My Brain Works Differently

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

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

My brain works differently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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