The Psychopath Dial

Yes, yes, yes, hello again.

I always feel a little diffident these days when I come back to this blog, as though I'm creeping back in with a blanket over my head. No interviews, please - The Calorific Criminal is back for another period of self-flagellation, till he gets too busy and/or leaps off the Disappearing Wagon again and then doesn't come back for aaaaaages.

Well....yeah, kinda. If a blog is anything worth writing, it's a reflection of the real world. Annnnd that's my real world. So - take me while you get me, folks; I seem unlikely at this stage to get anything book-length together, so right now, it's this or nothing.

So, where were we? Oh yes, Tuesday.
Tuesday is weigh-in day.

I don't know how to explain this, because at the moment I look rather like Santa Claus' less reputable, gutter-living brother, but weigh-in this morning was:
18st 8.

260 pounds, for those not staring down the barrel of a Brexit. Near-as damnit 118 kg, for the metriphiles.

Now in cold hard black and white those may not look like great numbers for a nearly-47 male of five feet six, or...oh gods, hold on...1.68 metres (if you're British or French) or 1.68 meters (if you're not).
Nevertheless, in recent times when I've felt the need to restart the blog, I've usually been at least a stone (14 pounds) heavier than that, strugglling to 'see an 18'. So if nothing else, we start this time out slightly ahead of the previous game.

I'm also under orders to test my blood sugars - which, thanks once again to a refusal to have any kind of internationally standard system, will mean buggerall to anyone, but let's just say I was told that between 6-8 is ideal, and anything in single figures will do in a pinch. After having quite a reasonable stint on single-figure results, recently I've been having a bunch that are jusssst the wrong side of that that. Today is 10.5, yesterday 10.6, the day before 10.3 etc. So clearly, something needs doing that hasn't been happening recently. To be fair though, my lifestyle's been pretty unhealthy again lately. So yyyyeah - tackling that seems to be A Thing To Do.

On the distinctly up side, most of the tourists have now fucked off from our little seaside town, which will mean it will be possible to go for more walks without feeling the surging, seething need to hit people with sticks. I mean, I might still feel the need as we hurtle toward a calamitous Brexit, but if they're harder to find, I probably won't click over on the psychopath dial to actively hunt them down.

So here we are again. for those who don't know the rules of the game, the aim is to lose two pounds per week, which is the medically advised weight loss. There'll be weeks when that doesn't happen, there'll be weeks when things go catastrophically in the other direction. But the intention is to push down, and down, and down, over the course of one year. Two pounds a week is 104 pounds a year, which would put me at 154 pounds, or 11 stone. Believe it or not, at that point, I'd still have 14 pounds or 1 more stone to lose to achieve me ideal weight, according to bastards who probably eat pizza every day and never get fat...

So...yyyyeah. Here we jolly well go again - though this time, in a town mostly comprising of fish and chip shops, cake shops, an old-fashioned sweet shop, cafes, gastropubs, restaurants and a fatally delicious kebab shop.

What could possibly go wrong?

The Bloody Truth

Hello again. Three weeks or so since I blogged last. Reasons for that are many and silly, but mostly bound up in a) weight gain, and b) arsery. Arsery which has seen me notsomuch fall off the wagon as leap off and burn the fucker to the ground.

Here's the thing though - that ends right now.

First thing's first, it's Tuesday. Ermmmm, last I recorded, I think I'd gone back up to 19 stone dead, or 266 pounds, which was irritating.

Following week I went up to 19 stone 1 pound.

Week after that, up again to 19 stone 2.25.
Clearly, there's drift going on, but given that I've done bog-all exercise and have been slugging and slothing my way through life for the past three weeks, it was going up alllllmost as slowly as it was previously coming off. But not quite, obviously.

Today, weighed in at 19 stone 2.25. Static from last week. Right now, I'll take that.

Now. Have been, as anyone who reads this will possibly remember, getting set up with the doctors in this area. Did the usual HBA1C blood test for long term blood sugars a few weeks ago. No sooner had I done it than they sent me a letter to say 'Balls. Need you to come and do that again.'

The image of course went through my mind of the diagnostic machinery going into overdrive, lights flashing, warning messages flashing, and then the whole kit and caboodle exploding in a puff of smoke when trying to process my blood. So I went and had it done again. Alllmost immediately the letter came back to say 'Yyyyeah, we can't afford to lose another machine. You need to get your ass in to see us, cos this shit ain't clever.'

Went today.

To explain the HBA1C, they like you to have a reading of under 50. I've previously managed under 50, but over the last few years, I've had a tendency, as the weight's crept back onto my bones, to hover in the low to mid-50s. Turns out last October, when we moved here, I had quite a bad result of 76.

Latest scoors on the doors? 117. One hundred. And then another 17. So, over twice what it should be.

#BadTony.

Badder Tony than the slow-ass drift of a pound a week here and there ever lets you know.

The nurse gave me a simple finger-pricking blood sugar test today. Again, in the UK, you're looking for numbers between about 6-8. Yyyyeah - 22.8. So - roughly three times what it should be.

'How are you not walking around with a huge dose of thrush?' she asked.
'Erm...should I be?'
'I'm surprised you're not, yeah,' she said, a touch too breezily for my liking.
'Oh, well, I won't panic when that happens then,' I muttered.
'I'm surprised your skin's not dreaful too,' she added.
'Oh it is, it's more or less turning to ash in the sun.'
'Aha!'
'We're happy about that, are we?'
'Visible symptoms,' she explained. 'Thing is, while your blood sugar's shot through the roof, your body's adapted to it quite well by the looks of things.'
'Thank you,' I said.
'But what we can't see is the untold damage it's doing to your systems inside,' she added.
'Oh.'
'First thing I'd be worried about is your heart.'
'Oh. I've already got an atrial fibrilation...thing going on,' I told her.
'I see that,' she agreed - I like to think she saw it in the notes on the screen in front of her, rather than being possessed of some weird and wonderful NHS juju that could let her spot fibrilation cases by eye.
'There are extra pills I can give you - we've got lots more stuff than we had even just five years ago,' she enthused. 'Weightloss injections and suchlike. The one I'd like to really get you on is for people with good kidneys. You have excellent kidneys.'
'I know,' I smarmed - back a decade or so ago, my mother, who at the time was more of a Tory, had shelled out to get me a BUPA head-to-toe check. They told me I had platinum-level kidneys. It's absurd, but it turns out my kidneys may be my best feature.
'The pill would let you use them to maximum efficience, so you'd pass the sugar out that way. Lose you about 300 calories a day. Also, your current pills aren't really touching the sides just now.'
I came clean that I'd been taking them with screaming irregularity pretty much since we got here - at first because there was a delay in registering and a month when I wouldn't have been able to get any prescriptions from them, and subsequently because I'd just gotten into bad pill-forgetting habits.
'Hmm,' she considered.  'Alright. Take your blood sugar measurements every morning. Some evenings too if you like, but essentially mornings. We'll see what you're like then. Oh and take the pills as prescribed, eh?'
'Will do,' I promised.

So, the stupid shit stops here and now. She gave me a testing machine to take away with me, so now I intend to bore you on a slightly more regular basis with measurements of blood sugar. Just because I can. More water, more walking, the bike is uncovered and just waiting for me. Less carb, less batter, less altogether stupid shit. The plan is to live here at the seaside. That means LIVING here at the seaside, and that in turn means doing what's necessary to stay alive as long as I can here at the seaside. So. Stupid macho posturing face on, and let's do this thing.

The Apparent Inconsequence of Inaction

'Don't take this as a mark of what you can get away with!'

'Yeah, yeah, I know. I won't, honest...' I lied. Well, it wasn't an intentional lie, just more of an understanding of the way in which my brain could be said to 'work.' Which is frankly, along absurd lines of hypocrisy and self-justification, with a touch of tedious public self-flagellation (which of course is where you come in).

This week, after having flopped over the first real  border line in the downward push, two things happened.

Firstly, a picture from a pal of mine of me as I was six years ago this week was re-shared on Facebook. Six years ago was when I was at my lightest in recent memory. I have kinda skinny stick-arms in the pic, but the rest of me looks as good as I remember looking in a long while. Oddly enough, the pic was taken round these parts, on a birthday celebration break for another pal of mine.

Apropos of nothing much, d also found a pic from EIGHT years ago of me on my beach, and bugger me but I was a miserable cur that day - probably faiiirly close to my heaviest in living memory.

So those were some interesting kicks in the head.

But the other thing that really happened this week was that I slipped matter-of-factly off the wagon. I didn't mean to do that either, the edge of self-control just kept lapping around my ankles. It wasn't even that leaping off into an oblivion of indulgence looked particularly pleasurable. I have a feeling it was just that thing self-harmers talk about - agency. Choice is choice, even if it's a bad choice, even - in fact, especially - if you know it's a bad choice, and you make it in spite of everything because it's yours.

Which is a long-ass double-dark way of explaining why I had ice cream this week. And doughnuts. And chips, and relatively little walking.

The thing is, for a guy who spills more words out of his fingers into cyberspace than would seem entirely feasible, I am pigging dreadful at talking about things.

Absolutely pigging dreadful. 'Only child' thing, possibly, but by the time I have to talk about things, I've already had the conversation a gazillion times on the inside of my head, and I tend to choose a fairly peppy way of bringing it into the world, because I've lived with it, picked it clean, put it back together a thousand ways, while whoever it is I talk to  comes to the subject new, and usually kind of 'Ohhhhkay, what the hell is this and where is it coming from?'

This, incidentally, is why, more often than not, d can look sideways at me and say 'Oh god...you're Thinking again, aren't you? I can hear it from here.'

She's dead right, of course. Most of the time, the subject dies, kicked to death by my Thinking, and never comes to light. This is also why, for instance, d long ago agreed to let me sleep with my iPod attached. My undistracted brain, given eight hours of silence to contend with, is a potential bedlam of Thinking, every angle of every line, every thought, every action, intonation, meaning...it's crowded as hell in there and it drives the 'conscious' me to utter sleepless distraction.

So...what? I hear you ask.

Well, so nothing, really, just the way of things in my head. And...well, there is a Thing. Hell, as ever with me, there are at least a handful of Things, but there's a particular Thing this week, in that I'm trying to drag something out of my brain for a writing submission, which has to be based in truth, and tell the story of some kind of healing from emotional trauma.

I'm not...good...with trauma. I'm never sure I have any right to talk about it, because let's face it, almost everyone has had more trauma in their life than me. Plenty of people have undergone trauma specifically to ensure that I don't have to. I've also undoubtedly been the cause of trauma to others, and probably still am.

But there was a Thing, back in ye olden days, that well and truly fucked me up for at least a couple of decades, and which to be honest is probably still fucking me up to some much lesser degree even now, despite a degree of healing. And I'm not sure exactly how much of the 'trauma,' such as it is, was inflicted from outside, and how much was a result of my Thinking. Probably by far the largest part was Thinking-based - but of course I still haven't worked out how to silence the Thinking, only to drown it out. And I've been trying to write about the Thing this week. Which, and here I'm guessing, might have had something to do with the drive to agency, and the slippage into ice cream, and doughnuts, and chips, and relatively little walking.

There have also been relatively few medications, as I've been holding on to finally get sorted and set up with a doctor and a pharmacist.

There was ice cream even yesterday, before I forced myself to have a somewhat longer walk than has become usual. Yesterday also marked the final slotting into place of a doctor, a prescription and a pharmacist, so all is happy and bouncy and groovy on that score, finally.

But with one thing and another, I had zero expectation of progress this week - I expected to be up at least four or five pounds, in fact, as a result of the Thinking-based slide into food-based idiocy.

18 stone 13.25.

That's the verdict of the Nazi Scales this morning. Down another half-pound in this endless crawl to progress. In spite of the Thing and the Thinking and the food and the lack of walking and the sparse medication...down a half-pound.

I officially now have no freakin' idea what's going on. Hmm...something else to Think about...

The Upside Of Alt-Facts

We now live in a surreal world. The world of Trump and Cronies (previously known as the US Government, but surely no-one can call them that with a straight face and a steady stomach), has just brought us the delightful phrase 'alternative facts.'

Like 'plausible deniability,' this is a thing that has never previously been quantified, but from the moment you hear it, you know it's going to become a 'Thing,' and that while in some shadowy Twilight Zone way it may have existed previously, having been given a name, it's going to more definitely become a fact of actual day-to-day life and your experience of it.

It's probably worth remembering that 'alternative facts' have been a thing much longer than people realise. Nixon said he wasn't a crook, which is about as alternative a fact as you can get. Clinton said he didn't have sexual relations with that woman, which is a frankly ungrateful thing to say about someone whose dress you've ruined, and also an alternative fact. The most recent iteration only really lodges in the brain because the circumstances in which it's been deployed are so pathetic - the alternative facts being deployed so early into the Orange Emperor's reign are basically 'my crowd wasn't smaller than your crowd, so nehh!'
Which is very presidential behaviour.

See? Anyone can do the 'alternative fact' thing.

In which connection, I should like to announce that far from being entirely static after a week of walking my ass off, I have lost three pounds, and now weigh 18 stone 10 pounds. I should very much like to do that, in fact, and so, in the Empire of the Disappearing Man, this alternative fact is now...fact.

In the Empire of Agreed and Verifiable Reality, as policed by the likes of the Nazi Scales, this alternative fact remains very much more alternative than I would like, and my morning weigh-in today had me entirely immobile at 18st 13 pounds.

So you see, as much as we might decry them in our political landscape, there's most definitely an upside to alternative facts. I'm alternatively happy, and factually less so. in the Empire of Verifiable Reality, something needs to change about my routine - there needs to be less intake and more expenditure, in all probability, or at the very least, as d suggested, there needs to be a shift in timescales. Currently, I'm waiting till my day-job is done at 5pm, walking for something in the region of two hours, and by the time I'm sitting down to eat, it's more like 8pm, after which I do precisely nothing in terms of exercise for the rest of the night. Perhaps a shift to earlier eating, followed by exercise, would have a more energetic, less sedentary effect on my system. At any rate, I'm more than willing to try that, because the thing about alternative facts is that once you know they're alternative facts - or even, really, once you suspect they're alternative facts - they have a limited and diminishing satisfaction index. One cannot be entirely satisfied if one knows one is lying to oneself - at least, not without a larger and more all-encompassing personality disoreder than I have, which I suppose is one of many complicated reasons why I'll never be leader of the free world. Ho hum - back to Disappearing we go then.

The Whispering Begins

I don't know whether this is an Everyfatfuck thing, or whether it's a specific Me thing, but there's a thing that starts to happen to me after just a little Disappearing.

I've mentioned that when I Disappear, I erect invisible Perspex walls between myself and all the things which, when I'm not Disappearing, I enjoy eating, but are bad for me. To be fair, things I enjoy eating and things that are bad for me are pretty much synonymous, so the Perspex walls are faiiirly comprehensive. You look around and thunk! You break your nose on a Perspex wall between yourself and chocolate, or you and pizza, or you and every cake in the world.

But what starts to happen is that while you're going about your day, if you happen to be in a place where temptation exists, the damn things start whispering to you. Whispering to get you to buy them, eat them, cram them into your face before anyone else knows, have a secret liaison with them that can become almost a culinary affair - only you nad them knowing that whatever you tell the world, you're cheating. You're doing what the things want you to do, to ensure your own failure, your own growing waistline. To ensure you don't achieve your goals.

Writing that down, as I'm sure I must have done before, is a good slap in the face. It makes me realise quite how fucked in the head I actually am. Quite how self-destructive. Quite how much at war, the element of me that believes I should be fat, and incapable of discipline, and self-destructive always tempting me to let it win. The action of Disappearing is a declaration of war on that part of myself.

Today being January 1st, we actually stayed in bed till after midday, and mulled gloriously around for a few hours. By the time 6.30 in the evening rolled around, I hadn't done a damn thing in terms of exercise all day, and had had one of the less wise but glorious breakfasts from d - home made waffles and incinerated American bacon (my favourite way). Today was probably the biggest incident so far of me having to force my ass out of the door, probably down to the late start in the day. Yesterday, I nearly made it to my 10,000 steps, deciding to walk from Merthyr down to Pentrebach to meet d and my mother for our New Year's Eve dinner. Today, I only managed half of that distance - some 4500 steps. That took my up to my roundabout from the first few days, and I stopped off at the gas station again on the way back - mostly, this time, to warm the hell up, as I seem to have wandered into Jotunheim, land of the Ice Giants, and have frozen at least one of my nipples off. If you find one, it's mine.

While I was there though, the whispering began. My eye fell on some of the most godawful looking, plastic-imprisoned muffins it's ever been my misfortune to see. And I wanted to slam them into my face, plastic and all. Chocolate bars stood up, early Disney style and turned into curvy dancers, waggling themselves at me. Chicken and mushroom slices unpeeled their pastry and beckoned me closer.

Every damn thing in the gas station begged me to eat it. And I could have. I wanted to.
Which is the point at which you have to either start singing (ideally, though not always, in your head), or get the hell out of Dodge and escape the shorus of whispering temptations.

I got out.

As it happens, d had been making pizza when I got home. All of which was glorious, and all of which I wanted to smash into my face. I ate three small pieces, and kept the rest for tomorrow.

Whispering madness averted. Today.

One day at a time and all that...

The First Re-Step

So – today’s the first weigh-in day since I re-started.

 Last week: 19st 7.25.

Today: 19st 3.5. Down 3.75 lbs.

Is it a massive, life-altering, world-rocking difference? No – but then it hasn’t been a massive, life-altering, world-rocking week either. Perhaps perversely, I can now reveal that this was the figure I saw after the first two days – the days of active, long walking. The rest of the week has been altogether less dedicatedly Disappearing – hell, the last three days have been mostly spent in a Starbucks, meeting deadlines and cursing about the deadlines I still have to meet. I’ve been reasonably good as far as eating’s concerned, but if I’m honest this has been two days of kickass Disappearing and five days of more-or-less-maintenance. 

So am I happy with a loss of nearly, but not quite four pounds? Well, of course I am, it’s nearly, but not quite two scheduled weeks’ worth of loss, although I’m aware it’s what’s known as ‘first-fortnight water’ – when you begin any change of life regime, the first thing to go is all the excess water you store, rather than actual fat. (Oh, and a fortnight, for the Americans, means two weeks. I was surprised to learn you didn’t have that word. Or penultimate? Last-but-one).

So yes – quite happy enough with 3.75 lbs.  If nothing else, it feels a lot more borderline-friendly than 19st 7.25 did. Hey, if I lose the same again in the week that’s coming, I’ll see an 18 by the next weigh-in. That’s a pretty damn fine incentive to do more walking and more biking and keep up the reasonable diet (again, it should be noted I’m using the word ‘reasonable’ here in a way of which no nutritionist would approve – three days more or less subsisting on decaffs is not to be recommended to anyone).

Hoping to walk more tomorrow. If I’d walked today, the perversity we’ve known as weather would have kicked me right in the face with the April Hailstones of Fuck-You. There is of course something to be said for just embracing that, and I probably would have, if I hadn’t dressed this morning for the bright blue skies and fairly strong sun that lured me out of doors this morning. There’s determination, and then there’s just damned stupidity.

Onward!

The Liquid Lifestyle

Apologies again. Mad couple of days getting very little of consequence done – though I did write a blog yesterday that may well be featured on the Women’s Equality Party Wales website at some point between now and the Assembly elections on 5^th May. Weirdly, despite spending most of both days in Starbucks, I smashed the hell out of my phone’s daily step-count yesterday and by the time you read this, I’ll have done the same again today. This proves nothing much, except that my phone has very low standards of what constitutes a worthwhile workout – just 6000 steps is enough to keep it happy on any given day. 

Both days have though been relatively good in terms of diet. Well, not good exactly, not in terms of eating five a day, or getting a balanced nutrient intake, more good in the sense of starving and not caring about it. Yesterday I had one pot of porridge and….erm…quite a lot of decaff skinny mistos at about 110 calories each. Today I had more in terms of solid food – yoghurt and granola for breakfast, and a truly mad experience for lunch. I had a thing called a ‘hula hula chicken burger.’ It seems to be an attempt to cram as many different varieties of calorific death between two halves of a bun as is humanly possible while not technically being an American burger specialist (I’ve seen the stuff they get up to, and that’s just exhausting even to eat with your eyes). I ate it and enjoyed it, eschewing the fries and the fizz that would have made it ‘a meal.’ Frankly it was about two meals all on its own, so I’m pretty much calorifically and nutritionally set for the day. Hey, technically, as well as the chicken, it had cheese for added protein, a slice of pineapple AND a mango hot sauce in it (two of my five, so nehh!).

Apart from that, lather, rinse, repeat on the decaff skinny mistos. The thing is, they produce the sensation of satiety, so I don’t particularly need anything more to eat. Which is all very well but can’t be considered even remotely healthy. Do not try this at home, kids.

Try this in Starbucks, obviously.

Weigh-in tomorrow. Steeling myself with the sensible advice that I’m only looking for a 2 lb loss. Haven’t weighed in days – I know, look at me! – so can’t even give you a wink as to whether I’ll have achieved that. Let’s find out together and pretend it’s fun.

The Capital Adventure

Apologies - meant to blog last night but the time simply got away from me. d and I went to Cardiff, my girl still streaming with the resurgence of the Boomerang Flu, as she had her first British hen party to go to.
This was her, ten minutes before she had to be out the door

It was gonna be a good night, clearly.

We booked a hotel in Cardiff to have somewhere to retire to at the end of the night, checked in and went to dinner. When we came back to the hotel, it had acquired a couple of bouncers.

Bouncers in some heavy-duty gear. Police bouncers, in fact. Along with a man who clearly liked having his hands behind his back as a restful stance in stressful situations. One of the cops was pulling on a latex glove as we pushed past them into the hotel.
There was what's been described in the news as a 'heavy, armed police presence' in Cardiff last night, because some gentleman enthusiast had a BB gun.
So - perfect night for a hen party, then.

There were about 18 of them in total. I walked d to the first stop, turning on my MapMyWalk app before we left the hotel. Turns out, MapMyWalk's GPS - or my phone's - can't cope with Cardiff Queen Street. It was baffled by the route I took, which was basically two straight lines in the drizzle. As d was introduced to the...uniqueness...of a Valleys hen night, I buggered off back to the hotel room to write. Then as midnight approached, and on a Cinderella principle, I went down to a local nightclub to collect her, and as many of the revellers as we could find, and eventually, with occasional bathroom breaks and burger bar breaks (none for me), we wound our way like a mostly pink-shirted herd of cats through the streets, avoiding the cops, to the pick-up point. I'm reliably informed a good time was had by all...except, just possibly the mystified twentysomething guy who ended up wearing the knickers of one of our party over his jeans. I have no idea, don't ask.
When we finally got back to our hotel at 2am, having gotten everybody to a place where they needed to be, we almost staggered to the lift.
It went 'bing.'
A big cop was standing in it, with an equally big bike.
'Evening all,' he said - yes, really - as he tried to manoeuvre the front wheel out through the lift doors. I have no particular explanation as to where he'd come from, or why he felt the need to have his bike with him.
'Vive la France!' It was the first thing I could think of. He walked his bike away, muttering about 'bloody drunks.'

Today, we've spent the day for the most part wandering from shop to shop in a furniture fantasy, and eating - had a French breakfast, and a Mexican dinner. Tonight, came home and pedalled the bike, but not for long. I'm fairly sure if I'd turned the MapMyWalk on throughout the course of the day, I'd have clocked up maybe a few kilometres, from store to store and department to department, but hey, who knows, because I didn't do that.

Tomorrow's a whole new day, with whole new opportunities to walk my ass off and eat sensibly. Tried to do that today - ate some bacon, but avoided the sumptuous boudin noir, which is insanely rich and fat-filled, and in the Mexican place, went for simple things, nothing deep fried, and not too much. So I feel pretty good about where we are, and there are still two more days before the weigh-in.

Now - important snoring to be done before the morning. To the SnorePit, Batman!