The Life-Changing Magic Of Not Being A Dick

No whinging this week - can't be arsed, don't have time, have deadlines to meet.

Did buggerall by way of exercise again - I know, quelle surprise, eh? As such, this morning, was up a apound and a half - 17 stone 5.5. Grr, waah, humph, etc etc - I'm trying to condense the mourning cycle into a pellet-form, so as to swallow it and get it out of the way. Next couple of days will be fairly brutal and housebound, but I'm hoping, after that, to get back on the walking trail, elbowing tourists in the throat left and right as the moment requires, and so adding back some actual exercise into a routine that I absolutely know has become too sedentary again.

Here's a thing.
Far too frequently, in this life we lead, I take the Path of the Dick.
Bear with me, this is going somewhere.

My pal Sian, also, famously within our circle, whenever given a choice between two options, takes the Path of the Dick.

We are two Dicks together.

Over the last couple of days, we've been getting our heads together, coming clean on our various Dick-Path choices, and resolving, whenever possible, to take the Non-Dick Path from now on.

For instance, the Dick-Path approach to my job involves winging every deadline to the limit, on the basis that I can do things really fast if I need to, but not, perversely, UNTIL I need to. The Non-Dick-Path would involve setting daily achievement targets to achieve work goals on or ahead of time. The Dick-Path approach to finance is to spend entirely theoretical money on the basis that it'll be coming in; the Non-Dick-Path would involve impulse control, saving, eating Rice Krispies out of the box and possibly bank robbery.

The Dick-Path approach to Disappearing of course is to eat as though I'm going to counteract it with exercise...and then do buggerall exercise. The Non-Dick-Disappearing Man would not only do the exercise to counteract the calories taken in, but also wouldn't, for instance regard Tuesdays, post-weigh-in, as a kind of 'Fuck it, I'll make up for it the rest of the week' day on the eating front.

Now, I should tell you that THIS Tuesday has been marked with a fish-and-chip supper, and apparently may yet contain apple crumble, which I intend to embrace like a long-lost friend.

But...y'know...starting tomorrow...the Non-Dick Path for sure.

Hmm...been audiobook-listening to some oddish self-help books this year. Maybe The Life-Changing Magic Of Not Being A Dick has a future?

The Disappearing Disappearance

'Course, you know what'll happen now, don't you?' I challenged.

'Go on,' said d, stretching out a conversational foot in front of her on the thin ice of my assumptions.

'It'll be bloody gone in the morning,' I declared. 'The thing about unofficial weigh-ins the day before the actual weigh-in is they're just there to taunt you and put you off your guard so they can kick your face in with disappointment on the day. This is The Way Of the Disappearing Universe. I Have Spoken...eth. So Shall It Be...'

Bloody was, an' all.

For reasons that passeth all understanding, but have more to do with the fact that yet another week has passed with me doing more stupid stuff than sensible stuff, I weighed-in yesterday. Oooh, I was tempted to blog it and so make it an 'official' weigh-in. Not that it was exactly a stellar result or anything - last week, I was 17 stone 4 pounds. Yesterday, I was 17 stone 3.5 pounds. But I was sooooo tempted to take it, make up some reason why yesterday was 'official' and go with it.

But no. Nooooo, Captian Big-Boy-Pants here decided to let it go, to act all sensible over dinner and trust to whatever the universe had in store for the 'properly' official weigh-in day.

You wanna know what the universe had in store for the 'properly' official weigh-in day?

Mm-hmm. 17 stone 4, that's what.

My minisicule little half-pound Disappearance this week - Disappeared overnight. I even did the stupid, desperate thing of waiting around for what I've taken to thinking of as 'Second Bathroom' (S'like a Hobbit's Second Breakfast, only...rather further along the process), but noooo. 17 stone 4. Still.

So that's that.

What we used to call a 'non-mover' in the days when music charts appeared to matter to the nation. On the one hand, disappointing, especially after the glimmer of even a tiny loss. On the other hand, given the week and its lack of much by way of serious effort, I should probably be all full of sunshine, light and gratitude. So - yay, I didn't put any weight on this week!

Yeah, I don't know either, it's a thing I'm trying, this positivity schtick, let's go with it and see where it leads...

The Hamster-Wheel of Panic

Last week I wrote this blog three days after my weigh-in, and, in that kind of maudlin, silent signalling of self-inflicted martrydom that I vaguely believe I learned from my bio-dad (He had a knack with a muscial choice, did my bio-dad, throwing down the late Elvis tracks like Suspicious Minds and My Boy, and singing his heart out to affect the mood of the room, while claiming he'd just fancied the sound of them), but which I can justly claim to have refind into a rather more fully sickening brow-clutching 'Woe is me! No, really, I'm fine' double standard, I reported that, in the wake of having dropped two pounds in a day and then maintained that level for a week, I would probably celebrate by injecting chocolate into my eyeballs or somesuch.

The point of which of course is that I wrote it on Friday, not Tuesday. So by Friday, I already knew what the intervening three days had looked like - sedentary, and while not exactly crammed from end to end with intra-venous chocolate, certainly not by any stretch as seriously dedicated to healthy eating as I should have been. So I prepped you for disaster by that throwaway line of what would 'probably' happen.

This, by the way, is the kind of hamster-wheel that circles all. The. Time in my brain. Reality, perception, work, non-work, how to justify and find the appropriate answers, the appropriate pose. Now, imagine that kind of acidic over-analysis applying to every single thing. Every single choice, every single action, where to stand, how to be, what to say and not-say-now, what to do and why not to do it till it's almost too late, and how, above all, to wage war. war on myself, war between the selves that want to succeed and want to fail, want to do what they set out to do and want to coolly revel in the epicness of failure. The war between the urge to triumph and the urge to self-destroy, and round, and round, and round, and round it goes, never stopping, never pausing, never ever shutting up - just in case you were wondering why I wear headphones 80% of the time, it's to block out this ungovernable nonsense in my brain.

I tried explaining this to a doctor once - he gave me more diet pills.

And yes, of course, incidentally, I know that this particular entry sounds like I just did an 8-ball of coke and have nowhere to go. Partially, that's because that's what it sounds like inside my head all the time, partially, it's because it's vaguely cathartic to get this out of my fingertips for a moment, and partially of course it's because some level of hamster-wheeling said 'Let them know - THAT'll be fun!'

All of which is by way of explaining that last week's entry was written with insider knowledge that I'd probably go up this week.
Then there was a Walk.

A walk I agreed to when there seemed fewer clouds in the sky and less work to do and fewer encroaching deadlines, and a walk which, when I woke up an hour before it was due to start, I gave a hearty 'Oh fuck!' about because by then I really didn't want to do it, because it was a 'led' walk, with Other Human Beings, which if you've been here a while you'll know I applaud in the abstract but detest in the reality. Nevertheless, the hamster-wheel turned, and the idea of having to explain I'd booked a place on the walk and then had been too put off by the proximity of humans to actually go through with it gave me a result of at the very least looking like I was having some kind of real problem with the outside world and its humans, and so, to disprove the appearance of that, irrespective of the reality of that, I should get my arse out the door and go.

So I went.

The walk itself was fine. The having to be sociable sucked - I'm not entirely sure why. They were nice people, good people, each with their own interesting backstory, but something deep in my heart resented the fact that I was obliged to be sociable with them, to ask them questions to which I could give not the most shrivelled of figs for the answers, to try and make them smile and laugh and, frankly, fail - tough crowd, your average ramblers, it appears - and JEEESUS, I swear I'm not on coke right know, but if you're reading this with spaces between the words it's only because my fingers are more courteous than my brain and they're cutting you a break. Anyyyyhow, did the walk. Longish walk, over 10,000 steps, many of them uphill, came home, collapsed, whinged in muscle-ache for the next day and a half, did nothing.

Weighed in this morning.
17 stone 4.

Might not sound like much to you, this half-pound of progress, but really, honestly, I will take it and kiss it and stroke it, and I shall call it George, because the onnnnly goddamn thing that can have got me there is yomping through the local nature with a bunch of people I'd much rather have shut out behind the safety of some earbuds. So - yay to them.

I know, right - this didn't go quite where you were thinking it would go, probably, because of all the high-octane fatalism at the front end, you probably expected a result of grandiose failure - hell, I kind of did. Again, thank the fingertips, they're far more often where the actual processing power of my brain is located - the majority of my ACTUAL brain is locked into spirals of hamster-wheeling about every decision from 'Tea or coffee?' to 'What do we need to do with the day?' to actually get anything constructive done, which is why a) the processing power's in the fingertips, and b) that's a good thing.

I think perhaps the thing is that this blog's been written not on cocaine, nor even on the grandly self-castigating melodrama of 'Oh woe is me, I've put on weight!' I have just checked my bank balance though, which rather spurred the self-revolving lemming in my brain to a series of monotonous 'Oh fuck''s, and it's probably that that started me off in such an insane spirit in this blog. Even as I write this, I can feel the panic levels falling, dropping, the boiling hot fear of crashing myself into the ever-loving ground eeeeeasing, even though nothing whatsoever has actually changed in that reality since I started writing the blog. Don't get me wrong, the hamster-wheel absolutely does revolve in the way I've detailed, all the time, without end (though crucially, gazing at the sea sometimes helps), but I can feel myself coming down from the abject, world-punching panic and fear of peering down the gunbarrel of financial oblivion, as the hamster-wheel revolves. Send the emails one needs to send. Get the money in the door. Pay the bills one has to pay, Revolve, revolve, revolve...

If this is now just sounding like splurge on a page, there's one important piece of connective tissue. Saw the weigh-in this morning, was all kinds of 'Cool - I'll take that this week. Saw the bank account, went 'Bang!' and started revolving at coke-speed. First thing I did? Went to Tesco, grabbed a sleeve of chocolate biscuits.

That's not even comfort eating, that's panic-eating. I didn't even particularly want them, I'm not, today, especially motivated by the sweetness and the chocolatey fantasticness of things. But get this - in response to a moment of stone cold panic, I spent money I do not have, on food that's practically guaranteed to elevate my blood sugars and is likely to be stored, in the absence of exercise, as fat. I paid...to self-harm.

I had four, as the basis of a bowl of cereal. Breakfast of self-defeating windbags, right there.

Now of course, I've come clean about them to you here, which means I'm not going to eat any more of them. But ultimately, the point is that the way my wind works is a constant wheel of questions, choices, judgements and random moments of panic.

And the immediate, unthinking response to a moment of panic was to grab the chocolate biscuits.

Did I mention that I ttried to explain this to a doctor once? Yyyyeah - diet pills.
While I know that the fundamental equation of weightloss is straightforward - take in less of the 'bad' stuff, do more of the good stuff that burns up the bad stuff, hoorah, all is well in the land of Oz - it is possibly worth acknowledging that what you're dealing with in many people's cases is not the calm, sunny-weathered mental landscape that can simply follow this equation to Positivityville. More often, you're throwing the equation (and the pills) into a cyclotron full of forks and expecting it to survive and make sense, even when the cyclotron panics.

My cyclotron panicked this morning. Fortunately, of course, it panicked after the weigh-in. Here's to not panic-eating evvvvvverything in the district before we do this again.

The Temporal Irrelevance

So last week, I had to report a rise in weight to 17 stone 6.5, despite not really feeling like it was a valid reading.

The day after the weigh-in, with a more...shall we say regular approach to the business of digestion, I did an unofficial weigh-in and tipped the scales at 17 stone 4.5.

After a certain amount of jumping up and down, yelling 'Ha! Bloody told you so!' and flicking somewhat vehement Vs at the Nazi Scales, I went about my business, and, thinking that, with a two pound lead on the week, I should really do my best to capitalise on it. Went walking for three consecutive days (only slightly embuggeranced on the way by the fact that d started making mini pineapple upside-down cakes). The rest of the week I didn't walk, due to deadlines, but I did act rather more like a human being determined to live - smaller portions, relatively sensible lunch choices, protein and vegetation-rich dinners etc.

Which means it is with a certain pride that I can tell you I weighed in this week at:
17 stone 4.5.

The whole week might as well not have existed after Wednesday. Buggerall moved, buggerall changed, I might as well have locked myself in a deep freeze and gone cryogenic from Wednesday to Tuesday - the result would have been the same.

So, on the one hand, and I mean this sincerely - BUM.

On the other of course, I have at least technically moved two pounds in the right pigging direction. So yay - let tiny banners be waved, let tiny trumpets be blown, let tiny vuvuzuelas be confiscated immediately, because they inarguably should be, irrespective of the celebration.

And on we go. At this point, I just want to be done. More immediately, I'm booooooored of writing a 17 at the front of my weight. I want the creamy goodness of a 16, because it feels at this point like there's still so far to go, and right now I'm merely dicking about, back and forth in the shallow end of the 17s. 

Will that mean I work extra hard to push on down this week?
You know me - what do you think? Probably means I'll mainline chocolate biscuits into my eyeballs or somesuch dumbass thing.

But let's see. At least for now, I'm heading in the right bloody direction again.