Tuesday, 29 March 2011

So Near And Yet So Far...

See, the thing about being a journo, or indeed a would-be writer, is that it's incredibly tempting to go for the story over the cold, hard, undoubtedly slightly more boring facts of the matter.

Most of the time in this blog, I've resisted that temptation, but this morning's weigh-in brought the thing tantalisingly home to me, because this is the news today.

Weight: 20 stone, and three-quarters of one pound.
Given that I started off exactly a month ago at 20 stone, seven and a half pounds, it's jusssssst a smidgen, just a quarter-pound away from a full half-stone (seven pounds) of weight loss in four weeks. Now, while it's less than I'd hoped for, a full half-stone in a month is a great concise headline - Bang, there it is, that's what I've done, hurrah, what's next.

And so the temptation sets in.

The temptation to just say that's what I've done, so people understand it, and I can sit back on my laurels and go - "See that half-stone? No you don't, cos I've lost it, nehh! I did that, with help from my friends. I conquered a whole half-stone of impulse eating in just four weeks..." I know, I know, it starts to sound like an ad for Tony's Patent Pound-Loss Plan doesn't it?

But that impulse to smooth away the rough factual edges is deeply engrained in me, because when all is said and done, it's a better story than what I've actually done this week - which is lose 2.5 pounds.

And then the headline-instinct begins to merge with something more insidious, and something which I'm sure a lot of dieters feel creeping up on them - the urge to think they've done better than they really have, because they need to keep going. If I tell you that on the way to work this morning, I was having internal debates with myself along the lines of "Well, my very first weigh-in was done after my first morning bathroom visit, but today I didn't have time for that, so really, if I'm being scrupulously fair and accurate, I've probably lost more than that when I'm empty..." you might begin to recognise the syndrome. And it is a syndrome - it'll drive you mad, having that kind of internal debate. But more than that, it can lead you to that other tried-and-tested way of losing your grip and slipping back to bad habits - the self-congratulation day.

The slithering little impulse that says "Wow...if we compare like for like, I've done better than I thought. How cool am I? It's really working...I deserve a little something for achieving this, don't I?"

Give in to that, and you're pretty much sunk. Sure, there are 'safe' options for some people, the people whose brains don't work the way mine does, and can have such things as 'safe treats'. As I've said before, I can't do that, there's no such thing as a genuinely safe treat. By virtue of being a treat, it's unsafe. But still, the impulse does slither up your spine and whisper in your ear, puffing up your pride to make you fall.

It occurs to me as I'm writing this language that I can see where religion comes from. If you're trying to walk a narrow, tightly-constrained path, your own instincts for pleasure begin to work against you, and begin to seem like external voices trying to persuade you off your path. And what that normally means is that your path is utterly wrong for you, I think. If it wasn't, you wouldn't get the warring voices inside. Needless to say, history is littered with examples of people who wore their mental girdles too tight, and ended up going a bit peculiar. And to some extent, it's true of me too. I love pleasure. Pleasure, as far as I can see, is worth stopping for...that's how it earns the name of pleasure in the first place. I've always been an advocate of the fact that the very point of temptation is to give in to it. So this whole exercise is very very counter-intuitive for me and again I feel like I have to say this - I'm not doing this for fun. I'm doing it as a kind of cheap mid-life crisis, having been pretty squarely told that a life dedicated almost entirely to pleasure and self-indulgence is going to start to properly kick me soon, and probably won't stop until I fall off the edge of the world. So every step of this is a step against my truer, more relaxed, pleasure-seeking instincts...which maybe explains a little something about why there are no safe treats. But certainly, the longer I do this, the more the idea of forbidden fruits and whispering serpents, and even the frankly monstrous idea of sin begins to make a kind of sense to me. Obviously not in the kind of way that makes me think "Oh, right, so there must be a god and a devil and choirs of angels and all that," but certainly in a Freudian sense of "inner demons" and the like - our sublimated desires refusing to go to sleep or die.

I wonder if that's why so many dieters ultimately fail? Because what they're actually trying to do by dieting is go against their own deeper will for extended periods of time, and without a kind of granite-hard motivation, the real them will always ultimately win...?

Hmm. Anyhow, enough cogitation for now. I have a park to walk across and a ten mile cycle waiting for me. But here's to progress anyway...I...(sigh)...lost two and a half pounds this week. Next week, goddammit, I'll have lost a full half-stone, and broken my first stone barrier. Next week's headline will involve the words "19 stone". Hmm...actually, that's a delayed gratification that's worth being honest today.

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