The Magnetic Sausage

"Sausageinabun! Two for a dollar, and I'm cuttin' me own throat!"

Apologies - just a little homage to Sir Terry Pratchett there, and in particular his "Sell anything to anyone" street vendor, Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler, most notorious for the selling of a particular comestible on the streets of the ultimate city - the legendarily awful, but utterly irresistible "sausageinabun."

Why this?
Because the sausage in a bun pretty much accounts for my entire food intake today. Yesterday was d's payday, so today, we hot-footed it to Cardiff to celebrate a brief starflash of financial self-delusion in the otherwise unremitting night sky of theoretical poverty in the South Wales Valleys. In case you're wondering, theoretical poverty is like real poverty, but with a roof, and plenty of food, and good couches, and white goods, and enough food to maintain, in my case at least, a fervent need to Disappear.

So - not like real poverty at all, in fact.
Anyway - down to Cardiff we went, at a point somewhere between the hours of 'Feed me!' and 'No, Really, Freakin' Feed Me!'

With many places and cuisines at our temporary disposal, we ended up popping into a French restaurant named Cote, where d had a full breakfast, and I eschewed my normal yoghurt, compote and granola, on the grounds of sugar, and went instead with le sauccison dans un petit pain - sausage in a bun, only posh and French.

It was glorious, in the way many many French things are, and when we parted, me to my Starbucks for a day largely taken up with Chinese algebra (don't ask - day-jobbery), she to probably not spend the John Lewis vouchers burning a hole in her purse (really, really not like actual poverty, the more I think, about it), we were both replete and smiley, she full of boudin noir, the sausage's evil twin, me full of the entirely uncommon and never seen a garden variety of the otherwise humble banger.

The day passed. The algebra flashed in front of my eyes and sodded right the hell off, as I drank a fairly small number of my Starbucks Specials - oh by the way, I now have calorie counts for those: cold=190 calories (1 consumed today). Hot=130 calories (memory fails, but I think three consumed today). Expect more int he way of utterly tedious Starbucks calorie counting going forward. Then, as we were due to get back on the train to come home, d arrived with a paper sack.

"You have a paper sack, my darling," I noted.
She grinned. "I have dinner," she corrected me.
"Ah," I said, nodding.
"Hot dogs!" she explained. "From Five Guys."
Hot dogs from Five Guys are an acceptable substitute for real food in every human experience. They are, if you like, the ultimate rapidly available sausage in a bun. And so, once I've finished writing this entry, and biked my ass off for an hour, I will return, as though magnetised, to the glories and charms of the sausage in a bun, which appears today to hold me in thrall.

If you're going to be held in thrall to anything, you could do worse.

To the HateCycle! Time to pedal myself to a big sweaty mess to earn a cheesy sausage.

The Bikeless Wonder

Humph.

Second day without any biking done. Walking again, roughly the same distance as yesterday – around 450 caloriesworth – and a significantly lighter calorific day – a few of my pleasure-vacuumed hot Starbucks, one cold, all with skimmed milk (and mostly Mistos, so less of that), one Starbucks porridge and half a carton of roasted nuts (roughly 400 calories, and with at least a whiff of protein mixed in with the fat).

That’ll do me for today – very taxing day-jobbery today, so needed to get my head down and push on. Tomorrow though, it’s the weekend, and while I still have work to do, and the weather continues to give a solid series of single-finger salutes to the idea of recreational walking (most of the walking of the last two days has been ‘getting to places out of the pigging rain’ walking, rather than ‘striding off into the wide green yonder for the benefit of my health’ walking), mark these words – there will be biking! If nothing else, I’m at a crucial point in Season 1 of Gotham, goddammit, and I want to know what happens next!

Am I panicking yet? Actually, no. Probably should be – my system is hardly conditioned to the Disappearing lifestyle yet, my metabolism won’t have adjusted enough to burn enough calories just from being alive to let me get away with this nonsense for a couple of days. But the way I see it, this is the difference between a diet and a lifestyle change. There are going to be days and chunks of days like this. The thing is to get back to it as soon as is practically possible and not let the lapse become the lifestyle. So – tomorrow, possibly early if I can haul my ass out of bed – the bikeless wonder will be vanquished, and Biker Boy will return.

28 January - The Bread Head

Bread, so they tell me, is appallingly bad for you.

Never mind that it’s been the staff of life since before the Roman Empire was the Roman Empire – things have changed with our lifestyle, meaning bread is the enemy. It stays around too long in the system, is apparently quite hard to digest, and is essentially just a carb-bomb waiting to explode in your system and turn you into The Blob.

Of all things, though, the first time I did this, bread was the hardest thing to cut down or give up. And why?

Because the little bastard’s so gorgeously scrummy, that’s why. So diverse, so multi-faceted, so much a meal in and of itself, there’s practically no limit to the invention, the wonder and the sheer, unbridled joy that bread can bring. Without bread, there’s no pizza, which pretty much invalidates all the anti-bread rhetoric in the world before we even begin. Then there’s the staggering pleasure of breaking a fresh loaf open. The smell, the texture, the job it does as a delivery device for all manner of other gorgeous things. No pizza, no sandwiches. How much worse does life become at the very contemplation of a world like that. No toast – no hot buttered toast. Absolutely no point to any soup in the world. And so very much on.

I mention this because bread remains a staple part of my diet, though I’ve been forced by the good if rather wretched sense of it to cut down to two slices with a can of soup – you’ll have noticed that’s become something of a standard lunch for me.

It was today – cream of tomato soup, two slices of bread, toasted.

Which in itself, is a Disappearing crime I’m happy to commit right now. There’ll come a time when I have to countenance a world with less bread in it, but damned if that time is yet.

I mention all this because neither d nor I really felt like the dinner of poverty and leftovers that was our lot this evening on the night before payday.

‘Y’know what I could really go for?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘Grilled cheese and tomato soup.’

‘I’m so down with that it’s not even funny,’ I told her. So – more cream of tomato soup, and the classic ‘grilled cheese’ was consumed. Or ‘scranned’ as my Scottish pal Gregor would have it. Great word, ‘scranned’ – seems to denote a wordless urgency with which any Disappearer is probably familiar.

To the non-American, a ‘grilled cheese’ is by no means just grilled cheese. That would be too simple by some considerable distance. Remember, it’s food invented by Americans, a people who accept insane complication as a matter of daily life, who add tax to the price of things at the checkout, and who add mathematics to rugby, call it football and then at least pretend to both understand and enjoy it.

Nor, to the Brits, is it simply ‘cheese on toast.’ Ohhh to the mighty fuck-no. It’s essentially what Americans think of as French Toast (indicating a not entirely inaccurate assessment of the French capacity for luxury), and which Brits tend to describe with the bluntness of purpose of its more northern inhabitants as ‘Fried Bread.’ Only with gooey cheese in the middle of a Fried Bread sandwich, because, fuck, when you’ve fried a couple of pieces of good bread in butter, you need that extra gooey fat layer to really make something, you know?

It is, quite simply, a food too good to be of earthly design. In fact it’s well known in Clever People Circles that when the Greeks claimed the food of the Olympian gods was ambrosia and nectar, what they actually meant  was Bread and Cheese (This may not in fact be entirely true). The thing about which is, allied to a cup of cream of tomato soup (I also have no idea where this pairing was first discovered to be the source of all wonder and wisdom, I simply know that it is), you can scran a hell of a lot of it before you even know your mouth has been moving.

I’m fairly sure I downed four pieces of butter-soaked, cheese-welded bread with what turned out to be a cup and a half of soup, before looking up. Added to the two at lunchtime, that’s a pretty damn hefty bread day, even for me.

I compounded the issue, such as it was, by determinedly not biking. I mentioned having days off, and while I didn’t exactly decide not to do it, I did end up, somehow, with it being later in the day than was feasible, if I actually wanted to exchange any civilised words with my wife, and so the day became a no-exercise day. Saying which, I had done about 450 calories of walking by the end of the day, so it wasn’t as though I’d been entirely sluglike and slothful. Just probably, in all honesty, not energetic enough for a six-slicer.

The point is, I’m not claiming I was led astray, or that my grand plans were dashed by time or any such thing. You can certainly do that sort of thing when you’re Disappearing. No-one’s going to stop you, and no-one’s going to disagree. The point is it doesn’t actually do you any good to dwell on it, either. You did a thing, what will be will be, and you move on, resolving to have better days coming.

Will the day of the six slicer hurt me come Tuesday? Who knows? There’s a long way between now and then. The challenge is not to let that sort of day become tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. That’s why official weigh-ins are only once a week – if you took every morning’s weigh-in as official, you’d drive yourself stark raving mad before the week was out.

Onward, to better, less tasty days!

The Double Check and the HateCycle

Today was a weird one. Had lots to do, ended up doing very little of it, not least because with the organisational idiocy for which I'm legendary in my close circle, I'd booked two doctors appointments for the same morning. So we schlepped to the first one - to have blood taken for an annual diabetic review next week - and I was vampirised with remarkable efficiency. One thing to be said for taking blood-thinning medications is that getting blood taken is usually no drama whatsoever. Then we hot-footed it to the hospital for the other, bigger event of the day - a cardiology appointment, which unbeknown to me these days includes a rudimentary ECG (and accompanying crop-circle waxing when the sticky pads are ripped off). So...that was fun. Fortunately, my heart behaved itself, and gave the doctor a lovely regular 50 beats per minute rhythm to study intently for ten seconds before he told me to sod off, and that he'd see me in two years.

Result!

That said, the whole thing, which took about four hours from leaving the ohuse to getting home, left me with a kind of hospital lethargy that has persisted for the rest of the day. Right now, I'm writing this before getting on the bike, and rediscovering the resentment and loathing of the machine. You know I've had a couple of knackered nights already, but this is more, or less, or certainly different to that. I'm looking across as it and hating the idea of getting on that bike.

Sigh. Where to go when that mood grabs you?
There's a quote I've tried and failed to find about the business of writing. It says something like "Anyone can write when they're inspired. The mark of a real writer is writing when you're not. Writing when you don't feel you can. Writing when it's the last thing you want to do."

The same is true of Disappearers and putting in the effort. Truth be told and bottom line, no-one's going to care if you don't do the exercise. No-one's going be shocked or scandalised. For the most part, unless you're a schmuck like me and tell everyone, no-one's even going to know.

But you will. And whne you next get on your scales, you'll be lying to yourself when you dare to hope, because you won't have done the work you need to do. And when the results don't come, you'll know why they haven't. Your choice, as a grown-up. Have days off, have nights off by all means, I don't mean to get all drill sergeant on your ass. But if your only rationale is the childlike "I don't wanna!" then shut your yap, and do what you need to do.

Does it help you loathe it less? No, of course not. I still hate the idea of getting on that bike right now. But it's an hour out of my life, and at the end of it, it'll be done. The angst of not doing it would probably last longer and be more painful.

So - to the HateCycle, Disappearing Man!

The Mini-Wave

So here we are: Disappearing Weigh-In 1.
I started this a week ago today at 19st 3 lb.
I weighed in this morning at 18st 13.75. The absolute minimum I needed to do to throw myself a man-ego celebration party. So awoohoo - this is me, doing a mini-wave of self-congratulation, as allll the books and programmes tell you to do. Acknowledge the progress, look at where you are and where you were, yadda yadda yadda. Truth is, I feel impatient. Good, moving on, what's next?!

What's next of course is the peculiarly British half-stone marker - 18st 7. For very straightforward reasons, mostly based in mathematics, that feels like a hell of a long way off, and 19 stone feels like one bad decision away.

But, let's not turn this into a wake, shall we? That's not really the mood I'm in or the tone I'm going for. When I did the first Disappearing, I started at 20st 7.5 (oh yes, my Disappearers, I was heavier even than this at one time), and while getting under 19 stone was a big achievement back then, I didn't really feel like I'd started properly Disappearing until I saw the back of 18 stone. The weird thing about that is I was there very recently. I've yo-yo'd a little in the last six to eight months - flirting with 19 stone, losing a stone to get down to 18, and then back up to 19st 3. 18 stone is by no means a good place to be when you're 44 and 5ft 6, but it feels like a whole different world to being 19 stone, so I'm impatient to be gone, to be moving on down, to pass under the half-stone barrier and then push, to break back into the 17s.

I do know of course that being int he 17 stone category is not a good place to be when you're 44 and 5ft 6 either, btu I have sentimental memories of it. It felt remarkably good the first time round, especially hitting 17st 7, because then I'd lost 3 stone, and was beginning to really feel the benefits. I also began to buy clothes off a whole other peg at that point. I'm looking forward to that peg again, but let's keep our heads in the game, folks. So far, just a single week has gone by, and I've officially lost just 3.25 pounds. Is it as good as I was hoping for? No. Is it good enough for week 1? Well, it has to be, doesn't it, because otherwise we're into the territory of the ridiculous - claiming this, that or the other thing has slowed the weighloss down this week, and waaah, waaaah, waaah. No. Let's be clear - 3.25 pounds is more than the medically recommended weekly weightloss, so I have no reason to complain at all. The weird thing will be the fact that I can't actually focus on it for more than the length of a mini-wave, because prolonged self-congratulation (quite apart from being a fairly nauseating habit to get into) can easily become a conviction that you don't need to keep on going, or that you can ease up. Tonight, having done a Starbucks day consisting of much-sitting-on-the-ass, I'm here, watching Gotham, trying to convince myself I can take a night off the biking. Texted d as much, because you have to know what you need, and who's going to give it to you in these situations.
'Get on the bike, honey,' she replied. 'You'll kick yourself if you don't.'

So woohoo - mini-wave, 3.25 pounds, under the first (and shortest!) marker. Here's to the next one, and here's heading to the bike to prove to myself that this wasn't just a one-week mini-Disappearance.

Oh, side-note. Weighed a second time, finding the inch of Nazi discrepancy. That inch still has me at 19st 3. So who really knows? I can only tell you I'm choosing to take the positive results, if nothing else because they keep me going.

The Biking Breakdown

Got home from an odyssey to Cardiff yesterday (rail replacement, local bus cancellation, yadda yadda yadda, scuse me while I yammer on like that boring guy you avoid at parties) fully intending to continue my unbroken streak of biking for an hour.

Then didn't.

For those who don't know already, I've joined a political party for the first time in about twenty-five years. It's called the Women's Equality Party, and I've joined it because it's the 21st century and I'm utterly sick of the fact that an organisation like the Women's Equality Party still so appallingly necessary. Yesterday was the first Branch meeting to which I've been able to make it - hence the odyssey. Set out at 9.30, got home around 7.30, mostly because of a stunningly straightforward journey made staggeringly difficult by British engineering ingenuity.

Anyway, whether it was the insane prolongation of the travel or the challenges inherent in the meeting itself - it was manifesto time, there were focus groups to, erm, focus on - by the time I got home, I thought about climbing the stairs and pedalling for an hour, and while the spirit was at least half willing, the legs were all placard-waving, slogan-chanting 'what you playin' at, fool?!' rebellion. 'Sit your ass on the couch,' they said. 'Watch yourself some Gotham and shut the hell up with all this pedallin' stupidness.'

For some reason, I appear to have had 70s Blaxpoitation legs last night. And if I have one guiding principle in life, it is simply this: never argue with 70s Blaxpoitation legs.

So couches were sat on, Gotham was watched, legs gave self-righteous 'that's right, don't argue with us again' snorts of satisfaction and all was good. Couldn't quite understand why I was so exhausted though, until, on getting up to walk over to collect d from her twelve-hour shift (it's incredibly difficult to whinge about your own discomfort when you're picking someone up who's worked a twelve-hour shift on her feet. I still do it, naturally, cos that's the kind of sticktoitiveness I have, but still, it's not easy) and my wrist vibrated, as though someone had decided to chainsaw my hand off.

No-one had decided to chainsaw my hand off. My Fitbit was going nuts. 'Arriba!' it said. 'You've just walked your daily ass off, muchachos! Congratulations on being Senor Fitnesse. Let us dance the Maraccalacca, the famous Dance of the Smug Bastard.'

So that explained that - for the first time since I started Disappearing again, I'd walked my designated number of steps in the day - 10,000, I think, equating to five miles, and at least double the 600 calories of an hour's biking.

'That's right, fool, that's what we been tryin' to tell your dumb ass,' muttered my legs.

That made me feel significantly better about missing my appointment with the bike. Ideally of course, and eventually, I intend to move to a regime where both the Fitbit and the bike feel the love on any given day - the walking and the biking. But this is the difference this time round - as with the original Disappearing, I'm refusing to obey the nagging instinct to go at this thing like a bull at a gate. This thing takes time. It demands a sacrifice of some lifetime when this was a thing you were consciously doing. As I think one of the very early entries says, I was a kid raised on 80s movies, and the inevitable 80s movie montage, where people achieved things to a kicking rock track, and a year of hard effort was compressed into about two or three minutes of inspiring highlights, but real life doesn't have a fast forward button so you have to go the slow way round. There'll be a time to step things up a notch. That time is not freakin' yet. I know this because of the chatty legs.

Today, I haven't walked nearly as far, but I have just Gothamed my bike-pedalling ass off for another 600 calories. Will it be enough to allow me to announce a first milestone tomorrow?

The first milestone, for anyone not familiar with my propensity to throw myself a typical man-party every time I achieve even the slightest thing, will be getting beneath the 19 stone mark.  Similar revolting look at me and what I did' events will crown every half-stone (or seven pounds) lost on the journey back towards vaguely healthy. To throw my first party, I need to have lost 3.25 pounds from last Tuesday by the morning. Place your bets, Disappearers. Place them now...

The Inch of Nazi Inconsistency

Those who’ve been reading for a while know about the Nazi Scales. For the newbies, I have a set of Nazi weighing scales. They have no regard for human beings or anything other than their own will, essentially, from which I have spun the theory that the spirt of dead Nazis have been reincarnated as the scales of fat people like me, and face an eternity of being continually trodden on – more or less to see how they like it.

It will come as no surprise to any seasoned Disappearer that while the official weigh-ins are on Tuesday mornings, since starting, I’ve been weighing with the regularity and the neurosis, according to my wife, ‘of a teenage Valley Girl cheerleader.’ I tend to respond with a ‘Like, y’know, whatever…totally.’

At the moment, I weigh in the morning, any time anything significant happens, pre-bike and post-bike (yes, really – I’m getting readings of the weight of the sweat I lose during an hour’s biking. My wife may have a point – she usually does).

And while I’m taking none of those readings at all seriously, because a) if I did, I’d be even madder than I am, and b) taking too much notice of the ‘unofficial’ weigh-ins feels like a devaluation of the ‘official’ one, they do at least help me get back into the swing of this thing, by dividing whatever the result is between Tuesdays into logical, noticeable slices of x=y, ‘this has been today’s activity=this has been today’s result.’

Except.

Except last night I uncovered an inch of Nazi inconsistency.

An inch of Nazi inconsistency that undoes any certainty I might have had.

You might want to put on your geek-protection gear now, this is where it gets double extra sad.

I keep the Nazi Scales in my office, mostly because the flat is smallish and there’s not really anywhere else for them to go. That means I drag them into the bathroom whenever I use them, and put them on the only patch of floor on that level that doesn’t have carpet or mats.

Last night, doing my pre- and post-biking weigh-ins, it didn’t for a moment escape my notice that, having biked for an hour, sweated like a – well, like a fat, chronically out-of-shape guy who’d biked for an hour – and got on the scales, I’d somehow managed to miraculously put on two and a half pounds. No water had been taken in (Side-bar: happened to mention, on getting off the bike, that I was really thirsty. “Did you not have water?” asked d. “Well, erm, yes, I did,” I admitted, “but-” “But you didn’t want the water-weight! Oh my god, you little freakboy!” she (fortunately) laughed). So the act of exercising had caused me to put on weight. Quite a lot of weight.

“What the hell, you Nazi bastards?” I muttered. Then I noticed something that I’d never noticed before. I noticed the inch of Nazi inconsistency.

Stick with me – d couldn’t understand this one till I acted it out for her and she was standing there.

Imagine a bathroom. Its door opens inward, and there’s a space about the size of a set of Nazi Scales, plus an inch, at the beginning of the room, beyond which, there’s a mat. Where the door swings inward, it’s roughly that inch distant from the mat. That means there are two possible markers for where you put the top of the Nazi Scales when you lay them down – in line with the swung-open door, or at the edge of the mat.

As I looked at them, I saw the heavy-weighing scales were on the edge of the mat.

I narrowed my eyes at them. Was that where I usually put them? Or did I usually put them in line with the door?

I dragged them in line with the door, and sure enough, lost 2.5 pounds.

“Balls,” I said, with feeling.

Because – and if you have any hint of compulsion or obsession in your personality, you’ll know why this was a hellish realisation – I couldn’t remember where I’d put them when I weighed before biking. What’s significantly worse than that, I couldn’t remember where I’d put them for my official weigh-in on Tuesday. So Was I really 18st 3 when I began this quest? Or was I really 18st 5.5, with some weight-absorbing floorboards? What was ultimately worst of all though, did that mean I’d weighed with them in the heavy position when I came home from London and saw 18st 5, only to shift them unconsciously to the light position for the launch weigh-in, giving myself credit for a miraculous 2.5 pound loss that was simply down to the inch of Nazi inconsistency?

Not knowing is hell, quite frankly. I know it shouldn’t bother me, but it does on every conceivable level. Of course, the aim is ever downward, and I’m hoping that come Tuesday I’ll be able to report a change in figure irrespective of position, to be back in the 18 stone territory, even weighing in the heavy position. But that said, there’s no way I can continue weighing twice each time I do it, or the obsessive and compulsive sides of my nature will really begin to cohabitate as some kind of obsessive compulsion, from which it’s only a journey to not being able to leave the house without weighing at least six times or somesuch hellish nonsense.

So – for future reference, and irrespective of any inadvertent prior measurement inaccuracies, the official position of the Nazi Scales will now forever be in line with the door, not the mat. Screw it, it might give me a 2.5 pound advantage, but who doesn’t need an advantage like that in their Disappearing lives, for the simple joy of motivation, if nothing else?

I’m going to try to put it out of my mind now, I really am.

Despite the shimmering, overlapping realities.

Really.

Trying…