Shaking My Own Maraccas

It's Paaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyydaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy!!!

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

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

Sooooo. Oatmeal it is from now on then.

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

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

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

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

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

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