The Rediscovery Of Legs

So - as promised, there's been action.

Not bullet from a gun, 'holy crap I'm going to die now' action, but action nevertheless.

In a nutshell, I have rediscovered my legs, and determined to put them to some use. Yesterday, I walked 8875 of my ideal 10,000 steps, while eschewing all the fun things in food life.

Well, I say that and it's monstrously unfair - actually, d (taking her inspiration from Tom Kerridge), did something remarkable with chicken and rice and tinned tomatoes, that saw me have a tasty baked chicken burger for lunch, and chicken, rice and stewed tomatoes for dinner. I know what you're thinking, but you're wrong. Give me a bowl of stewed tomatoes and I'm a happy little camper. Similarly a bowl of boiled Brussel sprouts. If there's a tiny tump of boiled rice with it too, so much the better - these are the meals of my childhood, when my grandmother was poor enough to give us just carb and Something To Make It Exciting.

So - happy Tony yesterday, despite, when I came back from my walk, having to sit for about fifteen minutes in the town centre and cough up technically more lung that I'm probably supposed to own.

Today, due to an uphill detour to visit the local doctors and pick up registration forms, I tapped out at over 9000 steps, and have so far had a couple of cold Starbucks drinks - about 160 calories a shot, since you ask. Yes, technically they're caffeinated, and so I'll have to knock them on the head sooner or later, but for now, there's enough of a sensation of richness about them to get me started in the morning without especially craving what has the potential to be my downfall meal of the day, which is breakfast.

There are more stewed tomatoes in my immediate short-term future, along with potatoes tonight. The compulsion to eat a late, heavy supper, and to demand something sweet, is still there after a meal like that, but the compulsion can pretty much do one. I know, technically it's been two days, big whoop, but currently, I'm focussed forward, not letting the fatty lifestyle tempt me.

The rediscovery of legs has also undergone its first mild challenge - by the time I'd gone a few hundred yards today, the drizzle started, and my immediate reaction was positively catlike. 'Blech. Wet,' I muttered to myself, taking a look back at the flat, with its warmth, and dryness and work to be done.

'Fuck it. It's drizzle. Onward!' I said, and marched on, to the accompaniment of an audio drama.

In other news, my laptop appears to be dead and currently is refusing to rouse itself to any stimulus.
So...that's annoying.
But from a purely Disappearing standpoint - a pretty good day.

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...

The Third Step

People who tell you the first step of any journey is the hardest probably haven't actually achieved anything.

The first step is great - it feels like decisiveness, control over your own destiny, bold, positive action against a sea of whatever troubles you think are dogging you where you stand. So's the second step, to be fair - that's when you get that slight 'Look at me, I'm actually doing this' smugness.

Step three - or lap three, or circuit three - that's when you have to shake your head a little to clear it of the new reality that settles on you like malicious snow. Really? We're doing this now? At which point what you absolutely mustn't ever do is take a long view of the horizon, because the horizon, or the finishing line, or the moment of completion and success is so astonishingly far away, still, that it will aactively demotivate you.

Step three, or lap three, or circuit three, is not by any stretch where things get hard. Not even slightly. But it's the step at which, if you like, and changing metaphors completely, you've jumped off the high board, and you get that sense of questioning whether, all things considered, that was the best move you could have made.

Whether it is or it isn't, of course, there's precisely nothing to be done about it at that point but head ultimately onward, and downward, and try not to break anything too important when you get there.

Day three is always a little tricky because it's when things start to call to you. Comforts, or in my case, carbs, sweet things, all the lines and lines of unwisdom that can keep me bound in this body and ultimately kill me ahead of all the other contenders that fancy a crack at the gig. It's simply the body reacting to a change of circumstance of course, a body that's been used to living one way, and has let you have your fun for three days, but now really would prefer the old life back, thankyouverymuch - the lazy life, the sweet life, the reach out and grab it, say "fuck it all" life.

I've been down this road enough times now to stick my fingers in my ears and sing "lalalalala."
Day four is always better. You get the horrendously premature sense of trophyism, the "Look what I've done" sense of having beaten day three. It's more than a little pathetic of course, but it works like anaesthetic to make the next few days easier. You amass your three pathetic little days and they become the beginning of something, and you don't want to spoil them. You begin to weigh three days against whatever it is that's calling to you, on that whole "one day at a time" principle, and you begin to think you're going to win.

So, having just done my day three biking, let's be having day four along quick smart, if you please.

The Smile-Locator

Well - last night I said today was weigh-in day, day-job day, Starbucks day and reuniting with old schoolfriend day, and that at least two of them had the potential to crush my bonhomie under their feet like a bug.

As it turned out, only one of them crushed my bonhomie under its feet like a bug. But it got its work in early, so there was a reasonable chance of its effects lasting all day.

The question I have for you is: when is good news not good news?

The answer of course is when the news has been previously better.

You see, in my first week madness, I've been unofficially weighing in a lot since last Friday. On that day, I was 18st 13.5. Saturday, I was 18st 12.5,  a loss of  4.5 lbs since last Tuesday. Then there was the Proper Dinner on Sunday, and yesterday morning I was up to 18st 13.25.

I didn't have a particularly bad day yesterday, perhaps a little heavy on the bread in terms of my evening meal, but since some people have told me they admire 'the truth' with which I talk about things here, I'll tell you honestly that when I saw 19st 1 on the Nazi Scales this morning (sorry - for the newbies - it's my contention that all bathroom scales are essentially reincarnated Nazis, doomed to a lifetime of being stepped on by people like me, and which seek the only vengeance they can take by being unmitigated bastards in this life too), I reeled. I did a dramatic, if pretty quiet, fling against the bathroom doorframe and very briefly, I did a bit of weeping.

Yes, I know, a bit pathetic, but I did it. The point is that from the viewing window of my brain, I'd been in the 18s all week. I'd broken the deadlock on that number, which scanning through pre-restart entries in this blog will show you has been keeping me from feeling like I'm making progress for a long time now. I'd applied myself and done it in a handful of heartbeats. I'd felt like I was going somewhere, and doing that usual first week thing of losing water. So to suddenly, without any real warning, find myself back over the borderline in 19 territory was a rabbit-punch to the face. Hence the reeling in shock and something absurdly like self-revolving, egotistical grief - the me I thought I'd been all week was gone, and woe was me!

Now bear in mind, I've actually still done what I've said was safe to do - I've lost two pounds in a week, so technically, I'm on target. The news is actually good. But my perception of it this morning was akin to 'That's it then, might as well give up.'

It's a darkly comic business, Disappearing. There appears to be danger and derailment around every corner; the urge to self-sabotage is always so near the surface, because the method of self-sabotage is comforting in the very short term. That urge to say 'Might as well give up then,' and do something comforting and foolish is powerful because we've often trained ourselves to react to bad news with the self-soothing method of eating our comfort foods.

Instead, I got on a train this morning, and text-swore chattily at a friend to tell her the news as I perceived it. I believe her exact response was 'Don't be an arse. You can do this.'
Can't beat a bit of tough love.

And the fact is, my Starbucks day was great, the day-job day came without any major wall-punching trauma except the price of a return train ticket to London in May, and meeting up with my old schoolfriend for the first time in, as we worked it out, a little over fifteen years, was lovely - we chatted for a good long while about everything and nothing, as you can and do with old friends - family, work and so on - but also at surprising length, given our newly-reunited status, about reading and writing and books and authors. Had a great time.

Then my barista pal, Naz, who's developed a habit of writing fun stuff on my Starbucks cups, came over all philosophical. 'Always start your day with a smile,' she wrote.

Seriously, how cool is that?

Of course, on the basis of there being a particular time and place to locate your smile, today was something of an epic fail on my part - I so did not start my day with a smile. But if I can adapt her philosophy wantonly for my own uses, I think she's onto something. If somehow, during any day, you can locate your smile somewhere, you're doing alright. And if you can pause, and step outside your own bullshit for just a second and look around you at all the great stuff you have - the people who want to see you, or talk to you, or think of you, the people who give you their smiles, free of charge - then you'll probably be able to find your own smile too, because by getting out of the way of your own self-revolving funk to see what you have, you give yourself a second to realise how much that is, and the smile will usually follow that sense of gratitude. So today, thank you to Stephen my schoolfriend, and Naz and all my Starbucks crew, and Sian, my tough-love friend, and Ma for supportive texts, and you on the other end of these words, for being there, all invisible and electronic.

And of course in half an hour, I'll pick up d, the biggest smile-locator of my life, and the smile will come unbidden at the sight of her. And bottom line, any day that happens is a great day.

The Blue Sky Dilemma

There are some very peculiar rumours going around this town.

Some bunch of hopeless astrological tosspots appears to think it's Spring. What's more, they appear to have convinced the sky of this folly, because when I woke up this morning, all set to  jump on my exercise bike and bitch about the usual April drizzle outside my South Wales window (my American friends, you might have to Google it - Wales is sort of like New Jersey, a chunk of land attached to somewhere Much More Important, where everyone absolutely loses their shit if you try and tell them of their relative irrelevance), the picture here is what I saw instead. Blazing blue, Simpson-fluffy, and dazzled by some demented bright yellow ball of heat (it's just out of shot in the picture. Honest).

There are plenty of jokes to be made about the fact that Wales doesn't really have a climate, so much as a penitence for being really really bad in a previous life. I've made a few of them myself to d, my  wife, who's both American and a believer in the Fundamental Goodness of Things and People (still, after ten years married to me). To be fair, I only used to make the jokes because she used to get right up my nose every time we visited by prancing off the train like a fairy godmother and declaring "Oh, how beautiful and bright it is!" I think what really got to me about that was that for her, it was!

The usual Welsh weather, which is fundamentally like Scottish weather only less imaginitive, always used to fuck right off and hide whenever she stepped into town. Blazing Christmases abounded - one year, as if to give me the right royal meteorological finger, it began to snow the minute our train pulled out as we were leaving. Not for nothing, but people have pretty much taken to calling us the Sunshine Fairy and the Drizzle Imp.

But I'm a rationalist and I'm not about to argue with evidence, so yes, hip hip hooray, the Spring has come to our little South Wales town - at least for a day or two. Men and women of the Valleys are out giving their armpit-hair an airing, all wearing their shades, some 'proper,' some 'off the market'. The nation's children suddenly have nothing to do but run, and screm and cavort, like the little vitamin d-starved wretches they are, pointing at the sun.

All of which raises issues for your average Disappearer. To be fair, every season brings its own issues for your average Disappearer. In the Winter, there's a primal, instinctive urge to stay indoors with a big bar of chocolate and pretend to be mostly dead. In the Autumn, at least round here, there's a primal, instinctive urge to build an ark and start collecting animals. But Spring and Summer are the painted harlots of the calendar year (I should add that my wife tries to convince me there are actually five seasons, and that Autumn and Fall are two different things, but then she also tries to convince me that Ecru and Lobster are colours, and that's not happening either).

Spring and Summer make you want to not have deadlines or day jobs. They make you wistful for your youth (or at least for that bit after your youth when you'd gotten over your awkwardness and there were things like sex and pub lunches over which to linger). And they make you feel that nothing is anywhere near as bad as you thought it was when you began this silly Disappearing business, and you should just chill out, join the rest of society and have a choc ice and a beer.

Verily I say unto you, resist! Resist the tantalising winkings of the Spring and Summer both, for they lead only to satisfaction and chilling the hell out. These things are not for you, Disappearer! Shun them! Put them behind you! Now, say three gastric bands and an ex-lax, then go inside and whip yourself.

To be at least vaguely serious for a moment, there's a real dilemma beneath my cod-preaching. I remember it of old - the battle between long-term and short-term goals. Long-term means getting on the bike while all the cool kids are hanging out and laughing and having beer and pizza. Short term means joining them, then feeling that awful crunching moment of loathing and despair come weigh-in time, when all the cool kids have gone home, and there's just you and the truth.

Of course, there's at least a partial way to have your Disappearing cake and eat it. Rather than sticking to your indoor calorie-burners, get out there and do what you can do. I walked around our local lake six times this morning before breakfast, and enjoyed both the wonder of bottle green-headed ducks, and white apparently pissed-off swans, and noisy-ass, bawling the odds Canada geese (endless fun, incidentally, is to be had translating bird-noise into human speech, especially with a gift like Canada geese, eh?), and that smug self-satisfaction of having walked 3.5 miles and burned enough calories to make a porridge breakfast null and void.

d is by far the more sensible of the two of us. She's the one who, at midnight last night, dragged me away from the computer screen and told me to come to bed. And so it was she who this evening dragged me away from the screen again come enjoy the sociable world. We had dinner out together (Nandos, chicken burger (no skin), sweet potato mash, pitta bread and red pepper dip), and it helped me relocate the smile I'd buried since the geese under flotsam and jetsam and the joy of running my own business as well as having a day job (which starts again tomorrow). It was great to have that particular 'cake' too, a moment of normality in a day otherwise crammed with deadlines and to-do lists.

And now it's done, and so very nearly is this blog, and the big yellow ball of harlotry and fun has very nearly gone away, just a tinge of pink left on the soft blue horizon, which can mean only one thing - it's time to get back on the exercise bike and pedal my ass off!

Tomorrow is many things - weigh-in day, day-job day, Starbucks day and, rather pleasingly, reuniting with old schoolfriend day. At least two of these things have the power to quash my generalised bonhomie like a bug beneath its feet. But for now, Happy Springtime, people!