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.

The Trampoline Factor

First week of the new year, and there has been, at least, a little movement.

Today's weigh-in has me at 17st 10.75.

In other words, for anyone following this nonsense, it's two weeks ago. Again. Or indeed three weeks ago for that matter, as there was a week of no movement. The upside of course is that the half a pound I put on last week in the distinctly muted madness of a Christmas and New year celebration has evaporated. The downside, for those of my own, rather more melancholic nature, is that 0.5 pounds is a pretty poor repayment of effort for a week which has at least seen me begin walking again.

Hey ho, let us dance the happy dance of weightloss, but let us dance it with a trademark Alan Rickman sneer, just for balance.

It feels almost like being on a trampoline, with weekly snapshots taken at whichever point on a repeated bounce-wave I happen to be at on a Tuesday morning - 17st 10.75, 17st 10.75, 17st 11.5, 17st 10.75. Of course on that imagery, what I aim to do by a week today is to plunge through the black rubber of the trampoline and touch the ground underneath - the ground which in this case reads 17st 8.75. In itself, that feels like a nothing result, but the key is that if I achieve it, the week following, I'll be under another milestone - 17st 7, or the halfway point of the 17 stone spectrum. It feels hard to escape the logic of course that says next week, the trampoline will twang me back up, because for the fourth week in a row I haven't been able to get beneath the 'barrier.' Must do though, because of course, it's actually not logical at all, it's an invention which runs the risk of getting way out of hand. Let's act like we believe in zen calm and all that, and acknowledge that barriers are only barriers if we believe they're barriers.

Be the weightloss, be the weightloss, be the weightloss.

Ach, bugger zen calm and chanting - more walking, less food seems to be the order of the week. Woohoo.

Oh, and rather annoyingly, the blood sugar results are spiking again this week - this morning, 11.0. Yesterday 9.5. Day before, 11.8 (though there's a a rational reason for that - d's birthday on the 5th meant there was steak, and a rich madeira sauce, and arancini starter, and even a slice of appallingly gorgeous chocolate cake...), so 11.8 the following morning was relatively reasonable. 5th January was 10.4 - an annoying smidgen outside the lines. 4th - 9.7, a smidgen the other way. 3rd - 11.6. 2nd - 9.3. 1st, after a New Year's Eve Indian banquet - 10.9.

Apart from the logical results after big feasts, I could invent reasons randomly for the elevated results this week - possibly more fruit juice in my system than water? But let's take a little stock, shall we? I've just - believe it or not, and despite seeming to realise it last week, I've JUST realised taht the day after the Indian banquet was when I last weighed in, and that might just possibly explain a thing or two about last week's result. And I've similarly just realised that this week has included d's birthday feast, including cake, which may well have slammed the brakes on any greater loss this week. It was worth it, to be fair, so that's where you find me - having stomped the bounce and preparing to go all stern-eyed and walky to achieve a loss from this low point next week. Game on. Cake off. Downwarrrrrrrd!

The Deadlined Decembrist

Brr.
Double brr and buggery.

Firstly, it's been freezing, and positively pissing down much of this week, which has a natural tendency to make me curl up into a ball, pull a duvet over my head and hang a sign round my neck saying 'Fuck You Till Spring.'

Secondly, I've been on a tight deadline all week, which is now at the stage in a Bond movie where the villain pushes the hero's face closer and close to a bandsaw and Connery (let's face it, it's always Connery in metaphors, whoever your own personal Bond may be) grimaces and tries to summon some Scottish grit so he can donkey kick the villain in the balls and break free. That's meant that, even had the weather been lovely, I wouldn't have had time to take its kindness personally and go walking. This has been a week where staying indoors and eating and drinking hot things has been Plan A for several, extremely rational, reasons.

Which is why this morning, I weigh in at 17st 10.25.

Static. Hey, it's the deal, right? You move, the weight moves. You stay still, at your very luckiest, the weight stays still.
So that means it won't be till at least the last week of January that I see a 16  on the face of the Nazi Scales. Joy.

What's less, but still concerning, is that I've had blood sugars in the 7s and 8s all week, except today, when clearly, my personification of the universe is out to kick me, and I baaaarely scraped acceptability with a 9.9.

The obvious result of course is that when things don't go your way for the first time in a Disappearance (and probably at several more such points on the way down), your immediate impulsive reaction (or mine, anyway - it may be an only-child thing for all I know), is to sulk and pout and whine and storm off to the store for the biggest bar of chocolate you can find. It's Christmas, you can find some really huge bars of chocolate right now. There's a bar of Galaxy in our local Tesco Express that's only about a head shorter than I am. I know. I just checked, in a fume. it's a popsitively toddler reaction of throwing your toys out of the pram - 'Well, if being good isn't going to bring me results, I might just as well be bad, so there!'

Ride this idiocy out, or you'll fall, right there and then.
Perversely - and get a lot of the titanium testicles on THIS guy - my house is currently full of home-made fudge. After Eight Fudge. Bounty-studded Fudge. Fudge made by the fair hand of my wife, who has on occasion this week offered me 'just a smidge, to test.' But no. I eschew the Fudge of love ('...and STILL you don't lose!' roars my toddler-brain) - were I to go on a rampage, frankly, you wouldn't hear about it till afterwards, when I was penitent and ready to confess, and I wouldn't got o town on d's homemade fudge. I'd go to Tesco and get an enormo-bag of M and Ms and  eat them without tasting them, in secret, for the sheer visceral pleasure of self-defeat - did anyone miss the fact that in my case, this weight shit is frequently compulsive, and secret, and self-harming? Fairly sure I covered that, but might not have been for years...

But no. Bought myself a small bottle of apple juice (Because ooh, the pleasure) and a new box of breakfast cereal, came home, spat these words into the computer, and am going back to the bandaw in a moment). This week, I'm clearly not the Disappearing Man. This week, I'm the Staying-At-Home-In-The-Warm-And-Moving-Nowhere Man.

It happens. I know it happens. It's how you deal with it happening that's the key.
Onward, and downward, we go.

Bastard...

The Lemming Temptation Principle - 13/1/17

OK, so this is pure stupidity.
Went to Cardiff for a day of full-on day-jobbery and editing.

People who find this through Facebook, which to be fair is most of you, will know that quite apart from my recent shenanigans with hot barely-scraping-the-calories-together-to-warrant-the-name chocolate, and flirtations with really dreadful chocolate in a gas station, I've been obsessing in a kind of intellectual way about Ritter Sport - a range of properly kickass chocolate that appeats unavailable in Merthyr.

There's a WH Smiths in the concourse at Cardiff Central train station.

And here's the perverse thing. The hot chocolate was brought to me, and I enjoyed it.
The crappy gas station chocolate was just there, talking to me.
I went into the WH Smith on the concourse, and I searched its aisles for some Ritter Sport.
Now, as it happened, there wasn't any there, but this is the weird thing - I wasn't searching for it because I intended to buy any. I was searching for it to not buy any.

I know, I know, twisted, but hear me out.

A pal of mine recently, in a pep talk, told me to avoid situations that were tempting. 'You're a foodaholic. Would you expect an alcoholic to run a bar, or a drug addict to run a pharmacy?'

Bless.

Well-meant advice of course, but my philosophy has always been exactly opposite to that. If I'm avoiding temptation, then technically, people with me can't do anything I'd find tempting - and that's no way to do this. So I have a weird tendency to embark on Lemming Temptation Outings, trying to put myself right there, one decision away from failure, on a regular basis.
I'm not really sure why - but it feels absurdly important to do this, as though I'm only partially Disappearing if I'm doing it in an echo chamber of my own brain, as though I have to invite my own failure in order to prove I'm succeeding.

OK, so mostly just just twisted. And it's not lost on me that actually, I embarked on a failed Lemming Temptation Outing, because the object on which I was fixated...wasn't there.
Faaaaairly sure I'd have succeeded if it had been. But..curses. Next time, Ritter Sport. Next time...

The Obsessive Compulsive Potential - Part 2: 12/1/17

Hello folks - been absent for a couple of days, but the blog entries have written themselves on the inside of my skull, so just catching up now.

When last we saw our Disappearing Man, he'd been brought a mug of hot chocolate, had a bizarre internal dialogue between Fat-Self and Disappeaing-Self and determined not to worry about it.

The thing is, that very night, while out on a walk and stopping in to what is now a familiar gas station, the voices of temptation actually WERE much more potent than I'd expected. 'Oh go onnnn,' whispered a chunky Kit Kat from the shelves. 'You might as well, you've got a taste for it now. Chocolatey goodnesssss...'

If you've never imagined a chunky Kit Kat as the serpent in the Garden of Evil, you probably won't understand the allure of really pretty shitty, ethically dubious chocolate. That's something non-Disappearers never seem to quite understand. They think when you have cravings for illicit stuff, it's probably for the really good quality stuff. And to be fair, sometimes it is. But I've had many a long dark night of the soul pondering the attractions of really quite ghastly chocolate, or carbohydrate, or whatever. It's equivalent, really, to thinking an alcoholic must get champagne cravings, or a junkie can only really really want the finest Peruvian cocaine, snorted out of a hooker's ass-crack.
Nono, our pleasures are, for the most part, mundane and pedestrian, but it's precisely that mundanity that forges links in our synapses and makes us WANT them.

Probably needless to say, but I eschewed the cheap seductive delights of the chunky Kit Kat from Hell. I eschewed the malty deliciousness of the slab of Maltesers chocolate too (again, AS chocolate, a shockingly shitty invention, the slab of Malteser, but still, sometimes, you just want to ram one down your throat until you choke. (I once had quite a disgusting moment on a railway platform in the north of England with a couple of 'Malteaster' bunnies. We don't speak about it. No really, leave it alone...)).

Nevertheless, it's interesting, to me at least, that the idea that I might have transgressed one of my self-imposed and clearly whacko rules about what's verboten led me to feel the temptation to throw myself heartily off the Disappearing wagon and into a pile of shitty chocolate. Still - let's see what happens next.

The Obsessive Compulsive Potential

I think - I could be wrong, but I think - it's pretty clear that Disappearing, the way I do it, has the potential to tip over into a fairly comprehensive personality disorder. The black-and-whiteness, the Perspex boxes, the compulsive unofficial weighing, the anxiety if I miss a day's exercise, the frantic rationalisations about what I've eaten, and whether figures are pre-or-post-'bathroom.' Clearly, it's effective, but as an actual mindset with which to go through life, it requires quite some pulling up later on in the process if one is not to crash and burn on the ground of one's life.

I mention this because at the moment I'm editing a novel, detailing the life, the rituals, the inner chiding voice of a man with some sort of obsessive compulsive disorder. It's a good book, but when, as happened twice last night, you read an action, and immediately understand in every disc of your spine what must follow it, it's a) a sign of good characterisation, and b) jusssst a little bit worrying.

Perversely, I just read a section of it about the man freaking right out when someone makes him tea in 'the wrong mug' - he has a mug that's his, a mug that's safe, and other mugs, should he drink out of them, will lead him to damnation, to unspecified evil consequences.

d popped her head around the office door as I was reading that, with a steaming mug.
Now - let's be clear. I don't have a special mug, and I don't believe in damnation.  And, perhaps inspired by all the talk of mugs of tea, I'd just been about to get off my ass and go and make one when she came in, bearing the steaming mug.

In the book, our protagonist, unable to drink from another mug for fear of damnation, unable NOT to drink from it for fear of embarrassment and discovery of his condition, goes the classic 'Oh, look at that!' route, then 'accidentally' spills the contents from the wrong mug and goes to make himself a refill in the right mug.

I knew what was in my mug before I even looked. It was - (cue dramatic music) - hot chocolate!

Now, let's be real here. We're not talking Belgian, cocoa-rich goodness, we're talking powdery, sugar-lite, 40-calories-per-sachet malarkey, though made with d's trademark care.

But in my brain, the battle began.
'That's chocolate. You're not allowed chocolate.'
'Do me a frigging favour. That's never seen a cocoa nib in its life.'
'It's still chocolate.'
'In what possible way is it chocolate? I'm not BEING this person.'
'You ARE this person. And it's Gateway Chococate.'
'It bloody isn't.'
'Bloody is. You can't drink it. Bad things will happen. Weight gain will happen. You'll have broken your Perspex boxes. Next thing you know, you'll be face down in the muffins at the gas station, weighing 23 stone.'
'Fuck. Right. Off. I'm drinking it.'
'Allllright, but on your own waistline be it.'
'It's forty calories per cup, for fuck's sake. my usual Starbucks drink has sugar-free caramel in it that costs more than that, and I haven't gone on a caramel binge yet.'
'But this is choooooocolate.'
'Oh, seriously, shut up.' And with that, I took a sip, and another, sadly not for the sake of the pleasure of it, but to put the question beyond doubt. I'm not about to turn a loving, caring, perfectly beautiful gesture into the beginning of some unravelling downward spiral.

Of course, technically, come five o'clock, I AM about to go and walk 12,000 steps. But...y'know...I would have been doing that anyway.

Yes, I would. Oh you can shurrup too...