Movin' And Shakin'

Barely made it outside the door of the flat today, except to go and collect my boiled rice and fried onions - I swear, for all thirteen years of being married to a foodie has done for me, a couple of days on my own and I'm reverting to pigging monasticism. Don't have that much hair to shave off, and the saffron might clash with my complexion, but hey, robes are good and flowing for those of us of the more enormous persuasion, and the only difference between ranting and chanting is the intensity, so who knows? Might be an option. Bowl of crispy rice in the morning and bowl of boiled rice at night, sorted.

It's all about the carb, of course. In the words of Garfield the cartoon cat, I never met a carbohydrate I didn't like.

Anyhow - barely made it outside the door today because there was Stuff To Do. Shifting of chunks of furniture, opening and emptying and crunching of boxes and suchlike. Made, in real terms, barely a dent, still can't get to our bed, the kitchen's filling up nicely with stuff to be found a place by d, and there's more to come tomorrow. Which is why this is a short and, if not sweet, than at least carb-heavy entry. There's more to do almost immediately I'm done.

One thing I got done today though was the shifting of one half of the fridge magnet collection.

Don't laugh, it's a reasonably big job. And it actually makes something of a difference to where some pieces of furniture can go, so I'm counting it as a reason to feel like progress has been made, along with the boxes removed from the pile and crushed and shoved out for recycling, which from what we can see, nobody else bothers with in the block. So...yeah - lowish exercise day, but I'll tell you a thing. I'm getting twinges. Not old-man back twinges of hamstrings or any of that, but if I move something, it actually feels like the muscles between my ribs on one side or the other - but never both - go into  frigging spasm. Which was interesting at about two o'clock this morning, when, having decided I had the gumption for a late surge, more or less spurred on by Bruce Dickinson and Bryan Ferry (separately, obviously, not together. Cos that would be weird. Interesting, but weird), I shifted a couple of bookcases round and found myself breathing weird till my ribcage straightened up and flew right.

So, not so much a Disappearing day - buggerall aerobic exercise, perhaps the tiniest bit of moving-man-style weight training. But also not by any means a carnival of excess. Sometimes, you've got to take the little victories and let them be enough to get you to the next day, and the next. Today, I emptied boxes, shifted furniture and yes goddammit, I rearranged half the magnet collection.

Tomorrow...more comes through the door...

Disappearing Tip #1 - Some days are diamonds. Some days, getting out of bed is a victory. Accept and embrace them both.

Disappearing Tip #2 - You can never have enough fridge magnets. At least while you still have a fridge.

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 Dangers of Hardass Love

Yesterday, I had an email from a friend.

As far as I know, this friend hadn't, at the time, clocked that I'd started Disappearing again. I've checked with her before using this, because I know what some of my friends are like, and they won't be happy about it.

Took me a little while to get right with it myself, because it seemed to come out of a clear blue sky - but I know it was meant well, and in a kind of hardass, personal trainer, no-bullshit, get better spirit, that this pal's particularly used to because we first encountered each other when I edited her manuscript (not to brag, but... Ah, hell, no, let's really not brag), so she's used to getting that from me about her work in a professional capacity, and we've become strong, good friends during that process, so it's part of the way we're allowed to talk to each other.

And while that's true, and we're cool, it stands as an example of the kind of thing people believe they can come out of a blue sky and tell you when you're fat...as if it's actually their business to point things out to you, so I figured I'd share it with you.


Here's the mail, before we go any further:

Title: You Mad Bastard!

 

Tony! What the hell! I've just seen your picture on Facebook and I'm so upset. What are you doing? People like me need you - and there you are looking like you might drop down dead TODAY.

Get back on that bloody diet man!

Do not eat a fucking thing unless you have not eaten for three hours!

Do not eat anything with sugar in for the next 24 hours.

If you feel like shit, then let me tell you, you look like it too! Here is a poke with a shitty stick! You're strong willed. You CAN do this. Move your arse, now!

I'm going to demand a report on the past 24 hours food and drink at 9.45 tomorrow, so fucking-well act like a man and get on with the bloody sensible eating and excercise plan, you big idiot!

XXX

So - there you go.
Now, since then, this pal has been so upset at what I look like in recent Facebook photos that she's been unable to sleep, because, in her own words, there's nothing she can do to save me but throw words at me, and she's also in fact been upset that 'people around you have let you get this way.' So, as I say, this wasn't badly meant, but it's an interesting example of a more general social trend: the idea that fat people need people to point out what they look like in order to 'motivate' them into doing the 'right' thing.

We really don't. I mean...really, really.

The thing is, as it happened, I'd started Disappearing again, and so was in a 'Let's deal with this shit' place when this arrived in my inbox. If I'd been feeling particuarly delicate, or perhaps more likely, if I'd woken up yesterday thinking 'As days go, I'm not looking so shabby, today's a good day,' there's no telling what it might have done to me.

Here's the thing: nobody 'lets us' get this way. We do this to ourself - whether driven by demons or drawn by cream cakes. And more often than not, only we can get ourselves out of the situations we're in. However well meant advice on what we look like and how we're likely to fall over and die may be, it's actually very rarely effective in terms of getting us to do anything positive. It's very difficult to actually shame us into doing something you think we should do, and more often than not, it hardens us into a 'Fuck you!' response, and a desire to run...or at least get a cab...to the nearest cake shop and buy EVERYTHING, because there's a degree of self-hate but also a degree of self-comfort and protection in eating foods that give us an immediate emotional buzz, like cakes and chocolate (or whatever we've associated as 'comfort food').

Now as it happens, my friend and I are cool, and I'm already in the Disappearing Zone. But generally, reacting with horror and forecasting death - nnnnnotsomuch the way to get your fat friend to do things that are good for them. Being a hardass is all well and good if your fat friend's a hardass too. But some aren't, and even some who seem to be in front of all the world are actually self-hating with a crispy sugary casing of hardassery they've had to master just to get through the day.

As I say, I know my friends, and I'm not posting this to start a chorus of angry responses - can the torch and pitchfork stuff. For me, from this friend, this was fine. Just in general, be sure you've judged your friend and their responses well before you go down the 'What the hell have you done to yourself?' route. We have to be pretty hardass to get through society being significantly outside its metrics of acceptability and attractiveness. Be VERY sure our hardassery's not just the candy shell we wear, and that you're not about to stake us through the heart before you deploy your own hardass love.

The Benefits of Delusion

Wellllll, that sucks.

That sucks big time. The weigh-in this morning was a positive scandal. 19st 8, thank you very freakin' much. Up more than five pounds, in the week when I started walking again. Wwwwwwhat the ever-living hell?

Now, as most of you know, I'm one of those tedious atheists that keep banging on about it, and one of those annoying arch-rationalists that have, when all is said and done, no time or patience for all the fluffy pseudo-scientific feelgood fuckery with which humankind insists on filling up its brains, and for which it claims some kind of validity irrespective of hard evidence.

That said, I neither feel like I weigh 19st 8, nor feel like I look like I do.

'So what the hell are you worried about?' croaked d, who's suffering from the Boomerang Flu at the moment. 'Go by what you feel for now, not what the scales say. Hate those fucking scales,' she added, before erupting into a giant snotty cough and looking up at me with eyes that said 'If you make me say one more word with this throat right now, I'm going to wait till I'm well and then I'm going to prod you relentlessly with a spork.'

I guess the thing is that I'm worried because I'm an advocate of facts, and the facts are right there on the scales. I can witter on about heavy rice meals last night, and slow transits and all kinds of nonsense till I'm blue in the face if I have to, but weigh-ins depend on facts, and those are them. 19st 8 is what I currently weigh, as of this morning.

That said, her approach has a good deal of psychological merit to it in terms of going the hell forward, because I'm here to tell you, having walked over twenty miles this week just for the freakin' sake of it, having gone up five pounds would be what fluffier people than me would call 'soul destroying.' Certainly, if you let it, it can freeze you into inactivity and a 'fuck it, then' mentality of burning your good intentions to the ground.

But if you don't let it - if you make use of the benefits of delusion to say 'I don't feel that heavy, and it's not like my clothes are straining,' then you can get up in the morning and still damn well do something. I worked yesterday when I should probably have been walking, and there's every chance, as I write this at 5.28 in the afternoon, that I'll do the same again today, though if not walking, I should at least be able to find the time to bike tonight.

So this is me - Factual McHeavyFuck - making use of the benefits of delusion to say 'more must be done' in the next seven days.

Still sucks big time though.

The Birthday Reawakening

Well hello all over again.

Yes, I've been away from the blog. Yes, I'm back now. Yes, the being away denotes notsomuch a falling off the wagon as a slowing up, stepping off and lighting the fucker on fire. And yes, it's time to break out the fire extinguisher, see what can be salvaged, preserve some roasted horsemeat for the journey and start all over again. Faiiiiirly convinced that tomorrow I'll actually be heavier than I was when re-starting the Disappearing. But, on the other hand, there has been, today, a degree of consciousness-raising (S'kinda like barn-raising, except you have to keep pulling your shirt down to avoid exposing your gigunda-belly). And there has also been some proper walking - as in painful, not-stopping, 'Holy CRAP I'm out of practice at this shit!' walking - so I can at least face the morning with a modicum of 'Yes, but I'm back on board now' rationalisation.

Decided to get back onto the blog discipline too, notsomuch because of the cathartic effect of confession - 'Forgive me, readers, I have sinned. It's been two weeks since my last confession' - but more because I have a pal who reads the blog pretty compulsively (I have the weird sensation she may conceivably have read all of it, which I'm not even sure I have once it was written. So this one's for Ruth, as a kind of birthday reawakening, and a promise to do better both in terms of the Disappearing and the blogging.

Happy Birthday, pal o'mine - the Disappearing Man is back. Again.

The Mystery Setback

You'll remember a couple of days ago - just Wednesday, in fact - I mentioned having had a post-official weigh-in and being pleased to find myself back in the 18s - 18st 13.

Since then, I've done reasonably well, I think. And after doing some biking last night, I figured it was safe to take a peek. Imagine my surprise and horror then to find myself barely a smidgen under 19st 7! Even with the lightening of an overnight, I weighed in this morning as heavier than when I began!

The galling thing about things like this is their mysteriousness.
If I'd raided the Temptaion Drawer, I'd say fine. If I'd been eating enormo-meals of extravagant and kingly richness, fine. Yes, I had the Curry Divergence, but on an active day, I figured I could calorifically justify that. It's when results seem to come out of nowhere to blindside you, that the whole thing seems pointless.

But - the point is the doing of it, I guess. And it's Saturday. There are still three more mornings before the next official weigh-in. Time yet to stomp the mystery setback into the ground. Still and all - galling stuff.

The Reluctant Return

Well, hello again.

I've meant to write a copuple of entries since the last one, but have pretty much convinced myself that I've been too busy. Don't get me wrong, I've been madly busy, but the whole Disappearing schtick is supposed to be about finding balance in life, making time to include some exercise in my otherwise sedentary-jobbed life, and making positive changes to my lifestyle.

Let me say without prevarication, that's been a bit fucked up lately.
My last weigh-in - the one I missed reporting to you - showed me as 19st 1.25, so back into the 19s. That was disappointing, but given that I hadn't done any exercise, and had been eating rather unwisely (Translation: there had been chocolate, or desserts, or high-carb meals late at night, or some other dumbass thing), I wasn't as disappointed by it as I probably should have been. What's more, have I changed my habits back to full-on Disappearing mode in the week since that weigh-in? No, not at all.

So all in all, things have not been on track for a couple of weeks, and if I let the catch-all excuse of 'busyness' determine me towards a flamethrower policy of doing whatever the hell I want to do, then things won't improve over the next few weeks either, they'll just get progressively worse and harder to shift back into a positive gear. So on the principle of faking it till we make it, let's assume a Disappearing attitude, and see what happens next.

Faking it? Yes, the positivity of the thing has safely evaporated now, and indeed so has most of the progress, so it's a case of hauling my ass back on the bike and being Mr Sensible all over again. On the other hand, my system is no longer conditioned to exercise and healthier eating, so with any luck the rapid loss of the first few pounds of mostly-water should kick in again and give me a boost.

(Sigh). Here's hoping, anyway.

15th February - The Nazi Forgetfulness

No, still haven't put batteries in the Nazi Scales. Which is extra tricky because I'm either not that much heavier than last week, or significantly heavier than last week and damn close to where I started, depending on which faint, weak-ass signal of their forgetfulness we believe.

Weigh-in today put me as either:
19st 00 or
19st 1.25 or
19st 2.

Who the hell knows which if any of these are accurate? Must get round to buying batteries. Must do. Because, y'know, I so want to face the genuine music of my week of more or less exercise-freedom.

One thing I'll tell you - the propensity exists in me for a dangerous new routine. A Costa coffee shop has opened up just round the corner from me, and while I vow my unswerving loyalty to my particular Starbuckers, I also vow my increasing poverty, and it's a hell of a lot easier and cheaper to go round the corner for processed-sandwich lunch and coffee at Costa than it is to jump on a train and spend the day being all productive. In itself, that's probably not so bad, but it is rather facilitating my not-new but new-this-week habit (honestly, it must get exhausting listening to which particular pothole I've fallen down this week) of buying a bag of cashews and chomping my way through them as I plough through work towards a tight deadline.
Clearly, this needs to be stopped at some point soon, because whichever of the weigh-in numbers is actually accurate, it's not good. Also, I need to start biking more properly, and walking more properly again, to kick the living crap out of my metabolism and get it to remember its function.

Walking goooood. Cashews gorgeous little bastards, but basically a tiny individual sack of fat and calories.

When the Nazis get theire memory back, I promise I'll interrogate them in a more rigorous manner - three potential weigh-in figures is just ridiculous.

9th February - The Mushroom Failure and The Dessert Success

As predicted, the weigh-in was a setback. To be absolutely honest, it was more of a setback than I'd expected - I weighed in at 18st 13 lb. Three whole pounds of backslide. Though that said, that was before I went to Starbucks for the day, and round about mid-morning, the coffee did what coffee is famous for, and much of me exploded - and naturally, all I could think was "Damn, if only I'd waited to weigh till after that..."

But that's not what happened, so the official figure stands. To say there's room for improvement would be assinine and anodyne at the exact same moment, but that's what weeks are for - to make the improvements we want to see in our lives, whether they be personal, political, creative or Disappearing. You have another week, get to it and carpe the fuck out of that diem.

This evening was reasonably good - yes, technically we went ot an Italian for dinner again (I have no idea what it is about Tuesdays in Cardiff with d, but Italian seems to be our go-to at the moment), but I eschewed the joy of pasta for a chicken saltimbocca (chicken breast, run over by something heavy, wrapped in thin ham, and paired with a white wine sauce and (as it happened), some less than spectacular saute potatoes. Had a starter too, because they were insanely cheap - breaded garlic mushrooms. They were ordered and eaten before the whole "nothing fried" thing even crossed my mind. Don't know what to tell you - I appear to have a weakness for fungi.

That said, we did stroll our eyeballs around the dessert menu. And I was going to be good.
"Oh look - they have a sundae," said d.
"Ohhhh fuck," I murmured.
For those who don't know me well enough to know this, I have notsomuch a weakness for sundaes as a major freaking personality disorder where they're concerned. Sundaes are the can-can dancers of the dessert world, all frills and hidden delights, kicking up their creamy skirts and daring you to dive on in.

This one in particular promised richness, darkness, bittersweetness in its chocolate salted caramel heart.
I sighed.
"Nnnnope," I almost mourned.
"Good answer," said d, and off we went to the movies to watch Shakespeare on stage. The Winter's Tale. I'd forgotten everything about it, despite having read it many years ago. Then we watched it. Now I understand why I'd forgotten everything about it. It went on for about three lifetimes, and by the time Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh were taking their curtain calls, we had roughly fifteen minutes to get to the last train home. There's power walking, and then there's "I'm gonna be stranded, freezing my ass off on the streets of Cardiff" walking. We did that second kind of walking, and made it to the train with five minutes to spare, but very little left in the way of lung capacity or will to live.
So this is me, embarking on another week of Disappearing after a disappointing but understandable result. The Disappointing Man, perhaps? Ach, maybe, but philosophy is a great consolation on days like this. Sometimes, you just have to say "Shit happens - after you've weighed in," and get the hell back on with what works.

The Elevator Plunge

Never underestimate the power of liquids.

Had a mostly Starbucks day yesterday, and weighed in the night, before getting on the bike, only to find myself - let's just say, worse than before I started all this.

Much biking later - well, I say much biking, by which I mean a meagre 400 calories of biking later - I got back on the scales and found myself 2.5 pounds lighter. A hearty pee lost me another pound and a half. And so it went. By this morning, I'd lost a whopping great six pounds in a kind of middle-of-the-night where-the-hell-did-that-go elevator plunge. I'm still heavier than I was last Tuesday, but given the week I've had, that's pretty understandable - and tonight, there's a baked rice in my future, along with more biking. I guess the lesson of this is that weigh-ins, useful as they are as stakes in the ground by which we mark the direction of a trend, are like taking a Polaroid of ourselves as we are that minute - a heavy meal or a massive quantity of liquid probably won't make us feel like we've put on weight, but the scales will record it because it's all part of the system we're capturing a snapshot of at that moment.

What happens tomorrow? Who knows? Heaviness in all probability - I have to be on, at the latest, the 8.38 train to Cardiff in the morning, which means I probably will still have tonight's rice meal in my system as part of the result I record as my third official weigh-in. The important thing is to let these things be what they are, rather than to go massively off the rails of "It's not working, I'm crap, fuck it, bring me chocolate!" Bad results come sometimes from bad behaviours or routine slippage. Sometimes, later in the process, they come from doing absolutely everything you can and your body clamming up and saying "Na-uh, fuck you, I'm not playing any more." The point is they come. The trick is to not let them become the only thing that comes. Good results come too, if you stay on the path, or, if you've fallen off, if you get back on the path.

That's probably the weirdest thing about the whole weightloss game. If you have a system that works, and you stick to it, success is actually mathematically likely over time. It's the million things that can sway you from your course that bring you failure.

So - tomorrow will be what it will be. I'm back on the bike tonight (though off it again tomorrow - long story short, the theatre show we were going to see last week is actually happening tomorrow instead). But the continuation of the Disappearing is not put in jeopardy by a bad result. We go forward from here.

Well, we go to the bike from here, technically, but you know what I mean...

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.

The Myth of Captain Healthy

While I'm thinking of it, the other reason not to weigh every goddamn day or chance you get is that, in case you missed this, scales are Nazi bastards, and they'll try and upset you and make you reach for your "Fuck it all, I'm leaving home!" treat of choice.

Last night, d and I were in Cardiff, and, as you do, and as is one of the great pleasures of liking any one or number of human beings more than the general mirthless, remorseless crowd of fuckwits, dickheads and douchebags that make up the human race, we had a meal together, sharing time, exchanging days and breaking bread. Breaking literal bread in my case, as we ended up in an Italian place that we've always walked by to get somewhere else, every time saying "Y'know, we really should try that place some day. Anyway..."

So last night, we said "Y'know, we really should try that place some day. Anyway...", walked on, discovered that the place we were heading for was about as attractive as a bullfrog on a blind date, and doubled back to finally cross the Italian off our List of Places To Eat At Before We Die.

It was...good. Not great, but good. Not fine dining, certainly, but fine if you found yourself in a particular part of Cardiff and seized with a sudden dangerously low blood-carb content. I had a brushcetta starter piled with tomatoes and raw onions - yeah, technically it was date night, but what you have to understnad is it was eleven year married date night. d had meatballs that were OK, but with which, should the need have arisen, you could at least have taken out the eyes of your first few attackers, come the zombie apocalypse. She added a side of garlic spinach, because, as I say, this was an eleven year married date night, dammit. For main, she went lasagne, and I went penne amatriciana - pasta, following bread, I know, sue me.

She went chocolate cake for dessert. I went smiling and a decaff latte.

All was good and groovy, except that in the aftermath of the meal, d wasn't well. Something had disagreed with her, and it wanted out any which way it could. I'm not sure a swaying bus ride home in the freezing cold especially helped either, but it was that or stand around for half an hour as her spine turned to one of Elsa's ice sculptures from Frozen. So we swayed.

Me - all I can tell you is that something must really have agreed with me, because 24 hours later, I still contain absolutely all of a bruschetta starter piled with tomatoes and raw onions, and a plateful of penne amatriciana.

Which is a real bastard if you're weighing every day, because then you wake up the morning after an official weigh-in, and weigh, and want to kill yourself when you see two weeks of pedalling run away yelling  "Fuck you, Disappearing Boy!" and throwing you V's and one-fingered salutes, giggling as it goes. I'm not getting on the scales tonight because something seems to be knitting itself a raft or a trap door in my colon and to have determined it wants a never-ending lock-in.

All I can do is continue as normal, get some dinner, get some biking done, try to get some sleep and move the hell along.

On the upside, I had my annual diabetic review today, after which you can kiss my ass and call me Captain Healthy. They bled me last week, and apparently, all is groovy. I have an HBA1C level of 54.

Impressed? Yeah, I didn't have a clue. "All good," said the nurse. Having just checked online, I can tell you the HBA1C is a measure of glycated haemoglobin - different from blood sugar in some...erm...crucial way, apparently. Now, the online stats say you should aim for an HBA1C of 48 or below, unless you've been advised otherwise - which to my nowledge, I haven't. So either my diabetic nurse knows more about my condition than she's ever bothered to let on, and I fall into the "below 59 is fine" category (which does appear to exist), or it was after 5PM when she saw me and she just couldn't give a shit any more. Pretty much like me in my current predicament.

Annnnnyhow. All good is what she told me, so all good is what I'm going with for now. The more I lose, the more the system is likely to come under better regulation, and the more optimal my HBA1C will be.

So, with d set to finish work just two hours from now, I need to get my clogged ass up and get some dinner and biking done. Catch you later, Disappearers all!

The Breakfast Hangover

Rassen frassen reakfast rindulgence rangover.

Since my Breakfast Indulgence two days ago, I seem to have slipped back in terms of progress.

Also, it's hot. Also, work. Nehh - wanna take my ball away and go home. One thing I don't want to do is walk anywhere. Another thing I don't want to do is get on that goddamned bike.

Sigh. Ignore me, just having a miseryfest. Feeling hot and flabby in the sunshine, and poor and deprived a week before payday, and covered up with deadlines to the point I don't even particularly want to do a thing.
'Nobody loves me, everybody hates me,
Think I'll go and eat worms' just about sums up today.

Meh.

16th June - The Normality Setback

Hello out there! I know, I know, you haven’t heard from me in weeks now. Well here I am, normal service resumed and all that.

Last Tuesday’s early-ass, pre-bathroom, pre-schlepp-to-London-to-hear-about-brains weigh-in was a fairly impressive disappointment. 18st 2.

Today’s early-ass, pre-bathroom, pre-Starbucks-to-work-my-moobs-off was even worse – 18st 2.5.

Why has this happened? Oh, that’ll be staggeringly simple – buggerall in the way of proper exercise for about two weeks, and an approach to food that hasn’t seen me be exactly profligate, but which hasn’t seen me be especially sensible either. So that’s the equation we’re dealing with. Let e= 0. Let f= >wisdom. e+f= fatbastardy+4lbs.

However, this is all fairly incidental. Just a couple of days ago, I started walking again in the morning before work, and biking again in the evening. The biking needs to increase, and so, if I’m honest, does the walking. I also need to find time from somewhere to throw some sort of gym-based element in there. Do I like being back in the 18 zone? No of course not – what kind of Muppet do you take me for? Will I get back into the 17s pretty damned sharpish? Yes, I will. This increase is a setback, but a logical one induced by the presence of too much normality over a relatively short period of time. This sort of setback happens on a Disappearing journey, and I know that. The challenge is to not go “Oh, it’s all gone to cock!” and dive into a cream cake, but to square your shoulders, rub your hands and say “Right, ya bass, I’m havin’ ya!” and get the hell back on with it.

Oh and no, I’m not too much of an ethical person – I’m happy to lay some of the initial blame for the Normality Setback on a couple of mad buggering deadlines that had to be hit. They’re done now. There are still mad buggering deadlines, (there always seem to be mad buggering deadlines), but none as mad or buggering as the ones of the last couple of weeks, so, all together now – “Right, ya bass, I’m havin’ ya!” – and up at 6.30 tomorrow morning again for more walking.