The Pleasing Perversity of Outliers

Huh.

There are ups and downs in this Disappearing business which are equally inexplicable. Sometimes you can be good as a saint and find yourself becalmed, or even increasing. Other times, you can misbehave and find yourself rewarded. Madness.

Today though, that madness is on my side. Despite dining on a small bowl of pasta in the most ridiculously kickass sauce, and then an unexpected half a pizza at nine o'clock last night, this morning's blood sugar came in at a pleasing 8.8, and this morning's weigh-in has me at:
17st 7 and three-quarters. Less than a pound to my next milestone. That'll do for me this morning.

I haven't exactly misbehaved....that much...this week, but for instance, I only walked the one day, cramming for an editing deadline for much of the rest of the week, and as mentioned, while I haven't exactly injected sugar syrup into my veins, my diet has been carb-rich (last night was the last of a three or four day pastafest), so to say the results surprise me would be something of an understatement. But I can do nothing, whether the results are good or bad, but straighten my spine and go forward with intentions to achieve my goal.

That's all this is of course, ultimately - the pitting of one's intentions against reality, seeing if one can turn intentions into actions, and through actions into a change in reality. I suppose that's the same principle as lies behind all human endeavour, from steam trains to the theory of magic. Thought becomes action, action changes the reality.

Any such system of action of course with throw out outliers, things that probably shouldn't happen but do. That's how today feels, like a pleasingly perverse outlier, because it doesn't really agree with the actions that have preceded it. But today I will take it, and move right the hell on, deploying theory, focusing thought, achieving actions (hopefully) and changing my own personal reality.

Oh, that reminds me - d popped into my office last night to say she hadn't weighed herself in quite some time, but that she's dropped beneath an important threshold too. Her method's entirely different from mine, and involves things like working for a living and the most perverse portion control, given her mad, mystical cooking skills. But hey - it's like that whole 'many roads to enlightenment' thing. Probably doesn't matter how you get to your goal, if you get there. So this week, we're a Disappearing Household, albeit in my case through the pleasing perversity of outliers.

The Belt Of Potential And The Pizza Stupidity

Been an interesting week.

On the one hand, I decided, round about the middle of last week, to dress up. To eschew my usual slothery in clothing and get back into trousers with all the complexities of the 21st century - zips and a button and suchlike madness.

All very well, but the pair into which I got were what I euphemistically describe as my 'comfy trousers.' Which is to say, 'big trousers.'

To give you some idea how long it's been since I last swanned around in them, I put them on, went out of my front door, annnd immediately had to grab at them to pull them up. Step, step, step - GRAB. Rearrange, seemingly firmly in place. Step, step, step, SLIP- GRAB!

So, I finally had to acknowledge to d (who loves nothing better than to try and get me into belts, despite my fundamental loathing of such masochistic items) that I needed a belt to stop myself from becoming a local scandal. A belt was procured and I slid it round myself.

One of the reasons I hate belts is that I'm always scared of the humiliation when they turn out to be human-sized, and do not go around the girth of me.

This off-the-shelf belt was very nearly that sort of belt. But importantly, not quite. I could just manage to pull it tight and fasten it on the last possible notch. As such, it became not a humiliation, but a challenge. We've started on the last possible notch. It will be another marker of progress as I become able to fasten it on tighter and tighter notches, and I daresay around entirely different trousers. A marker of progress, then, that doesn't rely on the Nazi Scales for its veracity.

All was going well. On one unofficial weigh-in this week, I saw a 17 in the 'Stones' column.
However, late last week I was stricken with a lurgi which saw my head become a bowl of snot and my chest a cheese-grater slathered in mucus. That rather knocked my walking schedule on the head, and replaced it with a lie in bed, whimpering, coughing and sleeping schedule, which affected my calorific-exercise balance more than somewhat.

Nevertheless, things were still going well - I've had blood sugar results in the 7s and 7s this week, which has been positive.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, I decided I could risk having a carb-heavy early dinner (round about 4.30pm). Had myself a pizza.

Have yet to...erm...shall we say get rid of the remnants of that pizza, some 21 hours on.

Which is why this morning's weigh-in - one with which I sought to argue for some hours! - puts me at:
18st 0.25.

Technically of course, this is highly positive and worth a yippedee doo-dah - it's a loss of two pounds, which is the 'right' amount to lose, medically speaking, in the space of a week. It's really only the fact that I saw a 17 earlier in the week, and the inherent understanding that one productive half-hour in the bathroom would see me over the 18 stone border, that makes it irritating to still be officially trapped on this side.

But there we are. Week 1, 2 pounds. Keeping to the schedule, next week I'll be well and truly into the 17s, rather than just barely so.

Having slept through the night for the first time in half a week, I feel better and stronger and all that happy Six Million Dollar Man crap today, even though the lurgi is still there on my chest. So the likelihood is that tomorrow I get back to the walking again, and on we go, pushing on down, two pounds and perhaps fewer stupid pizza moments at a time.

Wrong-Footing The Toe of Destiny

Well, that was a surprise.

As usual, O followers of the Dissappearing Witterer, the whole shebang begins with a taking-stock. That means a weigh-in, so we have a mark at which to aim.

When I began again before Christmas, I was over 20 stone, and close to 20 stone 7.25 - the weight I was when I began the original Disappearing, some seven years ago.
As foreshadowed yesterday, have recently been eating like I don't know where my next meal is coming from, and doing precisely buggerall by way of exercise.

Which rather takes the piss, as today's relaunch weigh-in weight is: 19st 8.25

This makes no sense whatever, but is enough to give me a spring in my step as I set out yet, yet, yet a-freakin'gain.

There's a danger, when you start out with good news (and yes, absurd as it may sound, starting out at just over 236 pounds is good news), that you immediate relax your resolve, thinking 'Ach, things are nowhere near as bad as I thought they were, where's me pizza?'

This wrong-footing of the Toe of Destiny which was previously booting you up the ass is the way to get precisely nothing done, and continue happy and comfortable and full of carbohydrate - at least in the short term.

At which point, you should feel entirely at liberty to punch yourself in the head and use whatever is available to you to motivate yourself.

'Oi, y'know that noise you make when you get out of a chair?'

'Yeah...'

'ACK, wrong answer, put the pizza down, get your shoes on and get walking.'

Yes, absolutely, I'm suggesting you bamboozle yourself. If it helps, yourself is trying to bamboozle you all the time - 'One more slice, where's the harm?' 'No-one ever dropped dead of eating this particular cupcake.' 'It looks a bit overcast out there...'

Fat is commmmfortable. Part of your brain - or at least part of mine - wants to stay that way, because it's like slobbing around in your PJs all day, it feels freakin' gooooood. But sometimes, you've got to go out. Taking an occasional day in your PJS - fab. Spending your whole LIFE in your PJs? Really not so good.

So lie, cheat, bamboozle the bejesus out of your brain if you have to. But when you get good news, treat it like a door-to-door double glazing salesman. Be wary. Nod, understand, but don't necessarily let it coax you into anything that doesn't fit in with your pre-existing plans.

Let not the Toe of Destiny go awry, for it is thine ass for which it is intended.

Now - time to register with a doctor...

The Madness of Disappearing Mathematics

Arrrrrrgh!

Hoping to see an 18, did I say?

This morning, in the positively chilly air that swpet majestically through our bathroom on its way to somewhere less scary, I weighed in, pre-bathroom (if you take my meaning), at 19st 1.5.

I waited.

And waited.

And peed. And weighed in again, just before lunchtime. Having pulled on a pair of heavy socks as protection against the cold, I then weighed in at 19st 2.25!

I discarded the socks, swearing calumny and a world of evils on their woolen soles. 19st 0.75.

Three-quarters of a pound away from the border, still 'pre-bathroom.' That, gentle observers of this Disappearing madness, is what I'm recording as my official weigh-in weight on this first weekly weigh-in. Down 6.75 pounds this week, still presumably burning up the excess stored water in my system.

Now let's be clear - this is pretty damn good. There's plenty to celebrate in this - it means since I began my week of 'pre-Disappearing' having seen a result of 20 stone, I've lost 13.25 pounds, probably all of it stored as excess water. But let's also be clear about the Disappearing mindset. This is one frustrating-as-hell result. One pound would have put me in the 18s, which, even if it's by the tiniest squeak, you need to believe me, feels a whole hell of a lot different to being in the 20s. As far as the difference is concerned, you might as well be talking centuries as stones.

And here's the extra-sepecially galling thing. I then had lunch, and for that lunch I had pizza. really quite a lot of pizza - there being no better time to have a heavy-ass day than post-weigh-in on a Tuesday, and there also at the moment being a shitload of really tasty homemade pizza left in our house.

So - much nomming of the pizza. Even before I was done, the urge to be 'post-bathroom' was upon me, and once I'd finished the really rather quite a lot of pizza, I fulfilled the urge in a rather prodigious manner. And yes, I weighed again.

Because I'm a monomaniacal nightmare, that's why.

After the enormo-pizza lunch, and the prodigious purge, I evened out at 19st 2.

Now, you're probably beginning to get a sense for the nature of my insanity, so it won't come as too much of a surprise to you to learn that as this aftenoon wears on, I'm inwardly bemoaning the fact that I didn't weigh the pizza before I ate it, so that I could claim with more legitimacy than hope that 'really' (and please not the absurdity of that 'really'), I'm under the 19 stone mark. I'm not of course, the official number today is 19st 0.75, but yes, everything in me (with the possible exception of the pizza) wants to claim this landmark. This is the madness of Disappearing Mathematics.

At some point, prrrrobably quite soon, I shall be needing to be hit on the head with something fairly heavy to break me out of this cycle of insane addition and subtraction. But for now, people tell me there are other important things to do besides worry about the weight of pizza versus the weight of really-not-pizza-anymore.

They're wrong of course, but I've found they go away faster if you smile and nod and pretend to agree with them.

So this is me, smiling and nodding and pretending to agree with them, and not obsessing at all about the calculable weight of cooked dough...

The Night-Before Nerves

And noooooow, the time is heeeeere, and so I faaaaaace, my first new weiiiigh-innn...

Tomorrow morning, whatever the Nazi Scales, in their black little digital heart, decide to show me, it's what we record. I've had a week of pre-Disappearing, in which I went down from 20 stone to 19 stone 7.5. And then a week of Disappearing proper, including every day walking, during which I will have achieved...whatever the Nazi Scales allow me in the morning.

Naturally, I'm quite nervous about the first weigh-in. I'm nervous because I have a feeling I've fallen into bad, if natural Disappearing habits, such as having only a few meals a day, with nothing in between. That has a tendency, or so I'm told, to slow the metabolism, leave it purring like a kitten that's never known hardship, but doesn't especially help when it comes to shifting the weight. The first week's weight loss of course is mostly water. The second, as far as I recall, is mostly water too, btu these first two weeks can give you quite a boost. You don't need me to tell you that - the first week droppped me almost seven pounds. Who knew I was that subcutaneously soggy? I won't lie to you though, life already feels significantly easier.

Nor will I lie to you about tomorrow - I'd love to see an 18, which would mean losing 7.75 pounds at least over the course of this second week. Unlikely, of course, but one has to dream. More likely I'll be down 'some pounds.' Two pounds or over, and Tony's a happy boy - as much as you have to dream, you also have to temper your dreams to reality and stay the course you've set for yourself.

It's funny though, the way the night-before nerves can get to you. Last night, d made pizza while I went out walking. We settled down around 9.30, and I had three smallish squares of what was frankly gorgeous - note in case this sounds weird, you're actually allowed pizza on my weird, self-imposed regime, you're just not allowed any sort of satisfying amount of it at a time, especially later in the evening.

I spent most of today in Cardiff, at my Starbucks. Yes, you're allowed Starbucks too, but you have to be sensible about it. My own bizarre concoction, courtesy of my mate Harry, who used to work there, is a...(draws deep breath...) Venti Decaff Wet Extra Hot Non-Fat Sugar Free Caramel Misto. A Misto, for those who've never encountered it, is equal parts coffee and milk. And if you Non-Fat it, it's a whole lot of drink for roughly 130 calories a time. Four or five of those a day and you feel relatively full, because of course you are relatively full, and for surprisingly little in terms of calories.

On the way home, d, who knows the night-before nerves of old, asked 'So...pizza tonight then? Or something lighter?'
I squirmed, because the pizza, it should be noted, is fricking excellent. You've never had pizza like this. But am going for the lighter option, simply because it's the night before a weigh-in. That, my friends, is the night-before nerves. I'm having pizza for lunch tomorrow, beyond a shadow of doubt. But tonight...something less, simply because the 'main meals, no snack' routine has slowed the metabolism, or certainly the digestive system down, and I have it within me to actively resent the food that doesn't make it out of my system by weigh-in time tomorrow. I am that idiot.

So this is me, drinking water to try and flush out my system, and having something lighter than pizza for dinner, to pay tribute to the night-before nerves and aim to skew numbers and physics and Nazi Scales in my favour.

Here's hoping.

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 Papa John Puff Pastry Penitence Principle

Evil has come to our town.
Crusty, chewy, succulent evil.
Merthyr now has its own Papa John's. This spells all kinds of doom for all kinds of Disappearing efforts, and today, when d got out of work, we went to give it the blessing of our patronage.

Given that the weather today has been all kinds of apocalyptic - I was out of the door ten seconds when the sky started throwing little pellets of fuckyou (or hailstones, as the rest of the world rather boringly insists on calling them) at me - I had figured that today might be one of those wondrous, joyful things we like to fondly imagine are necessary - a rest day from the routine of exercise.
But as we sat in our flat, moaning rather indecently given we were on separate couches, and chewing our Papa John joyfulness, the sun did a rather unfriendly thing and beamed through our window, as if to say 'Ohhhh no - you're not pinning this shit on me, pilgrim, I'm here if you want me.'

So, I grabbed my trainers (I have yet to convince my body we're taking it seriously enough again to stap on the walking boots - not least because every time I do that, I get pigging blisters!), and trudged out of the door.

Wales, as I've mentioned before, is not flat. In fact, if you were looking for absolute antonyms of Welshness, 'flat' would probably win hands down. I wanted something slightly different from my Trail walk, which saves most of its uphill stretches for the return journey, so instead I looked towards Thomastown. Thomastown, for those who've been with the blog a while, or who know the topography of Merthyr, is up what I'm pleased to call a Hail Mary Mother of Fuck of a Hill. Since I've been living in Merthyr this time round, I've tackled that hill many a time.

I've never been this heavy when I've done it. In fact, it's fair at this point to recall that I've not really been this heavy while living in Merthyr...erm...ever, I don't think. So instead of the straight up (and I do mean straight up) kill-me-now of a hill, I tackled the thing with a puff pastry principle - walking along one way, making a little upturn, and walking back the other - acheiving the rise in altidue in a series of at least theoretically more manageable inclines (it's possible I've been married for a foodie too long for this reference to make automatic sense to non-foodies, because this naturally feels like puff pastry to me - it's all about the layers). By the time I got to Thomastown Park, I was still practically begging for death from any wandering deity or demon. A detour over to my mother's place to check on her, as she's been suffering from the bastard son of a thousand lurgis recently, and I managed to rack up something a little over three miles. With a whole hell of a lot more up involved than my Trail route ever feels like. So, technically a light day, exercise-wise, and a heavy food day, with the discovery of Papa John's. But still, the joy about doing a truly painful walk is that you feel ridiculously virtuous at the end of it, whatever the numbers actually say. I'm not sure what this inherent masochism in the human spirit is all about, but you do feel like you've 'earned' your dinner if you happen to feel bloody awful after some exertion, whatever the reality might be.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to sink, Bertie Wooster-like, beneath the water of a hot, reviving bath. one rather feels one has 'earned' that too, having walked a painful walk. The dangerous thing of course is that the same logic whispers into your brain that you've earned a big slab of chocolate as well...

Argh - to the bath!

6th February - The Caterpillar Paradigm

I rarely take a day off from anything – the day-job, the editing, the geek writing, the Disappearing. When I do, though, I take them right the hell off and in another county.

Today, I took a look out the window at the stormy, pissing-down weather and thought a handful of single-syllable words: “Sod that for a lark,” more or less covers it.

d had a day off too, and while we thought about doing any number of things – new coffee shop, breakfast out, movies – in the end, we decided on the warmer, cuddlier option of sitting, snuggling on the couch for hours long enough to get ass-carbuncles, watching recorded TV, Netflixing and chilling. 

Lunch was a small pizza and chicken strips. Dinner was curry and rice. Biking was contemplated, annnnd then frankly not done. This makes actually the second or third night in a row where I’ve done precisely nothing in terms of exercise, and overall, a day containing both pizza and rice is massively unwise. Essentially, today, I emulated The Very Hungry Caterpillar – sitting extremely still in a duvet-cocoon, occasionally pouring food into my face.

Of course the trouble with the Caterpillar Paradigm is that rather than turning into a butterfly, one turns rather more into a slug if one follows it too often or too assiduously. Tomorrow needs to be significantly different. Am I likely to have made progress in my Disappearing come Tuesday? Not on the basis of today, or any recent days. Am I likely to in fact have slipped back some? Yes, absolutely.

It's incredibly easy, contemplating this, to say “Fuck it!” and simply eat what we like. I’m not going to do that. Tomorrow needs to be a return to Disappearing form, before a couple of days of busy ass-sitting turns into a slippery slope to Reappearing.

31st January - The Overweighing Idiocy and the Garlic Demon Bread

I know, I know, I know - don't weight yourself every day.

Certainly don't weigh yourself twice a day.

Or...y'know, twice a day with the scales in two different places each time.

My name is Tony and I am a weighaholic.

This clearly needs to stop, because not only does it influence my mood and my interpretation of the day, but exactly as all the manuals and guides and suchlike tell you, it leads to a false sense of rollercoastering.

Today, I weighed in the morning and was quite happy with what I saw. Had a stay at home day, ate reasonably, biked - though, I'll be honest with you, have finished Season 1 of Gotham, and Daredevil Season 1, while great for atmosphere, is less compelling to pedal, meaning I only got 300 calories burned, only stayed on the bike for half an hour.

But I left it too late after lunch to eat anything, and when d came in, we ordered from Dominoes Pizza. Now, neither of us actually had pizza, because as much of a lemming as I may be, I'm not that stupid at heading on to 11 o'clock at night. But chicken strippers and two quarter-pieces of garlic bread at that time of night are not exactly smart either. Now, I'm not overplaying this, but there's a part of my brain I'm working fairly hard to shut the hell up that's telling me "Ooh, go and weigh, go on, see how much you've gained from garlic bread and chicken, go on dare you, double dare you, you great big bread-eating pillock!"

I've mentioned this before, but embarking on any change of behaviour, it becomes almost pathetically easy to see why, in less enlightened ages, people thought there were demons tempting them to do things they thought were 'bad.' Once you have a concept of 'bad' behaviour, and you isolate it as such and try to do something else, you can drive yourself entirely crazy in a demon-haunted world without any help from outside influences. You're talking to yourself, but it's so much easier to name that madness a demon, to absolve yourself of the dabbling with the 'badness.' Ahhh, human beings. We're a strange bunch.

And so, happily exorcising the demon Garlic Bread and laying my dabbling with daftness at your feet, on we go. Monday tomorrow. What can possibly go wrong?

28 January - The Bread Head

Bread, so they tell me, is appallingly bad for you.

Never mind that it’s been the staff of life since before the Roman Empire was the Roman Empire – things have changed with our lifestyle, meaning bread is the enemy. It stays around too long in the system, is apparently quite hard to digest, and is essentially just a carb-bomb waiting to explode in your system and turn you into The Blob.

Of all things, though, the first time I did this, bread was the hardest thing to cut down or give up. And why?

Because the little bastard’s so gorgeously scrummy, that’s why. So diverse, so multi-faceted, so much a meal in and of itself, there’s practically no limit to the invention, the wonder and the sheer, unbridled joy that bread can bring. Without bread, there’s no pizza, which pretty much invalidates all the anti-bread rhetoric in the world before we even begin. Then there’s the staggering pleasure of breaking a fresh loaf open. The smell, the texture, the job it does as a delivery device for all manner of other gorgeous things. No pizza, no sandwiches. How much worse does life become at the very contemplation of a world like that. No toast – no hot buttered toast. Absolutely no point to any soup in the world. And so very much on.

I mention this because bread remains a staple part of my diet, though I’ve been forced by the good if rather wretched sense of it to cut down to two slices with a can of soup – you’ll have noticed that’s become something of a standard lunch for me.

It was today – cream of tomato soup, two slices of bread, toasted.

Which in itself, is a Disappearing crime I’m happy to commit right now. There’ll come a time when I have to countenance a world with less bread in it, but damned if that time is yet.

I mention all this because neither d nor I really felt like the dinner of poverty and leftovers that was our lot this evening on the night before payday.

‘Y’know what I could really go for?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘Grilled cheese and tomato soup.’

‘I’m so down with that it’s not even funny,’ I told her. So – more cream of tomato soup, and the classic ‘grilled cheese’ was consumed. Or ‘scranned’ as my Scottish pal Gregor would have it. Great word, ‘scranned’ – seems to denote a wordless urgency with which any Disappearer is probably familiar.

To the non-American, a ‘grilled cheese’ is by no means just grilled cheese. That would be too simple by some considerable distance. Remember, it’s food invented by Americans, a people who accept insane complication as a matter of daily life, who add tax to the price of things at the checkout, and who add mathematics to rugby, call it football and then at least pretend to both understand and enjoy it.

Nor, to the Brits, is it simply ‘cheese on toast.’ Ohhh to the mighty fuck-no. It’s essentially what Americans think of as French Toast (indicating a not entirely inaccurate assessment of the French capacity for luxury), and which Brits tend to describe with the bluntness of purpose of its more northern inhabitants as ‘Fried Bread.’ Only with gooey cheese in the middle of a Fried Bread sandwich, because, fuck, when you’ve fried a couple of pieces of good bread in butter, you need that extra gooey fat layer to really make something, you know?

It is, quite simply, a food too good to be of earthly design. In fact it’s well known in Clever People Circles that when the Greeks claimed the food of the Olympian gods was ambrosia and nectar, what they actually meant  was Bread and Cheese (This may not in fact be entirely true). The thing about which is, allied to a cup of cream of tomato soup (I also have no idea where this pairing was first discovered to be the source of all wonder and wisdom, I simply know that it is), you can scran a hell of a lot of it before you even know your mouth has been moving.

I’m fairly sure I downed four pieces of butter-soaked, cheese-welded bread with what turned out to be a cup and a half of soup, before looking up. Added to the two at lunchtime, that’s a pretty damn hefty bread day, even for me.

I compounded the issue, such as it was, by determinedly not biking. I mentioned having days off, and while I didn’t exactly decide not to do it, I did end up, somehow, with it being later in the day than was feasible, if I actually wanted to exchange any civilised words with my wife, and so the day became a no-exercise day. Saying which, I had done about 450 calories of walking by the end of the day, so it wasn’t as though I’d been entirely sluglike and slothful. Just probably, in all honesty, not energetic enough for a six-slicer.

The point is, I’m not claiming I was led astray, or that my grand plans were dashed by time or any such thing. You can certainly do that sort of thing when you’re Disappearing. No-one’s going to stop you, and no-one’s going to disagree. The point is it doesn’t actually do you any good to dwell on it, either. You did a thing, what will be will be, and you move on, resolving to have better days coming.

Will the day of the six slicer hurt me come Tuesday? Who knows? There’s a long way between now and then. The challenge is not to let that sort of day become tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. That’s why official weigh-ins are only once a week – if you took every morning’s weigh-in as official, you’d drive yourself stark raving mad before the week was out.

Onward, to better, less tasty days!