constitution
You should know this. Plenty of mentally healthy people who 'just happen to be' overweight will tell you you should never cut everything out, as you're just ensuring you'll snap and fail.
If moderation works for you, likewise, do it. If you can square the circle of just 'having a little' of something that gives you pleasure, by all means, walk that path.
My brain works differently.
That's a phrase that has added significance if you know where I stole it from. I stole it from The West Wing, from the words of a character named Leo McGarry, who is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. Here's the context, for those who don't know it:
I don't know how else to explain it to you, but as regards food, my world can be black, or it can be white. Grey doesn't exist for me, it's just black trying to con the world. So there are concepts to my Disappearing that in all likelihood, you won't find anywhere else.
I talk about 'Perspex boxes' or 'Perspex walls' quite a lot. That's how the world feels when I'm Disappearing - like all the things I've determined I can't have are behind Perspex walls. I can see them, smell them, remember them, crave them - but I won't allow myself to have them.
The Rules
When I go Disappearing, I cut out sugar, excess fat, too much carb, all alcohol, and all fizzy drinks. And when I go for it, I try and get at least one act of exercise into every day, some moderate, and as the process goes on, more intensive. I walk, and I have a recumbent exercise bike - which at the moment is particularly recumbent, as we've recently moved house again, and the power cord for the damned thing has yet to surface from any of the hundred-plus boxes.
Official weigh-ins take place on Tuesday morning, and are recorded here. Weigh-ins cannot be deemed official unless they were recorded on the Nazi Scales...
Ahem...the Nazi Scales are my own private bathroom scales. The name's a reference to a pet theory - every Nazi gets reincarnated as the bathroom scales of a fat fuck, which explains both their bitchy attitude, and the notion of some sort of punishment for their gittishness while alive - they get to be stepped on by us every day of their afterlives.
These blog entries, which when I'm doing it seriously tend to be every day affairs, are generally more conversational than they are lists of things eaten and exercise taken. That said, those details will be in there somewhere probably, because, believe it or not, people asked for them to be there. Something to do with investing in the process, I gather.
There will be swearing. There will be madness. There will be funny bits and dark bits, because, as I mentioned, this is not really me just 'needing to lose a bit of weight.' This is me taking back control of a part of my brain that appears bent on self-destruction. It's a battleground, with laughs along the way.
A week ago, as I say, I saw 20 stone on my Nazi Scales for the first time in five years. Since then, I've been edging towards Disappearing - alcohol's gone, desserts are gone, chocolate's gone, crisps are gone, fried food for the most part has gone. Carbs are reducing. Ho ho ho. Merry Fuckin' Christmas.
I've not had a chance to do much by way of exercise, due to the deadline crunch in which I currently find myself, and which appears to be getting no better any time soon. I have a day-job, and an editing company which I run in the laughingly-titled 'spare hours' after the day-job ends. I also contribute to a few geeky sites, and, believe it or not, want to try and become a published writer as well. Time has often been the enemy of my Disappearing, because much of what I do for large chunks of my day involves me sitting on my ass, staring at screens and not moving around a great deal. The effort must be made, consciously, to add exercise into my day, but hasn't as yet been made.
Nevertheless, on Tueday 27th December, which by virtue of this first blog entry we're calling the re-launch day, my Nazi Scales (pre-bathroom-visit) had me at:
19 stone, 7 pounds, or 273 pounds. (There are 14 pounds in a stone, in case you're wondering).
On the one hand, that means I've lost seven pounds in a week. So, yay. On the other hand, I have the bad grace to be disappointed in that, because just before Christmas, I was unofficially weighing in at 19 stone 5. Still, Christmas, I suppose, albeit a Christmas without sweets and treats. A Disappearing Christmas.
So this is where we begin, this time around - one stone and a quarter-pound down from where the Disappearing Man originally began. I don't begin to feel like I'm 'really' Disappearing though until I'm under 18 stone, so I still have a stone and a half to go before this begins to feel like progress. And I'm fully aware that the first week's loss is mostly water, rather than any of the hard stuff I actually need to shift - it's a gift of encouragement from the body when you're as far overweight as I am.
Oh and in case you're wondering, my 'ideal weight' according to the NHS is around 10 stone 7 pounds. Nine stone from now, or 126 pounds. I only aim to lose the medically recommended two pounds per week, or 104 pounds a year, leaving me at 12 stone or 169 pounds by 27th December 2017. I won't actually do that - I didn't the first time, because 104 pounds is over seven stone, and I'm perfectly well aware there will be plateaus, setbacks, stalls, and weeks where the numbers go in the wrong direction. But nevertheless, this is where we begin, having thrown ourselves right into the deep end with a Disappearing Christmas.
Come along for the ride - there'll be funnier stuff than this along the way, honestly!
Saturday, 5 March 2016
The Mystery Setback
You'll remember a couple of days ago - just Wednesday, in fact - I mentioned having had a post-official weigh-in and being pleased to find myself back in the 18s - 18st 13.
Since then, I've done reasonably well, I think. And after doing some biking last night, I figured it was safe to take a peek. Imagine my surprise and horror then to find myself barely a smidgen under 19st 7! Even with the lightening of an overnight, I weighed in this morning as heavier than when I began!
The galling thing about things like this is their mysteriousness.
If I'd raided the Temptaion Drawer, I'd say fine. If I'd been eating enormo-meals of extravagant and kingly richness, fine. Yes, I had the Curry Divergence, but on an active day, I figured I could calorifically justify that. It's when results seem to come out of nowhere to blindside you, that the whole thing seems pointless.
But - the point is the doing of it, I guess. And it's Saturday. There are still three more mornings before the next official weigh-in. Time yet to stomp the mystery setback into the ground. Still and all - galling stuff.
Since then, I've done reasonably well, I think. And after doing some biking last night, I figured it was safe to take a peek. Imagine my surprise and horror then to find myself barely a smidgen under 19st 7! Even with the lightening of an overnight, I weighed in this morning as heavier than when I began!
The galling thing about things like this is their mysteriousness.
If I'd raided the Temptaion Drawer, I'd say fine. If I'd been eating enormo-meals of extravagant and kingly richness, fine. Yes, I had the Curry Divergence, but on an active day, I figured I could calorifically justify that. It's when results seem to come out of nowhere to blindside you, that the whole thing seems pointless.
But - the point is the doing of it, I guess. And it's Saturday. There are still three more mornings before the next official weigh-in. Time yet to stomp the mystery setback into the ground. Still and all - galling stuff.
Wednesday, 2 March 2016
The Tax Demand Cure and the Temporal Direct Debit
One thing I’ll say for the increase in fear that comes with
falling off the wagon of a daily routine of exercise and healthy eating – it
does wonders to cure you of obsessive, three-times-a-morning, every morning and
twice-a-night weighing that the prospect of progress instils in you if you
happen to be an obsessive, habitual creature of addictions. It’s almost like
the difference between waiting for post on your birthday as a child and very
pointedly not waiting for post as a taxpaying adult. You don’t expect
nice things in the post as a taxpaying adult, only more demands for money, or
junk mail, or increasingly tedious effluvium and pointlessness in envelopes. So
you don’t wait, excited, by the letterbox, waiting to claim every tiny sliver
of joy that’s shoved in your direction. Rather, if you know you’ve been bad,
you avoid the letterbox altogether, and shove whatever post does arrive into a
vague brown and white heap, to be opened when you’re altogether stronger and
able to deal with it.
So it is with weighing when you think you’re likely to be
wildly out of control. You don’t want to know, because you know that
when you do look, it’s just going to put a crimp of failure and, like as
not, self-recrimination into your day. If you happen to work to deadlines,
there are times when you simply can’t fit that much breast-beating into any
given day.
Still, official is as official does. Weighed today since I’m
back among you all, detailing the minutiae of my daily Disappearing, and
weighed in at 19st 1.
I’m really rather surprised by that, but the Nazi Scales are
resplendently unpleasant and eager with the new batteries d bought for them, so
I have no reason to doubt them. Of course, everything in me would prefer to see
an 18, but considering the reluctance into which I’ve fallen to do anything as
pro-active as ‘move about,’ 19st 1 is a positive triumph. I’m just one hearty
bowel movement away from seeing an 18 again.
I did, to be fair, jump on the bike after writing last
night’s entry, albeit for a paltry half-hour and 300 calories. If nothing else,
it helped me shift the funk of reluctance that was evident in my mood
yesterday. At the moment though, I feel as though there’s too much to do and
not anywhere near enough time to do it in. This, in all probability, is a time
of tokenism – doing a tiny bit of this and that here and there in between the
things that must be done, in order to kid myself I’m making progress on all
fronts, like a kind of direct debit agreement, only with time, taking a tiny
bite here and there to reduce the overall mountain of what must be done by an
infinitesimal amount, but allow me to feel like I’m doing something. So – maybe
another half-hour of biking tonight, with perhaps a half-hour of work on the
flat to prepare it for selling sometime in the next few months, to spin that
plate a tiny bit too.
That’ll let me fall into bed tonight feeling like
something’s been accomplished. Which is what passes for a plan in my brain
these days.
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