The 45 Deadline

Hello there.

Yes, yes, back again. It's been pointed out to me by several people that the blurb of this blog still says it's the journey of a single year in the life of a man...yadda yadda yadda, and yet here we are - a year from now I will be 45. In fact, pretty much eleven months from now I'll be 45, and when I started this blog waaaay back in the day, I would be turning 40 during the 'Year of Disappearing.'

The horrible truth is that I have been for some time out of all control, 'out of all compass' as Shakespeare says of the famously fat Falstaff.

I weighed in today at 18stone, 12.25 lbs. 264 lbs, for my American friends. Still some 23lbs lighter than I was when I originally started, but still, - pretty damned heavy.

Recently, it's felt utterly compulsive again, rather than for the purposes of enjoyment or rational feeding. I've felt like I've been whipped by my own brain to try and destroy my body. I have no enormously productive idea why one part of myself should want to do that to another, but there it is nonetheless.

And so, we begin again. I do not want to be this way, I want to be an entirely other way. I want to wear clothes without having to think about them, without having to worry about them and most of all without having the unconscious gag reflex when I see myself in them.

I want, ideally, not to be one of those people that people shake their heads about sadly at their funerals, and mutter about them being 'a fool to themselves.' I'll be a fool for anyone and anything you understand, but it seems the very acme of redundancy to die for foolishness. I say this of course in the week when a lot of people who had, as far as we can tell, no desire to die were killed by the foolishness of others, but obviously that wasn't their fault. As far as is humanly possible, I don't want my death to be my own fault either. I want the bastard that is clamshell packaging to get me, to burst a blood vessel in pointless frustration aged 97 trying to open a new pair of earphones and be done before I hit the floor. I don't want to be a statistic of self-destruction.

And so, as I say, we clear the decks, we jump on the exercise bike, we pedal. And so begins another year - a year of aiming to lost five stone at minimum before I hit 45.

Here we go again...