This is the diary of one year in the life of a really fat man, trying to lose weight and avoid the medical necessity for gastric surgery. There are laughs, there's ranting, there's a bitch-slap or two. Come along!
This is of course the week with no days in it - the underbelly between Christmas and New Year, when no-one knows what's what or when's when. People tell me it's Friday, which means there are just four days before the first actual Disappearing weigh-in since the re-start.
Disappearing of course is not just the business of not eating X, Y, tasty-as-fuck Z, and eating pretty much cardboard and salads. It's also about increasing the amount of energy expended in any given day, so the body wakes up to a new normal, and releases some of the stored fat to burn the energy it's not getting from all the high-fat, high-sugar shit it's grown accustomed to getting.
The Disappearing Man has never really been just about 'Here's what I ate, here's what I evacuated, here's what I did.' But in an effort to show the balance of factors, I shoudl probably record that every day since the first of the new blog posts, I've got off my ass and done some walking.
Having been stricken with a lurgi at the start of the week, and being chronically out of practice, I didn't go far the first couple of days - just 5000 steps or so, from my house, up a steady hill (Merthyr Tydfil is basically what Nature did with all the unweildy hilly bits it, past a gas station to a roundabout, and back, picking up a treat for d and a vending machine coffee for myself on the way back.
Yesterday, we were in Cardiff, so this neat, if slightly clumsy, routine was interrupted. But the fun about that is that an aimless amble around Cardiff added up to over 7000 steps. We actually had a meal out last night, and I decided not to care about it, because even when Disappearing, you can drive yourself absolutely nuts if you turn the world into a bunch of calorie-values - and believe me, I've done that before now. It's waaaay too early to, as d puts it, 'obsess like a Californian Valley Girl' about calorie values - my body's no kind of temple right now, so at this point, it's just about pushing things down, pushing things in the right direction, kickstarting the process.
Today, my appalling deadline schedule has meant I've had my ass planted to the chair, editing my face off. Had an Indian ready meal this evening, and - which was less wise - a cereal breakfast this morning. Need to not do that until I can master the art of minimisation again, the art of having two Weetabix, a little milk and feeling satisfied with that. This morning, two Weetabix, a handful of Bran Flakes and a handful of granola. Too damned much, frankly - especially on a day as generally sedentary as this.
The sun went down and the demands of the business kept me planted to the chair till after 7 o'clock. I was fed, watered, warm and busy, and the greatest temptation in the world was to say 'Fuck it, I'll exercise tomorrow.'
Fortunately, at the moment at least, I'm able to recognise that impulse and turn it in on itself, using it as an alarm to get my ass out the door.
Changed my route tonight, going up something that even in my town of hills has earned itself the name 'Dangerous Hill,' and up through the first home I remember, a region called Penydarren.
Penydarren's built like a sloping roof - lots of streets built parallel on a sharp angle to a topmost strut-street, which itself goes upward from the base of the Dangerous Hill (the picture for this entry, all the way to the gateway to two other regions, the Gurnos and Dowlais regions. Almost at the crossroads of those regions is the gas station that's become my base camp and turnaround point.
I haven't lived in Penydarren for decades.
I'm now fairly sure that while I've been away, someone has stuck a jack under the ass end of Penydarren and pushed that bastard up, because damn! I swear it never used to be that steep.
Admittedly I was younger and lighter and fitter the last time I tried to walk the damn thing, but still, I think my jacked-up theory has merit.
Ended up walking about 6900 steps, though significantly more of them were uphill tonight than on any of the previous walks, so I can feel it more in the legs tonight.
So the exercise restart continues - I'd like to think my Tuesday, I'll be up to the standard 10,000 steps a day. On we go to New Year's Eve, and to notional new beginnings. So sue me, I like to get my new beginnings in ahead of the crowd.
As far as I know, this friend hadn't, at the time, clocked that I'd started Disappearing again. I've checked with her before using this, because I know what some of my friends are like, and they won't be happy about it.
Took me a little while to get right with it myself, because it seemed to come out of a clear blue sky - but I know it was meant well, and in a kind of hardass, personal trainer, no-bullshit, get better spirit, that this pal's particularly used to because we first encountered each other when I edited her manuscript (not to brag, but... Ah, hell, no, let's really not brag), so she's used to getting that from me about her work in a professional capacity, and we've become strong, good friends during that process, so it's part of the way we're allowed to talk to each other.
And while that's true, and we're cool, it stands as an example of the kind of thing people believe they can come out of a blue sky and tell you when you're fat...as if it's actually their business to point things out to you, so I figured I'd share it with you.
Here's the mail, before we go any further:
Title: You Mad Bastard!
Tony! What the hell! I've just seen your picture on Facebook and I'm so upset. What are you doing? People like me need you - and there you are looking like you might drop down dead TODAY.
Get back on that bloody diet man!
Do not eat a fucking thing unless you have not eaten for three hours!
Do not eat anything with sugar in for the next 24 hours.
If
you feel like shit, then let me tell you, you look like it too! Here is
a poke with a shitty stick! You're strong willed. You CAN do this. Move
your arse, now!
I'm
going to demand a report on the past 24 hours food and drink at 9.45
tomorrow, so fucking-well act like a man and get on with the bloody
sensible eating and excercise plan, you big idiot!
XXX
So - there you go.
Now, since then, this pal has been so upset at what I look like in recent Facebook photos that she's been unable to sleep, because, in her own words, there's nothing she can do to save me but throw words at me, and she's also in fact been upset that 'people around you have let you get this way.' So, as I say, this wasn't badly meant, but it's an interesting example of a more general social trend: the idea that fat people need people to point out what they look like in order to 'motivate' them into doing the 'right' thing.
We really don't. I mean...really, really.
The thing is, as it happened, I'd started Disappearing again, and so was in a 'Let's deal with this shit' place when this arrived in my inbox. If I'd been feeling particuarly delicate, or perhaps more likely, if I'd woken up yesterday thinking 'As days go, I'm not looking so shabby, today's a good day,' there's no telling what it might have done to me.
Here's the thing: nobody 'lets us' get this way. We do this to ourself - whether driven by demons or drawn by cream cakes. And more often than not, only we can get ourselves out of the situations we're in. However well meant advice on what we look like and how we're likely to fall over and die may be, it's actually very rarely effective in terms of getting us to do anything positive. It's very difficult to actually shame us into doing something you think we should do, and more often than not, it hardens us into a 'Fuck you!' response, and a desire to run...or at least get a cab...to the nearest cake shop and buy EVERYTHING, because there's a degree of self-hate but also a degree of self-comfort and protection in eating foods that give us an immediate emotional buzz, like cakes and chocolate (or whatever we've associated as 'comfort food').
Now as it happens, my friend and I are cool, and I'm already in the Disappearing Zone. But generally, reacting with horror and forecasting death - nnnnnotsomuch the way to get your fat friend to do things that are good for them. Being a hardass is all well and good if your fat friend's a hardass too. But some aren't, and even some who seem to be in front of all the world are actually self-hating with a crispy sugary casing of hardassery they've had to master just to get through the day.
As I say, I know my friends, and I'm not posting this to start a chorus of angry responses - can the torch and pitchfork stuff. For me, from this friend, this was fine. Just in general, be sure you've judged your friend and their responses well before you go down the 'What the hell have you done to yourself?' route. We have to be pretty hardass to get through society being significantly outside its metrics of acceptability and attractiveness. Be VERY sure our hardassery's not just the candy shell we wear, and that you're not about to stake us through the heart before you deploy your own hardass love.
The week before Christmas is a very odd time to start Disappearing.
A very necessary time, as it turns out, but a very odd one, all the same.
Christmas is of course all about overconsumption - before it was tinselled up and Christianised, this time of year was Saturnalia - banqueting, continual partying, gift-giving. Much of the point was, to quote comedian Mitch Benn, 'to eat until it hurts, then drink until it don't hurt any more.'
Of course, there were centuries between that and the Victorian Christmas which in many of the important ways has merely evolved into our modern version, but the notion of celebrating by having 'more than usual' at Christmas was a farily constant one. When the Victorians (and particularly the Germans) got their hands on a British Christmas, the good times rolled again, and everywhere, the imperial overlords promoted the idea of more, more more at Christmas, with the evolution of puddings and cakes, the enlarging of dinners, the development of sweet snacks and such, all of it more or less to say a right royal 'Screw you!' to northern hemisphere bitter weather, to give a sense of survival and celebration to the midwinter feast.
Dickens, of course, was an almost ridiculous genius, and one of his absolute best stories was A Christmas Carol. That works on so many levels it's practically a puzzle box, but one of the things it does, whether intentionally or otherwise, is to associate abstemiousness at Christmas with miserliness of spirit. Scrooge is pictured as a skeletally thin figure, a man who cares only for the making of money, not the filling of his clothes or, beyond the strictly necessary, the sustenance of his body. By comparison, Fezziwig, who embodies the 'right' spirit of Christmas, the joyful, carefree spirit of the season, while absolutely getting his cardio-funk on with Mrs Fezziwig and leading the dancing of the Sir Roger DeCoverley, is pictured as having a well-rounded pair of breeches, and the chubbiness associated with Victorian gaiety. It's been said before that for the Victorians, except when it came to the shape of their women, where they followed their diminutive queen, bigger was always better. So we get the idea of Christmas generosity represented by groaning tables, giant turkeys, plum puddings the size of small children, mince pies by the plateful, nuts, chocolates, yule logs and so on and on on, a feast which, like the Roman version, goes on for days, getting progressively more inventive and desperate to re-use the same ingredients in different ways.
Having a Disappearing Christmas then feels inherently far more miserable than by rights it should, because it feels like by not indulging in all the consumption, you're tacitly opting out of merriment and open-heartedness, and people begin to look at you with that sneer that whispers 'Scrooooooooge.'
Admittedly, the 'Bah, Humbug!' hat probably doesn't help to counterract that image, but still...
The point, really, is that your body doesn't know it's Christmas. Christmas is an entirely social construct, built on permissions and societal agreement that eating to an excess is somehow, suddenly, OK for everyone at this time of year. Your body though has no truck with social convention, it just understands biological mathematics - what goes in as food, what's in store as fat, what goes out as energy through exertion.
But what the social convention means is that if you're going to have a Disappearing Christmas, you need to get your head in the right space.
The right space, fortunately for me, is very much a 'Fuck You' headspace. Oddly enough, it's a headspace that being significantly overweight gives you little option but to get comfortable in, because some people who aren't overweight feel they have a right to judge you most of the year round for your appearance, and you won't get far as a fat fuck if you can't get into the headspace of 'Ffffffuck you, you're not me.'
So perversely, having a history of overindulgence gives you the armour you need to not necessarily follow the crowd.
We went out for Christmas Dinner this year, d, my mother and I.
Mulled wine, starter, family meat platter main (three kinds of protein), Christmas pudding and custard, mince pies, cheese and crackers.
For lunch.
And yes, absolutely, when you get water instead of wine, and when you have a main plate that's mostly meat and veg, and then you sit there watching a dining room do the last three courses without you, it's a surreal experience, and even in your own mind, the narrative plays. 'Oh, go onnnnn, it's Christmas, ya miserable bugger. Have a spoonful of pudding, go on...'
But as I explained yesterday, a single spoonful collapses all my resolve. Moderation is not something that makes sense to either my mind or my body. One spoonful and before you know it, I'd be face down in a box of Black Magic, pouring hot chocolate on my head.
The early stages of Disappearing are among the easiest bits, because you're on a new quest. But the trick to doing a Disappearing Christmas is re-wiring your behavioural instincts, because your instincts are to do precisely that, to grab everything there is for grabbing, especially during a period when grabbing it is smiled on more than it would be at any other point in the year.
Saying no when every instinct you have says yes is a particulary weird thing to have to do at any time of year. At Christmas, when the rest of society is practically encouraging you to eat everything that's available to you, it's extra weird.
But here's the thing. The extra weirdness made it stand out, gave me an alert to react to, and let me do the whole 'No thanks' thing in spite of the cultural convention and the instinct to go 'Gimme evvvvverything and twice!' So actually, a Disappearing Christmas, by virtue of the weirdness it entailed, was relatively easy this early on in the Disappearing process.
What nearly got me was the day after Christmas, when I went to my local Costa coffee shop for...well, coffee, clearly. It was such a natural instinct to 'pick up a little something sweet to help the coffee go down,' and the cultural permission had swung so naturally back to the way I normally experience it - 'Fat fuck, about to eat something sweet in public, oh my god, doesn't he realise what he looks like? Don't do it, you monster!' - that I got to the barista and stared at them like somebody'd hit me in the face with a trout.
'Is that all?' asked the girl, after I realed off my absurdly convoluted coffee order.
'Errm...' I said.
She smiled.
'Errrrrrrrrm...' I said, my eyes flicking to marshmallow biscuits, and Christmas pudding-shaped cookies, and weird rocky road brownies that appeared to have had a lab accident and grown to a size suitable for the incredible Hulk.
I snapped my jaws together, for fear of drooling. Smiled, through a shaggy, Santa's-drunken-brother beard.
'Yes thanks.'
And went about my decaff skinny day. A Disappearing Christmas can make you feel like the world's biggest Scrooge for not eating. But outside the Christmas window, your own historic routines can trip you up before you even have the chance to think about and amend them if you're not alert. Disappearing, for me at least, is a kind of war. The trick is to know how sneaky the other half of your brain can be, and stay alert for the patterns of behaviour that you need to re-wire.
Most of you will, I'm sure, already know the deal here. Some of you, mad and glorious as you are, have read much more of this blog than I've ever been back to check out once it's gone, stream-of-consciously, out of my brains and through my fingers. Some of you, clearly, are gluttons for punishment. But in the interests of any newbies out there, this is a pretty simple proposition. It's an honest, warts, pains, madness-moments, failures and all weight loss blog.
I know, I know. Not another one.
But yes, frankly, another one. If you're reading this entry, you'll find you have access to a yearsworth of intensive Disappearing entries, and then five years of more sporadic entries as failure gains march after march on my progress.
Here's what you need to know. Here's the Disappearing Constitution, the history, the rules, such as they are, the likely things that will clog up your life and mine over the next year if you come along.
The History Five or six years ago, beginning in the year I was due to turn 40, I lost a chunk of weight. I did it because I was 20 stone, 7.75 pounds. That's 287.74 pounds for the Americans, and over 130 kg for those of a metric bent. I was 5ft 6 inches tall, which translates to around 1.6 metres.
These are not healthy numbers.
These are numbers so unhealthy in fact, my doctor was heartily ready to recommend me for bariatric surgery. I was almost ready to sign the papers, when a voice inside me roared. A voice of ten generations of stubborn bastards. I have no problem with bariatric surgery (the so-called gastric bypass) or those who get it. Good on them if it's right for them, I say. But I was seized by a feverish certainty that it wasn't right for me. At least not then. Not before I'd given my stubborn bastardy a red hot go.
Over the course of the next year, I gave my stubborn bastardy a red hot go. And I lost six stone (84 pounds, or a metric shitload of kilos). That was a pretty successful year, all told. As a diabetic, I managed to dramatically reduce the amount of medication I was taking. I could do more, had more energy, better self-esteem, yadda yadda, you've seen this video a hundred times.
Then, one very simple evening, shortly after moving home to the South Wales valley town of Merthyr Tydfil from the Metropolitan grooviness of London, I stopped. I had fish and chips.
The course of the following five years has been a saw-tooth of slipbacks, determined re-starts, excuses, failures, further slipbacks, moderate successes, annnnnd more slipbacks.
The result of which is that a week ago, late in the year in which I turned 45, I saw 20 stone on my scales again.
That can't be allowed to be. It can't be allowed to continue, certainly. And so, despite currently having a number of ridiculous deadlines, I changed my eating habits again. Suddenly, instantly, with no warning, as a prelude to beginning Disappearing again.
The Constitution
You should know this. Plenty of mentally healthy people who 'just happen to be' overweight will tell you you should never cut everything out, as you're just ensuring you'll snap and fail.
If moderation works for you, likewise, do it. If you can square the circle of just 'having a little' of something that gives you pleasure, by all means, walk that path.
My brain works differently.
That's a phrase that has added significance if you know where I stole it
from. I stole it from The West Wing, from the words of a character named
Leo McGarry, who is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. Here's the
context, for those who don't know it:
I don't know how else to explain it to you, but as regards food, my world can be black, or it can be white. Grey doesn't exist for me, it's just black trying to con the world. So there are concepts to my Disappearing that in all likelihood, you won't find anywhere else.
I talk about 'Perspex boxes' or 'Perspex walls' quite a lot. That's how the world feels when I'm Disappearing - like all the things I've determined I can't have are behind Perspex walls. I can see them, smell them, remember them, crave them - but I won't allow myself to have them.
The Rules
When I go Disappearing, I cut out sugar, excess fat, too much carb, all alcohol, and all fizzy drinks. And when I go for it, I try and get at least one act of exercise into every day, some moderate, and as the process goes on, more intensive. I walk, and I have a recumbent exercise bike - which at the moment is particularly recumbent, as we've recently moved house again, and the power cord for the damned thing has yet to surface from any of the hundred-plus boxes.
Official weigh-ins take place on Tuesday morning, and are recorded here. Weigh-ins cannot be deemed official unless they were recorded on the Nazi Scales...
Ahem...the Nazi Scales are my own private bathroom scales. The name's a reference to a pet theory - every Nazi gets reincarnated as the bathroom scales of a fat fuck, which explains both their bitchy attitude, and the notion of some sort of punishment for their gittishness while alive - they get to be stepped on by us every day of their afterlives.
These blog entries, which when I'm doing it seriously tend to be every day affairs, are generally more conversational than they are lists of things eaten and exercise taken. That said, those details will be in there somewhere probably, because, believe it or not, people asked for them to be there. Something to do with investing in the process, I gather.
There will be swearing. There will be madness. There will be funny bits and dark bits, because, as I mentioned, this is not really me just 'needing to lose a bit of weight.' This is me taking back control of a part of my brain that appears bent on self-destruction. It's a battleground, with laughs along the way.
A week ago, as I say, I saw 20 stone on my Nazi Scales for the first time in five years. Since then, I've been edging towards Disappearing - alcohol's gone, desserts are gone, chocolate's gone, crisps are gone, fried food for the most part has gone. Carbs are reducing. Ho ho ho. Merry Fuckin' Christmas.
I've not had a chance to do much by way of exercise, due to the deadline crunch in which I currently find myself, and which appears to be getting no better any time soon. I have a day-job, and an editing company which I run in the laughingly-titled 'spare hours' after the day-job ends. I also contribute to a few geeky sites, and, believe it or not, want to try and become a published writer as well. Time has often been the enemy of my Disappearing, because much of what I do for large chunks of my day involves me sitting on my ass, staring at screens and not moving around a great deal. The effort must be made, consciously, to add exercise into my day, but hasn't as yet been made.
Nevertheless, on Tueday 27th December, which by virtue of this first blog entry we're calling the re-launch day, my Nazi Scales (pre-bathroom-visit) had me at:
19 stone, 7 pounds, or 273 pounds. (There are 14 pounds in a stone, in case you're wondering).
On the one hand, that means I've lost seven pounds in a week. So, yay. On the other hand, I have the bad grace to be disappointed in that, because just before Christmas, I was unofficially weighing in at 19 stone 5. Still, Christmas, I suppose, albeit a Christmas without sweets and treats. A Disappearing Christmas.
So this is where we begin, this time around - one stone and a quarter-pound down from where the Disappearing Man originally began. I don't begin to feel like I'm 'really' Disappearing though until I'm under 18 stone, so I still have a stone and a half to go before this begins to feel like progress. And I'm fully aware that the first week's loss is mostly water, rather than any of the hard stuff I actually need to shift - it's a gift of encouragement from the body when you're as far overweight as I am.
Oh and in case you're wondering, my 'ideal weight' according to the NHS is around 10 stone 7 pounds. Nine stone from now, or 126 pounds. I only aim to lose the medically recommended two pounds per week, or 104 pounds a year, leaving me at 12 stone or 169 pounds by 27th December 2017. I won't actually do that - I didn't the first time, because 104 pounds is over seven stone, and I'm perfectly well aware there will be plateaus, setbacks, stalls, and weeks where the numbers go in the wrong direction. But nevertheless, this is where we begin, having thrown ourselves right into the deep end with a Disappearing Christmas.
Come along for the ride - there'll be funnier stuff than this along the way, honestly!
