You know how people always say that when they have to make big decisions, they get a little angel on their shoulder, whispering good intentions, and a little devil on the other shoulder, usually whispering about sensual pleasures and how great they are? I feel like that tonight, having done the math (or the maths, as my fellow Brits would insist was more grammatically correct – after all, one never refers to a single mathematic as a collective noun, does one?) of my current situation. My current situation of course being on the brink of my 14th Tuesday since this experiment began. If we take the first Tuesday as my initial weigh-in, with no expected ‘loss’, then that leaves 13 during which I should have lost two pounds, making a total expected weight-loss of 26 pounds. If, which seems unlikely somehow given my generally highly-regarded impersonation of Jabba The Hutt this weekend, I’ve maintained last week’s level of weight-loss, what I will actually have lost is 18 pounds, leaving a shortfall of eight pounds, or four full weeks of effort, for those of you with a more sadistic turn of mind.
And that’s where the angel and the devil come in. Except I don’t have an angel and a devil – frankly as an atheist, I’m not sure I’d trust an angel if it whispered sweet nothings in my brain, and certainly my life to date has been more accustomed to listening to the ‘devilish’ impulses of sensual pleasure. After all, with the exception of the genuinely glandular or the genuinely disabled, you don’t get a body like mine without putting a serious amount of effort into the sensual pleasures of life. So instead of a devil and an angel, I have Captain Sensible and The Disappearing Woman.
The Disappearing Woman, who, since she was given a form by my pal Sally-Anne last week, really rather sounds like her, whispers “Oh look…you’re way behind where you wanted to be aren’t you? Better do something drastic, really, hadn’t you? Try a starvation diet for a couple of days, the pounds’ll fall off you, and you can get back on track…”
Meanwhile Captain Sensible, who’s absolutely not based on the weirdo 1980s British pop star of the same name, but appears, more than anything, to be based on James May from Top Gear, is standing on my other shoulder, tutting and folding his arms and shaking his head, going “Don’t be stupid…if ya do that, you’ll oversensitise your system, so that your body’ll go into Tasmanian Devil mode when you start eating again, keeping hold of every molecule of fat it can get its metaphorical hands on in case you…y’know…actually start starving to death…”
The thing is, that makes it sound cut and dried, doesn’t it? But I have to tell you, I can feel the persuasive pull of trying to work a starvation diet for a few days. I mean, surely, nothing’s more likely to convince my body that a) in the whole yin-yang of calories taken in vs calories expended, I mean business, and b) it really, truly, honest-to-any-god-you-like won’t starve to death and rot without food for a few days, than actually not taking anything in. And I do need to try and do something to catch myself up. Myself in a parallel universe, I mean, where I hadn’t spent most of May dealing with Real Stuff and therefore giving myself more license than would otherwise have been the case.
Sadly though, I think Captain Sensible might win the day, on the grounds that a) what he says appears to be actually true – which often helps in terms of winning arguments, I find, b) I don’t think d would let me rock a starvation diet, even if I really wanted to, and c) on a regime of no sugar, no fried foods, and sensible portions, there are days when I want to smash the faces of the effortlessly thin into huge great three-tiered wedding cakes and make them eat until they know what it’s like to be fat. I have a feeling that on a genuine starvation diet, in a crowded city, I might just cross the line from ‘fantasy homicidal lunatic’ and end up burying the needle in the red zone of ‘serious danger to himself and others.’
Sigh.
Fine. I’ll be over here, sulking, if you need me.
On the other hand, tomorrow, I go back to work. Of course it’s true that with a full week in the States, followed directly by three days in Croatia, followed directly by a long weekend off, I have only the sketchiest recollection of what it is I actually do for a living, or indeed, where I do it. But still, if I can hold my brain together, it’ll be a return to the world of Perspex boxes, walking, three square meals a day at more-or-less regular intervals, meaning three full doses of Xenical a day at more or less regular intervals, and all the stuff that let me make relatively quick initial progress. So foot down, back to reality, and all hail Captain Sensible…
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