The Impatience Of the Long-Distance Disappearer

*Kicks stone, disconsolately.*

Hey hey.
Headlines first. Weigh-in today - 17st 10.25. Down two pounds.
Blood sugar - 8.5, after a week of mostly being in the 7s.

So, all is good and groovy, right?

Well...yeah...kinda. If you just look at the numbers.
The thing of course is to do that.

The other thing, unfortunately, is human nature. Normally kicks in at about this point, so it's hardly a surprise. I know the medical advice is that it's 'safe' and 'recommended' to lose at most two pounds a week. But the impatience of the long-distance Disappearer kicks in, and you start to want a fast forward button on your life, or a Rocky-style training montage to speed the whole damn thing up.

Perfectly natural, I know. Quite apart from the fact that we Eighties Teens were absolutely surrounded by training montages or friendship montages or skill-attainment montages (seriously, montages were big in the Eighties. Hell, everything was big in the Eighties), once you've been on a changed lifestyle path for a few weeeks, all the entirely invented viciousness stored in your fat cells starts to release into your bloodstream, and things seem so toddleristically unfair! You start to whinge and chunter - if those around you are lucky, you only do this in your head - about how him next door or her two doors down eats more than you and never puts on a pound. There's every likelihood that this is when you start making the voodoo dolls, of course.

But more than that, you start looking up. You look up at the mountain, rather than at your moving feet, and the whole mountainous nature of the mountain takes your breath away, and the 'safe' weightloss recommendation starts to feel like an artificial hand brake applied to your efforts to climb Mount Fat-Fuck. If you can afford it, and don't have a heart condition, this is probably also when speed starts to feel like a viable diet option.

Objectively, I'm 3.25 pounds away from my next milestone at 17 stone 7 pounds. Subjectively, it's two...more...bloody...weeeeeeks before I get there. Two more weeks of eating and watching and walking and bleeding, and around and around and around we go, like a hamster on a pigging wheel.

Christmas Day, in fact, is when I should hit the next milestone. So that'll be jolly. Then another three, or more likely four weeks before I dip under the 17 stone mark. That feels like aeeeeons away right now, let alone looking at the bigger chunk of mountain still left to go.

Sigh. Buck up, Fyler, you're depressing everyone. Objectively, as I say, the news is all good and groovy. It's just that, in Disappearing as in life, to quote Douglas Adams, 'the last thing, the very last thing you actually need is a sense of perspective.'


And today feels like a very perspectivey day. 

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 Hunger Games

Hello again - apologies, rather fell out of the blogosphere over the weekend.

Everything seems to feel different on the weekend, even though technically, working for myself, there's little to really mark one day out from another, or one block of two days out from any other.

And to be fair, there was little that was actually different about the weekend - walked every day, minimum carb, etc.

I suppose the only thing that really felt different was hunger.

So far, since Tuesday, I haven't really felt hunger per se. I've had automatic proddings to say 'Ooh, you could eat now,' or 'Ooh, you should eat now, but nothing that would really class as hunger until this weekend. And only then at night - eating a main meal relatively early in the evening has left me with urges to eat something later. Naturally - or at least naturally for me - those thoughts have turned to sweetness and carbohydrate. The idea of toast and jam, or a big bowl of cereal, played over my brain on each of the two nights of the weekend, round about 9.30-10pm.

This wasn't real hunger of course, just a sharper kind of whiny craving. Waah, I'm doing all this good stuff, reward me! It's absurd, and it's the pampered cry of the overfed, overindulged inner child who shoves every available thing down my throat, just to quell that odd sort of panic that rises at anything less than feeling entirely full.

It's funny, really - hunger seems to be a primal fear in the west. If you get anywhere close to it, anywher less than replete, there are triggers: eat more, eat heavy, eat sweet. Store up anything inside that keeps that absurd-in-this-situation fear at bay.

The thing with Disappearing is that the arrival of that kind of hunger-like craving, as opposed to want-like craving is a potential pitfall. It's like looking into the eyes of your toddler and telling them no. Turning your back on a whining puppy. That's how it feels to me - denying an innocent, who depends on me for their happiness, the very thing they require for that happiness.

Of course, the inner me is ludicrously overpampered, overindulged, to the extent that while it is quite happy to keep munching, keep taking in all the foods it likes and loves, the things that make it happy, the outer me is suffering, staggering under the weight of the wide-eyed inner toddler.

So - sternness has to be the order of the day if you want to Disappear. The inner you will whine. It will cry. It will argue like every righteous wronged child in the world that it's not FAIR.

At which point, you have to put it on the inner naughty step - drink water, go to bed if that's an option, do something else entirely if not. distraction, diversion, every trick you have at your disposal is needed to parent the little sod and not give in to its whining.

So far, so good - didn't cave this weekend. Things will of course get much, much harder than this.

Tomorrow, we weigh in. I genuinely have very little idea of how the first week has gone. I'm only really looking for the 2 pound loss that's supposed to be healthy, even though usually, you get a bump in the first two weeks as you lose water-weight before your system really kicks in and realises you're serious.

Now then - to the walking path!

Winky

So – hoorah. Started pre-Disappearing today. For the uninitiated, pre-Disappearing is what happens before the first official weigh-in, which given that d made a mercy dash to a local hardware store this afternoon, will now be tomorrow. Pre-Disappearing is nothing terribly special, it’s just not doing the things I used to do, and doing some new things instead. 

Was going to be up in time to growl at larks on the wing and flick snails off the thorn and all that, but…what can I tell you, I live at the seaside now, and that seems to bring a lethargy with it that allows larks and snails to race about the place unimpeded. To be fair, I was up at 6…something-or-other to enjoy that delightful middle-aged need to pee in the night, but it was still pitch black outside at that time, because  it’s November and the sun’s having none of it either. So, I turned over, listened to an episode of Survivors (a bleak audio drama about the world after a pandemic plague wipes out more than 90 per cent of us – check it out, it’s from bigfinish.com, and it’s excellent), and then, when d woke up, all smiles and bounciness and greeting the day, I felt the need to humph, turn over and snore. Cos I’m just Mr Personality like that.

So – got a post-lark-and-snail start on the day, but, determined to make it at least a Disappearing start, got dressed and naffed officially off on the first walk of the week. Nothing dramatic, nothing overly taxing, just a slowish walk from Saundersfoot to Wiseman’s Bridge and back, but my phone (Oracle of All Things as it is), tells me that amounts to 7691 steps, 5.89 km (with a twiddly uphill bit at the end), and a somewhat cracking 543 calories burned – which given that it felt like more or less tokenism, I’m happy to take before breakfast. It only rained torrentially down on me twice during the walk too, so that was a result, and something else happened along the way.  

You know how, if you’ve been desperate to pee, and worried about making it home in time, you reach your bathroom, finally, blessedly, and it’s like all the pressing concerns of the world condense into one thought – that you’ve made it, and you’re alright – and as you pee, you smile because something that was in doubt has been safely achieved, and for those moments, you don’t care about anything else in the world?

It was like that, only less urinocentric. On the way back from Wiseman’s Bridge, I felt the sudden need to look out to sea, and did, and it was like crossing the point of no return, only for a different kind of relief. I breathed deeply in, and slowly out, and the stress of the last year, of trying to sell our flat, and having buyer after buyer frustrate us, of being made redundant right at the point when we were hoping to start looking at mortgages, of the last undotted i’s and the last uncrossed t’s that meant further and further delay as the money ran out and we were flung upon the kindness not of strangers but of friends and family, all shuddered out of me on that out-breath, and the smile that grew on my face probably disturbed the ever-living fuck out of an elderly couple coming the other way with the perverse determination to walk a Dachshund.

So, in stress, if not in actual blubber, I feel lighter today.

Then, of course, the deep fat fryer arrived, like the Fuck-You of the Gods.

I’m joking, really – I knew it was coming. d has phases of learning and re-practice where she feels the call of the culinary deities upon her shoulders, which is why, for instance, she makes kickass bread, and fudge and the like. When the money from the flat came through, her single indulgence was to get a deep fat fryer. It’s not that she’s about to set herself up in competition with the many exquisite fish fry restaurants in the area – honest. It’s more that there are things called cannolis, and these other things called doughnuts, and so there’s a need for deep domestic fat.

Not, now, of course, for me, but in general these things are needed, and so now, we have one. I’m calling it Winky…or possibly, for reasons no-one will understand, P’diddle, at least until its presence becomes a giant mocking outrage in my grease-starved life, which is at least a little down the line. And at which point, I’ll probably start calling it ‘Pieces of Winky.’

Popped into the local Tesco Express on the way home, and the attitude adjustment hit me. ‘Ooh, chocolate biscuits,’ I thought. ‘Fuck that, fool, the chocolate bars are right here,’ said a different, rather more Mr T part of my brain. Then in floated the Inner Hippy. ‘We don’t do that any more,’ he said, in precisely the tone of voice most likely to get the shit kicked out of him. The thing is of course, in my recently post-stress relief, he was easy to listen to. Things will by no means always be that way, but today at least, in what I like to think of as the real battle of Man Versus Food…Man won.

Man came home with a box of Weetabix in fact, for easier, more measurable breakfast cerealing than Rice Krispies allow. To show willing though, I downsized the size of my Krispie bowl this morning. And didn’t add a base layer of cookies. And didn’t ‘mount’ the bowl with double cream and sugar, so as to get that ‘Executive Rice Krispy Treat’ coagulation going on.

No – really. That’s been my breakfast, and occasionally lunch, for weeks now. You want lessons on force feeding, come to Papa.

Lunch was going to be beans on toast, but as it happened, d grew increasingly busy with an editing client on the phone, and lunch became dinner prep. I’ve just eaten two home-made cheeseburgers – as in patties made from scratch, grated cheese, bought buns, along with two small but gorgeous potato cakes, which were technically shallow fried, and so which, gorgeous as they were, I won’t be having again for a while. And some beans, left over from the beans on toast idea.

And that’s me done. When I finish and post this – broadband is still non-existent here in our new place, and the wifi’s ropy at best – I’m going to jump on the exercise bike and pedal for at least half an hour, so as to begin reintroducing my body and my brain to the idea that this is a thing it does now. That’s the game for now, I think – reconditioning. No chocolate biscuits, but a short walk and a short biking session each day, so the brain and the body start to build new patterns of expectation.

Thankfully, as I say, entirely due to a mercy dash from d, there will be the first weigh-in tomorrow morning, which is when the Disappearing starts in earnest.

The deep fat fryer may be winking at me, but tonight at least, I have a date with a bike.

Disappearing Tip #1: Retrain your brain.

Disappearing Tip #2: Yes, this will suck.

Disappearing Tip #3: It’s supposed to suck. Get through it, and eventually, it will feel like normality. This is a good thing. Honest.

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...