AcMe Replacement

Yesterday was weird, all ways up. In fact, this week's been weird from start to finish. I appear to have started doing something fundamentally unhealthy, mainly as a result, I think, of Diabetic-Penis Boy. I appear to have started a sort of Accidental Meal Replacement.

Meal Replacement, for those who don't know, is...well, pretty much what it sounds like - you don't have a meal, and replace it with...something else. Ordinarily, in cases where this is medically sanctioned, you replace it with a kind of slurry-shake full of vitamins and nutrients and absolutely no fun whatsoever. It was sanctioned for Penis-Boy, and it seems to be the cornerstone of some radical weightloss regimes, where eating very few calories is fundamental.

Of course, it could be argued that eating very few calories is fundamental to any weightloss regime - certainly, this one that I'm on is all about balancing what goes into my system with the amount of work I ask that system to do.

I think what probably can't be argued though is that replacing meals with enormo-mugs of decaff skinny latte is really the way to go.

I didn't really notice this was what I was doing till yesterday, when I met a friend for coffee, and ended up with two double-handed bowls of the stuff in the space of an hour, then followed that throughout the day with at least a couple of large (fuck you Starbucks, I'm not calling it Venti, because that leads to a system where the smallest coffee size is Tall, and henceforth into madness!) mugfulls of utter pointlessness.
Then, when I thought back on it, there was the mising breakfast on a couple of mornings, replaced with pointlessness. And a couple of lunches that were reduced in size because of the volume of pointlessness still in my stomach. As I say, I genuinely hadn't realised this was happening until my second mugfull in Costa yesterday (oh yeah, I'm not as proud as I once was, I'm becoming a bit of a pointlessness-whore - probably another sign that things are getting out of hand!) that the thought occurred to me.

I mean...with my wheedling, self-justifying, any-damn-thing-rationalising head on, I could plead that it a) gives me a sense of fulness that reduces the habitual 'hunger' which isn't really hunger at all, and b) it's both decaff and skinny and artificially sweetened, so it's as chronically low-impact as can possibly be imagined, so where's the bad?

But we all know this is wheedling self-justifying bullshit, right?
Aristotle would certainly be whipping me up and down the street, for not having the self-mastery to do the cold-turkey thing and simply reduce calories, increase work and suffer like a bitch inbetween. And to some extent, for once I think he'd be right. I said early on that I wasn't a 'substitution' kinda guy - though clearly, any insight into my history would prove this itself to be bullshit, as I drank Diet Coke for years without batting an ironic eye - but clealry what I've done here is discovered something that is nothing more than three substitutes in a single mug - something that, if you keep your eyes shut and don't have much of a pallette, you can convince yourself is milk, something which is little more than a flavouring to your hot milkshake, and something which gives at least the baseline systems of your tastebuds the idea of being sweet - so I'm replacing coffee, milkshakes and desserts all in one, and then clearly mainlining as much of this crap as I can get, to make up for the fact that I'm not allowing myself the genuine pleasures of real coffee, real milkshakes or real desserts.

The sick thing, probably, is that as I sit here with one eye on the clock, knowing I have about half an hour before I go out, alone, for a comedy music gig (already-thoroughly-Disappeared Man, Mitch Benn, who I've mentioned before..."Yes dear, incessantly" as d would undoubtedly say), describing the process I appear to have fallen into, I'm already thinking "Hmm, I could stop at Stratford on the way and pick up a coffee..."

Clearly unhealthy thinking, and probably, at some point in time, I should cut the decaff intake down. but right now, if some replacements have managed to sneak through my perspex walls and are helping make the Disappearing less of a fundamentally gittish process, I say screw it - it's like using Methadone to come off Heroin or some equally inappropriate and over-dramatic comparison (I often wonder, when I say these things, whether junkies or alcoholics would just like to rip my pimply head off for daring to compare addictions with them...). What I mean is, it's clearly less dangerous than if I were 'using' real coffee, milkshakes and desserts, so how about I get to a healthy weight first, and then we see?

On the business of accidental meal replacement though, I'm undecided. Clearly, under any normal circumstances, it's not healthy. But I think we're also in danger of over-accentuating the positive here - and again, I've talked about this before (sorry, this wasn't meant to be a 'Greatest Hits' post...). While everybody's delighted that I've lost my first 3.5 stone, objectively speaking, what I am is a man who's still at least five stone overweight, so I'm still really on the uphill part of the climb. And while, as I say, under normal circumstances, meal replacement's something of an emergency measure, the whispering mathematician in my brain is saying "Yeah, but if you can do it without starving and actively reducing the number of mealsworth of calories that go into your system on any given day...where's the bad?"

I'm not gonna be stupid about this, in all fairness - I did this accidentally this week. And one day, certainly, I was roaringly hungry by lunchtime. I'm not gonna do this without a net, and will always ensure I have Disappearing-friendly food available any time I feel hungry - I'm not ignoring the whole 'keeping the metabolism going' thing. I'm just gonna take it on advisement, shall we say. Watch this space...