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 Imp Of Physical Carnage

Yes, yes, yes, started again. Yes, again, again, again.

By the time of this first Tuesday since the reboot, I've done a few days of not eating what I want, not drinking anything but plain water, coffee and the occasional fruit juice, deeply, thoroughly wanting to beat people to death with giant Toblerones (usually a Day 2 phenomenon, I'm over it now), walking hither and yon just to force my ass up and my legs to move, and so on.

Yeah, it kinda sucks, frankly - when it starts to feel good, believe me, I'll let you know, but right now, it just kinda sucks.It's the resistance you get when you first start sawing a plank of wood - you're cutting against the grain of long experience, habit and expectation (both physical, in that you crave sugar, and mental, in that you turn the denial of that craving into the world being unfair very specifically to you).

Perhaps most creepily, when d goes to work, there's still something impish in my mind that flares to life, saying 'Ooh, it's playtime! What kind of self-destructive shit can we cram down our throat and get away with today!'

Not that I was cramming self-destructive shit down my throat to an enormous degree before I started back on this Disappearing lark, but certainly, if I decided I wanted a chocolate bar, I'd have it and not think about it (Evil Tip - if you do it early enough in the day, it doesn't mess up your next morning's blood sugar that much). Now the imp of physical carnage screams in my ear about five seconds after the door closes, and there's no-one to shut it the hell up but me. And I have to tell you, swigging plain water in those moments absolutely sucks the big one, and also doesn't really work as an antidote to the imp.

But still, here you find me, restarted, having resisted a bunch of blandishments - it's an adjustment for everyone around me when I slam back into Disappearing mode on the snap of a finger, so people still offer me stuff, and I have to remember, and refuse them politely - and as yet, have managed to resist either beating people to death with the Toblerone, or indeed ramming it, Pyreneean, down my neack for a sweet, sweet nougat hit...

...

...

Sorry, where was I?

Oh yeah - so, first Tuesday. Weigh-in day. Well, we're starting off this time in a place more reasonable than most recent attempts - I've had attempts in this last year that have started at 19st 7, 18st 7 and so on. This time, we're starting out at 18st 2 - which is actually the lightest I've been in some time, though it's not light enough at the moment to let me like the bloke I see in mirrors and photos, who seems to me to be an overstuffed sack of spuds. 18st 2 is close enough to the 18 stone border (lol I've explained stones to the world several times - I'd suggest going back a few entries, it'll all be there) to give me something immediate to strive for. More to the point, I never feel like I'm properly Disappearing till I'm into the 17 stone realm. Now of course, this is purely based on prior experience, and by the time I was in the 17 stone realm the first time I did this, I'd already lost three stone, so it's a completely false reckoning, and really speaking, I shouldn't feel like I'm properly Disappearing this time till I'm in the 15s, but hey, habits, right? If getting into the 17 stone zone spurs me on at this moment to shut the imp of physical carnage up, I'm taking it. That's the thing, really - there are lies aplenty available to you. Use them. Use them allll. If they help you climb in the direction you want to go, it doesn't matter that you know they're basically bullshit. Call on any god you like, ascribe value to one particular threshold or another, it really doesn't matter - do it, get over that line, take strength from whatever belief is open to you, but get over that line, where the imp of physical carnage, the voice that says it's not fair that you have to do this, or you're going to fail, or it's your birthday, or you're on your holidays, doesn't sway you as often as it does at the start.

Defeat that little bugger any way you can, because only your mind gives a damn about rationalizations. Your body? Just cares about what you put in it, and what you do with it. It makes no excuses, and it makes no allowances, sadly.

So - onward. Hopefully, a week from now I'll either be on the 18 stone border or eeeeven just possibly a smidgen under it.

Oh, and for those who want to know such things:
Blood sugar:
20th November - 9.1
19th November - Skipped, accidentally, as had breakfast before remembering
18th November - 9.2
17th November - Skipped
16th November - 9.2
15th November - 9.0
14th November - 11.9 - my bad, only took half my diabetic meds the day before.
13th November - 9.7
12th November - 9.3
11th November - 10.5 - late supper
10th November - 10.3 - late supper
9th November - 9.5
8th November - 11.4 (acting like an ass, clearly)
7th November - 12.2 (acting like a super-ass, even more clearly)

So while there's still a way to go before I get back into the 6-8 range now deemed optimal, I'm seeming to establish a pattern of single-figures with occasional assery at the moment. Will be interesting to see how that goes as the imp of physical carnage is squished more and more beneath my thumbnail.

The Daily Disparity

Apologies all, obviously meant to post this blog yesterday.

I've had exactly the kind of week I told you I might have - my Inner Fat Fuck, supported by a positive week's results last week in spite of ice cream and pizza and chips, oh my!, decided that it could get away with mass murder, and let me eat things I haven't for a while - it felt more or less like a week off.

When I stepped on the Nazi Scales yesterday, I'd had a pretty hefty Monday, and the buggers showed me up three-quarters of a pound, and back on the 19 stone 0 mark. While disappointed that I'm not able to defy the realities of physics and biology, I accepted that - it was the equivalent of two weeks of miniscule losing, evaporated for the sake of a week of not really giving a toss. That seemed inherently fair.

Had a much less calorifically hefty day yesterday, even though I was prevented from going for a walk 9as I had been several days last week) through unseasonably slam-you-against-a-wall-sounding winds and rain. This morning, post-bathroom, I got a 'Why the hell not?' wrinkle in my brain, and re-weighed.

18st 12.5 this morning.

Now, there's a quandary for you. The official number has to be yesterday's 19 stone. But today, I'm a whole pound and a half light than that (sounds like nothing, but given the micro-slivers in which this Disappearing appears to be happening, it's rather significant in context). Do I record yesterday's official number and push myself a pound and a half ahead of next week's game? Or do I recognise that I'm one day on and, for instance, three-quarters of a pound lighter than last week's official weigh-in?

For the sake of sanity and credibility of results, I think I have to record the gain of three-quarters of a pound this week, and treat today as a happy outlier, which might allow me to push on further (or might indeed be swallowed up during the course of the week) by next Tuesday. So - back to 19 stone. Joy.

Interestingly though, the BBC just ran a feature on its website about 'where you are on the UK's fat scale.' Being up this high, I expected morbid obesity, where I've been before. Obesity at least. But at 5ft 6, age 46, identifying as male and with today's weight of 18st 12.5, apparently, I'm only 'Overweight,' with a BMI of 29.1. I'm pretty close to the obesity borderline, but officially, just overweight. If one believed in signs and omens, it would seem distinctly as though today was trying to tell me to keep on going. Especially as the wind and rain have also naffed off, replaced with a gentle breeze and a blue sky. So - here we go with a new week.

The Month-Long Christmas and the Toe of Destiny

Well, that didn't go according to plan, now did it, boys and girls?

Went to Merthyr to spend Christmas with my mother, and had hardly got through the door before I started cramming the Quality Street down my neck.

Have been eating like a self-destructive maniac, doing precisely buggerall in terms of exercise, being somewhat creatively interpretative with my medication and essentially evolving into Jabba the Hutt with a keyboard.

I have watched accomplioshed chef Tom Kerridge, himself a big lad, encouraging people to lose weight after his own battle with suicidal habits, during which he lost a whacking 12 stone - which would have been fine, had I not watched him with a ten-inch cheesy pizza halfway to my gob.

I've known this was coming for a while, and if you'd asked me three hours ago, I'd have told you that I've never needed to do this more, and never felt like doing it less.

Since then, I've rather had the toe of destiny shoved up my ass in a forceful and purposeful manner, so right now, I'm writing this while energised and powerful and ready to take on the world or burn it down.

This is of course not an energy that lasts for the accomplishment of marathons. I know this. This is neither my, nor I daresay your first ride on this Disappearing pony. But the toe of destiny is a good motivator to get one started on projects that mellow and develop a more productive rather than destructive rhythm over time. So this is where you find me. Tomorrow, Disappearing-shopping - fruit, veg, protein etc. There will be grabbing of sticks and hiking, at least to Wiseman's Bridge and back, while under the influence of music or drama pouring through my iPod and turning my thighs, I have no doubt, to mush. There will be, or at least should be, registration with a Saundersfoot-based GP, so that I can return to taking my meds without fear of running out before that process is completed. There will be, above all, ACTION.

In the name of the Toe of Destiny, there will be action!

Tomorrow.

Honest.

No More Walks In The Water Park

Weigh-in day today.

Weigh-in days evolved to be Tuesdays because way back in the dim and distant past, when we moved from London to Merthyr, I often had to go back to the city for the day on a Monday, so Monday weigh-ins would inevitably be ‘pre-bathroom’ affairs, because with a sluggish metabolism, if I waited to get a ‘post-bathroom’ number, I’d have missed more than one train, and would have had several hard stares from my boss.

I wouldn’t have been able to see them of course, I’d have missed the train, but still – that’s why we shifted to Tuesday weigh-ins.

This morning, I had plans to de-camp to Cardiff, to my Starbucks, for a day of intense day-jobbery and an evening’s editing. So today’s weigh-in is also ‘pre-bathroom’ – and as such encourages me to do the mathematics of self-delusion, trying to estimate how much weight I eventually got rid of which isn’t included in the official figures. Yes, seriously, I give actual brain-space to such equations these days. Sad, sad, sad man.

But this morning’s weigh-in figure actually marks the dividing line between phases of Disappearing. 

The figure is 18 stone, 12.75.

So on the one hand, yay and all that – more than a stone (14 pounds) lost since we started again, and it was gratifying to see the 18. As I’ve mentioned before though, I tend not to feel like I’m really Disappearing till I’m under 18 stone and we’re pushing down through the 17s.

But in particular, what this means Is that I lost exactly 2 pounds this week. I’m not gonna lie - with the digestive irregularity and the breaking out of the longer walks, there’s a part of me that feels cheated by that. But here’s the dividing line I mentioned. The first two weeks of any weightloss regime are apparently when you lose all your stored water (as I mentioned last week, who knew I was so subcutaneously soggy?). That’s why you get such sudden, dramatic figures showing – six pounds per week and so on. Water’s eeeeasy once you start.

After which, by and large, the real bastardy begins, and your body fat folds its theoretical arms and mutters ‘Ohhh you think you’re a big shot now, do ya? Well we’re not fuckin’ movin’ pal, alright?’

This is when the real games begin. This is when it turns into High Noon between you and your body fat, the whistling tune playing across the dusty street of your bloody-minded stubborn bastardy. It’s you versus you. The future versus the past, and you’re the only one that gets to decide which version of you wins.

The thing is, Fat-You is, by nature of having had to be, to get you looking this way, a cunning, cunning bastard. It will try to trick you into celebration - ‘Wow, you lost a stone, how cool are you? Maybe just a little treat wouldn’t hurt, eh? Just to celebrate, then you can get back on with it…’ It will try to trick you into vanity – ‘Wow, you look so much better already. Maybe you’ve done enough for now, eh?’ And it will try to trick you with tantrum-cravings, which may or may not have been a big factor in your journey so far – ‘God, how much lonnnnnnger till we can have a chocolate bar? We’ve been soooooo good. Just a little one? Just something, cos we reeeeeeeallly need it…’

At which point, you pretty much have to have no mercy and punch it relentlessly in the face until it shuts the hell up. Do something. Do anything. Have water. Have coffee, with as little milk as possible. Have, gods help your desperate brain, salad. Have anything that won’t smash the Perspex boxes between you and your Danger-Foods, but will make you feel like you’ve had something, like you’re full. If you find your brain trying to convince you of any of this stuff, remember you’re a Womble. No, wait, got carried away there. Remember you’re a stubborn bastard, that’s what I meant. If you hear yourself thinking any of this stuff, use it as an alarm, a klaxon. It’s your Fat-Self trying to protect itself, trying to maintain its existence in the face of what it’s just begun to realise after two weeks is your serious intent to do this, and to replace your Fat-Self with your Disappeared-Self.

Remember this – your body doesn’t know it’s Christmas. It doesn’t know it’s your birthday. It doesn’t precisely know you’ve lost x-amount of weight. There are, in actual fact, no celebrations in Disappearing, beyond a bit of a wave and a cheer and a Happy Dance. You can’t really step off, go wild and crazy for the night, and get back on. I know some of you actually can, absolutely, do this, and more power to you. I can’t do it. For me, Disappearing is like marriage or pregnancy – you don’t get a night off from it. You can’t fool around with a fondant and then expect your Disappearing-Self to take you back in the morning because it ‘meant nothing to me, honestly, less than nothing.’ I’m in this thing for the long haul. And really speaking, the long haul begins here.

So – two pounds this week. The medically advisable amount, and what we’re actually aiming to lose each week. Long haul week one – goal achieved. Next!

This rate means three weeks from now we do a mini-wave of celebration at having crossed the next border – at least in UK terms – as we go under 18st 7. One month after that, at this rate, we his the 17s. So – seven weeks of hard slog to lose the same amount as we’ve lost in the first two weeks? Man, that sounds no fun!

No. No it doesn’t, does it? But this is not actually fun in any way – it’s a programme for losing medically dangerous weight and turning my life around. Seven weeks? Seven weeks is nothing, if it’s just seven weeks of doing what I’ve been doing so far. The cunning bit is that it won’t be. Long before that, we’re likely to hit the first plateau – probably three weeks from now, if I’m any judge, as the body settles into Disappearing as ‘the new normal’ and stops burning fat to cope with the system shock. Still – that’s a gunfight to have when we get there. For now, yay, under the 19 stone marker, and losing the right amount of non-water weight in the first week of slogging.

Onwards and downwards!

The Bikeless Wonder

Humph.

Second day without any biking done. Walking again, roughly the same distance as yesterday – around 450 caloriesworth – and a significantly lighter calorific day – a few of my pleasure-vacuumed hot Starbucks, one cold, all with skimmed milk (and mostly Mistos, so less of that), one Starbucks porridge and half a carton of roasted nuts (roughly 400 calories, and with at least a whiff of protein mixed in with the fat).

That’ll do me for today – very taxing day-jobbery today, so needed to get my head down and push on. Tomorrow though, it’s the weekend, and while I still have work to do, and the weather continues to give a solid series of single-finger salutes to the idea of recreational walking (most of the walking of the last two days has been ‘getting to places out of the pigging rain’ walking, rather than ‘striding off into the wide green yonder for the benefit of my health’ walking), mark these words – there will be biking! If nothing else, I’m at a crucial point in Season 1 of Gotham, goddammit, and I want to know what happens next!

Am I panicking yet? Actually, no. Probably should be – my system is hardly conditioned to the Disappearing lifestyle yet, my metabolism won’t have adjusted enough to burn enough calories just from being alive to let me get away with this nonsense for a couple of days. But the way I see it, this is the difference between a diet and a lifestyle change. There are going to be days and chunks of days like this. The thing is to get back to it as soon as is practically possible and not let the lapse become the lifestyle. So – tomorrow, possibly early if I can haul my ass out of bed – the bikeless wonder will be vanquished, and Biker Boy will return.

The Disappearing Numbers

So – another week, another weigh-in. Having missed last week’s of course, there’s a certain novelty to the whole thing for me.

Anyhow – as I was 18st 10lbs (262lbs) two Tuesdays ago, I should technically have lost four pounds by today’s weigh-in.

Alright, so shoot me – 3.75lbs lost. Today’s weigh-in has me at 18st 6.25lbs (258.25lbs). Given the fact of having been on holiday for a week, I’m happy enough with this. Certainly, it’s broken the entirely arbitrary UK barrier of the ‘half-stone’ (every 7lbs, American groovers, is a half-stone – as I say, probably dates back to overweight Druids or somesuch). Total loss since restarting the Disappearing, 10.75lbs. As I’m writing this on a train, I can’t actually remember how many weeks ago the restart was, which means I’m not sure if I’m still on technical target or not. If it was five weeks or fewer ago, then I’m doing at least alright. More than that, notsomuch.

Anyhow, those are the moderately yawn-making scores as we speak.

Last night, it was pushing 9.30 at night when I finally got on the exercise bike.

‘Where’s your iPod?’ asked d, bemused, as the little bundle of sound tends to go everywhere with me.

‘I’m doing a different thing,’ I told her, waving my phone.

‘Should I guess?’

‘Sudoku,’ I explained.

She blinked, let the word sink in a moment. ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me?’

I grinned. I love it when people say that kind of thing, it sort of makes me feel like I’m doing this ‘being alive’ thing right.

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘It’s like slipping your mind into neutral. Your brain does its thing, and stops focusing on your legs as they do their thing, and you stop looking at the miles travelled and the calories burned and before you know it, the bike is beeping at you and because you haven’t focused on it, it doesn’t feel as long or as arduous but you have a bank of calories burned. Plus, y’know – healthy body, healthy mind, all that cobblers.’

‘Yyyyeah, OK,’ she said, smiling at me as if to say ‘You’re a strange, strange little man – but hey, you’re mine.’

‘It’s Disappearing Numbers, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘All meaningless, but you find them, and discount them, and move on.’

‘Yes dear,’ said d. ‘Pedal.’

I pedaled. And the numbers Disappeared.