The Denial of Disappearing Climate Change

You know that phenomenon when people who stand to gain from the ruination of the earth  say 'Brr, it's cold today. See, there can't be any global warming?'

I feel almost embarrassed to have been able to type that sentence, but you know what I mean.

Yyyyeah, that is me, right now, in relation to the ecosystem of my body.

Yesterday, I went to get my semi-traditional beating by the usually-not-listening drug-mule diabetic nurse, after submitting some vials of the old red stuff for testing last week.

I knew I'd be getting a beating, because I haven't been particularly good for a while. And fair enough, she knew her role in the proceedings, and beat me within an inch of my life. Blood sugar down on a year ago, but still pretty freaking high. Choloesterol up. Liver enzyme count up. She changed my prescription slightly, offered me her latest 'super safe, honest, in the trials' gizmo - a kind of injectable nausea, that makes you feel a bit sick and makes you feel full. I said I'd read up on it, but that if I could avoid the whole injectable pathway, that'd be good thanks.
The one thing she impressed on me, several times, looking me straight in the eye and annunciating importantly, like a character in a Chris Chibnall Doctor Who story delivering plot-exposition, was that 'Doing nothing...is the wrong thing.'

My body, it seems, is finding ways to cope with my dumb ass. It's working just fine...ish, despite elevated blood sugar levels and all the rest of it. Just as Mother Nature's finding ways to deal with our shit, but she doesn't have to be happy about it. You can run it this way, said the nurse, but if you do, one day it'll break. Badly. And that'll more or less be that.

Which of course I already knew, but which doesn't especially help. I'm going to 'talk to someone' she recommended, because I feel the need to unravel this shit at the root - the sense of self, the sense of identity, the sense of giving myself a ready explanation for things, and the self-detructive lemming factor, and the self-war...so that'll be fun for whoever it is I talk to. Get an overthinker to tell you about themselves. What could possibly go wrong there?

And then, today, it was weigh-in day, and I tipped the Nazi Scales at 17 stone 4.25 (I would do it in Kilos for you, but we've had a memor through from Jacob Rees-Poshgit to only use imperial measurements). Down a pound and a half on last week, down...I think a couple of pounds or so on two weeks ago. And in my brain, immediately the line sprang up: 'See? Can't be all that bad - I'm losing weight!'

A...ha. And the rain means there's no global warming too, asshole. Get your shit together Fyler, for fuck's sake...

The Seaside Years

Err...hello?

Is this thing on?

This is The Disappearing Man, a blog about one fat bloke's efforts not to die quite as soon as he's currently scheduled to do, through the application of sheer bloody-minded stubborn-bastardy.

This blog's been in existence now for about seven or eight years. When it started, I was living in London, and was 20 stone 7.25 lbs, or 287.25 lbs for my American friends, or...oh hold on, talk among yourselves, I haven't quite got enough fingers for this bit...just over 130 kg, the web informs me.

That was heavy. My doctor had decided it was heavy enough to recommend me for bariatric surgery. And that was a genuine option for me. I faced a long dark tea-time of the stubborn bastard, and decided I couldn't personally go for the surgery until I'd tried my own implacable determination against the training I'd had in being a fat bastard and killing myself, mouthful by mouthful.

I did it for a little over a year, and lost six stone, or 84 lbs, or 38 kg. Along the way there was much fun, much ranting and sweating and hatred of the human race, and a progression from being the bloke who struggled to put on his own socks to a marathon-walking, spin-classing, gym-understanding bloke who confidently swore he'd never go back to the way he was before.

The thing is...my brain, as I'm coming to realise more and more as the years go by, works a little differently to many people's. Intellectually, I'm all about doubt and grey areas and live and let live - I'm among the hippiest of hippies in many ways. But in terms of my own existence, I seem to live a binary, inflexible life - one thing or the other.

The way I got to be over 20 stone was by allowing myself total, childlike freedom. If I wanted something, I had it, and devil take the consequences. I was at one and the same time entirely content with this approach and deeply self-loathing - I was Schodinger's Fat Fuck.

The way I Disappeared the first time was to radically and rapidly change the nature of my behaviour - to switch from total liberty to almost-total self-denial. I made a decision, and instantly, overnight, cut out fried foods, chocolate, desserts, fizzy drinks and overt sugar, while changing my approach to portion size, protein and even the dreaded salad vegetables (which I maintain to this day are more or less nature's garnish and should not be taken at all seriously as a food group). I began walking - first short distances, then longer, and longer. I invested in an exercise bike heavy enough to take my ass (not as easy a thing as you might think to find), and I began to pedal that ass viciously off, plugging in my iPod to keep me up to pace and avoid the running stream of obscenities in my brain. I started drinking water for the first time in my life, replacing all my seductive fizzies with clear boredomjuice.

And the way that worked was what I think of as my 'perspex boxes.' I have to live in a world where other people are able to eat and drink what they like, and not want to pound their skulls in - I'm married to a foodie with a baking fetish and mad skills, it simply can't be an option to ban all the good things in life from my world. That means I erected these 'perspex boxes' all around me. I was in the box, and all the tempting, delicious stuff was outside - visible but unreachable as far as my brain was concerned.

As I say, it's not for everyone, but it worked for me. During the course of that year I moved, with d, my wife, from London back to my childhood home,  the Welsh Valleys town of Merthyr Tydfil. And it was there that, one night, d asked me whether I could, after that successful year, experiment with re-introducing treat-foods into my diet. It began with a battered cod and chips.

And the boxes were broken. The digital, black-and-white world in which I live couldn't sustain just one treat, in the way an alcoholic's world can't really sustain just one drink.

Over the next handful of years, I tried time and time again to resurrect my boxes, and failed. And the weight came back as more and more I ate and drank precisely what I wanted. Precisely what I wanted, of course, wass mostly carb, and fried things, and sugar, and chocolate. Because Dopamine, right?

We don't live in Merthyr any more. In the last two months, we've finally achieved a long-held dream and moved to the Welsh coast, to the Anti-London that is Saundersfoot. The last year has been insanely stressful for us both, as we've been trying to sell our Merthyr flat, while both being made redundant.

This week, the flat finally sold. Money transferred. Debts were paid off.
The new chapter of our lives, this seaside chapter that hopefully sees us through to the end, began this week. And I'd made a pledge that after a year of extra-special stress-eating (something to which I've never knowingly been prone before - I always copped to eating for the sake of gluttony, or just because I wanted the tasty stuff), when the flat sold, and the stress lifted, I would get the hell back to my Disappearing.

The blog's part of the process, it seems - that sensation of reporting to someone on the ups, the downs, the issues of Fat Fuckery and Stubborn Gittishness, and which will win in a clash of those titans. It's like having an electronic Father Confessor, an audience, a bunch of eyes I have to meet if I go wrong. So here we are again, preparing to erect the perspex boxes. Preparing to bike, and walk, and ignore the fact that I now live in one of the many HOMES of battered cod and chips, with tea shops, cake shops and chip shops everywhere I look.

The rule is that I AIM to lose the medically-safe amount each week - 2lb. There'll be regular weekly weigh-ins on a Tuesday morning (slightly hampered at launch by the fact that a great deal of our stuff is still in Merthyr - including my scales), by which progress and setbacks will both be recorded. Suffice it to say that I firmly believe I'm now heavier than I was when I began my first Disappearance, but the official launch weight will be whatever the scales first records when it gets here. That means the goal will be to lose 104 lbs in the first year - 2lbs per week, on average, over 52 weeks.

That's goal 1: Lose nearly 7.5 stone in 52 weeks. I have no expectation of actually achieving that of course, but having the goal is useful as an aspirational stick with which to beat myself. If and when I DO achieve the 7.5 stone loss marker, I'll still have around 2.5 stone to go to be at my medically advised weight, being a shortarse at just 5ft 6. But one goal at a time, eh?

As is the way with most people about to embark on a diet, we've just more or less finished all the 'bad' food in the house. While writing this, I ate the last slice of d's homemade Thanksgiving apple pie, and a chunk of Christmas pudding. It's in me now, and it's done. This part of my life is done.

Perspex boxes - up.

Come along for the ride if you like. Welcome to The Disappearing Man: The Seaside Years.

The Harry Attitude

I deleted the first four paragraphs of toight's blog entry, simply because I annoyed myself so much. I was complaining about this and fretting about that, and whinging like a whingy thing about something else entirely, and on, and on, and on it went.

Then I thought of my mate Harry. And the whinging went away, because it couldn't lift its head for shame by comparison.

It's a big day for Harry today. Today, he starts a course of treatment that will take him from how he looks and how he's perceived today to how he feels inside and wants to be perceived in the future. He's already been through a lot, because generally, our society likes to poke people with sticks when they're not what we think they 'should' be, and yell 'Waargh! Different is wrong, go and live under a stone and stop confusing us!' 

We really need to grow the hell up, as a society.

Harry's quest to match biology with psychology is a long, hard slog, partly because it's a complex process and partly because we're nowhere near as evolved a society as we think we are, so institutions and expectations make it harder than it should be. He's got a hell of a journey ahead of him, that needs him to be stronger that I'll ever have to even contemplate being.

Yet today's a really exciting day for this 28 year-old mate of mine, because it's the beginning of a new phase, a new push towards the version of himself that has to be. That just, absolutely, has to be. That's the difference, of course - it has to be.

I'd never be as crass as to compare our journeys, but I look at Harry, smiling and excited and on his way, and I look at myself whinging about this and fretting about that, and I just think 'Shurrup Tone, stop being an arse.' There's a lesson in his attitude, in his excitement and his smile, because whatever he's about to go through on his journey, his destination is set - it has to be. Everything in between is the getting there. That kind of vision's enough to make any whinge die on your lips, I promise you.

I'm not about to make saints or angels out of any bugger - I'm sure Harry can be a cantankerous sod if he wants to be, though I've never seen it. But neither am I above looking at my friends, and seeing the journeys they're on, and shutting the hell up from my point of ridiculous privilege, and raising a glass in salute of their strength of character, and the attitude that carries them on. And today, I look at Harry and think 'That's a dead cool attitude, man. Thanks for showing me that.'

We don't of course see more than a snapshot of each other's lives as we go through our days - this person, that person, their strength, their excitement, their optimism, their fear. Only those closest to us get to see the whole of us - that's the point of that closeness. But I know enough, I think, about my mate to say that a healthy heaping tablespoon of Harry's attitude in all of our minds and make-ups would do all of us a load of good, and me more than most. 

So enough neurotic whinging. Here's to Harry, and to all those people you know who are on journeys of their own, but who always make the day a bit brighter by also being a part of yours.

The Disappearing Ripples

Ripples are cool.

Clothes Maketh The Man. Tidy Desk, Tidy Mind. Fake It Till You Make it.

Gotta love a good aphorism.

They’re worth of course precisely as much as we invest in them – if they mean nothing to us, if we invest nothing in them, the world turns and nobody gives a damn.

On the Tidy Desk principle though, I've got one of my own: Disappearing Body, Disappearing Life - the more lean the body grows, the leaner, the more productive, the more focused grows everything else in my life. It works (for me, because I invest in it) on a kind of Disappearing Ripple principle.

I’m starting to feel the ripples of being the Disappearing Man again. I’ve been doing it now for, what? All of nine spectacular days – hardly enough to effect a particular life-change, you might think, and indeed you might be right. But just as when a rusted wheel first tries to turn again, there’s sloth and screeching, but the more it turns, the less noticeable the complaining noise becomes, so with Disappearing – nine days of following a routine of sorts, a rhythm, an image of how the personal world looks now, and I’m less inclined to see it as ‘a thing,’ as something where every tiny triumph or massive personal disaster (it seems to be entirely within my nature to magnify the drama of potential failure) needs to be trumpeted to the world. This might, just conceivably, make for even duller blog entries going forward. With any luck for the reader, they may also get significantly shorter.

Nevertheless though, the ripples are fun when they start, and they're also good fun when they start to bubble. 

‘Wow,’ said d this morning when I went in to kiss her goodbye for the day before beggaring off to walk around the lake. ‘Good outfit choice. You’ve gone from blah-’ She held her hands out wide. ‘-to schlung,’ she said, pulling her hands closer and bringing them down relatively straight.

She was referring to a mistake I’d made some months before. I’d bought a T-shirt with a slogan on it (no, really – I’m 43), but rather gloriously (glorious in that such a thing was still possible) overestimated my size, so it looks essentially like a nightshirt on me. What’s more, it pulls a particular con trick on the eye – because it’s so big, there’s a sense that I need it to be that big, and so it cons the brain into thinking I am that big. I’d worn it yesterday, changing today into an older but plainer and smaller black T-shirt, which, with black trousers, almost has a stealth effect – it’s no secret that bigger people wear a lot of black to minimize the effect of their size on the eye. So she’d noticed the difference between the ‘mu-mu shirt’ and the ‘big human shirt’, and suddenly I’d lost a bit of bulge, and assumed a better shape.

This in itself is not a Disappearing Ripple – I’m actually at least 14 lbs away from the effect of the Disappearing Ripple that makes me, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, ‘be at charges for a looking glass, and entertain some score or two of tailors, to study fashions to adorn my body’ – in other words, before I start being able to look at myself in the mirror and think of clothes as things that might apply to me beyond the Comic Book Guy style of slogan shirts. But I felt the familiar memory of that ripple in my reaction to her comment – a bit of a spring in the step, and a bit of grit in the step as I went around, and around, and around the lake to burn a breakfast’sworth of calories. It's not yet a ripple, but it's the bubble that will eventually rise to the surface of my life and cause the ripple.

There are other Disappearing Ripples too. They all work like dominos lined up and ready to fall. I have a number of projects that have been idling, and today, more than at any point in recent months, I’ve felt them sink into my bones and become part of me. There are To Do Lists, and Sub-To Do Lists, but more than that, the Disappearing discipline is beginning to spread through my veins and my brain. To achieve C, I’m putting A into action, and setting up B to follow. 

In a way, as I’ve mentioned before, the Disappearing Me is a rather less amiable, less pleasant human being, the open-handed bonhomie of my nature shrivels somewhat under the constraints of discipline, but on the other hand, the hippie in my brain rather burns away too – I begin to stop thinking ‘Some day, I’ll get my shit together…’ and actually begin to get my shit together, lining up the dominos between me and achievement. Which, on reflection is probably just as well – we’re already almost a third of the way through 2015, and I have a lot of stuff to do, to achieve, to be a part of. The Disappearing Ripples in my brain have just about begun to warm me up, to oil the engine of my potential, and to start me back on a path where things don’t slide beyond me on a river of enjoyably contented days.

So – I can hear you from here – what’ve you done, Disappearing-Boy?

As yet, very little: the sensation’s just beginning, the first drops of oil dripping onto the wheels in my brain. But I can feel them nourishing me. The rhythms are becoming normalized, so it’s less of a ‘thing’, less of a struggle to get out of bed at a time I previously would have balked at, less of a pain in the butt to exercise at that time, to get a start on the day. Less of a hardship to not have the things I would previously have wanted. Less of a burn of wanting them in the first place. I always said, the first time I did this, and I maintain this time, that I didn’t feel like I was really Disappearing till I’d got beneath the 18st barrier, till I saw my first 17. Readers will know of course, I’m still significantly higher than that, so I haven’t exactly had that superhero movie moment of ‘Game on, now we’re serious, let’s kick some supervillain ass’ that launches the hard rockin’ third act. But in terms of my mindset, I’m beginning to feel already as though the Disappearing Man is emerging, coming through, breaking out. I’m not by any stretch there yet, but my Clark Kent has I think taken off his glasses. My Tony Stark has made his kickass billionaire witticism, my Peter Parker’s Spidey Sense is tingling.

The Disappearing Ripples are the unexpected effects that the act of Disappearing will eventually have in my life and the lives of those around me – dynamic subsidiary changes that come from increased social inclusion and rising confidence. They’re not by any means here yet – but for the first time, today, I can feel them bubbling up inside, waiting their cue.

Feels good.