Ths Inexplicable Trip

Hello again.

Been three weeks since I wrote. On the one hand, that's because there's been little to say - three weeks of more or less stability - 17st 6 and change.

On the other, have been busy trying to swim against a current of Stuff to Do, or at least get my head above the water of work. Haven't quite got there, but certainly getting there.

Haven't, if truth be known - and why not know it? That would seem to be the point, after all - been all that good. d's been making fruity summer tarts and the like for sale in the local deli, and I've denied myself little. Which is perhaps why the summons from the nurse to come and see her before I go and get my next medication has struck such abject inevitability into my heart - it's not fear, per se, but it is the understanding of a grindingly miserable, patronising, 'Stop acting like a child or I'll have to punish you' lecture from the nurse that my life will shortly have to contain, coupled with the knowledge that she has historically listened to not a word I've said and has been rather too keen in my view to try out the newest Thing on me. I'm entirely happy to leave my body to medical science of course, I just could wish they'd wait till I'm actually dead before treating me like a guinea pig for their latest toys.

Anyhow - that's just a ramble about the imminence of patronising deafness. Does nothing to explain the inexplicable good fortune of recent days. While still denying myself nothing, I discovered I'd shed some pounds late last week. I even - because I've been jerked around like that by the Nazi Scales before - took a picture on what the scales said on Monday, in case I'd need to prove to you that I'm not just making this up. As it happens though, I don't need it.

Weighed in yesterday at 17st 3.5. Down some 2.5 to 3 pounds. Happy with that, certainly - and of course, from the moment I realised it was possible, have re-started my walking, now having done a whopping two days of schlepping.


So - somewhere along the line, I appear to have tripped, fallen over, and fallen down a couple of pounds. They're mysterious pounds, certainly - hell, for all I know, in the fairly heavy heat of this week, I've just evaporated or expirated a couple of pints of water, and when the weather breaks I'll go back up. Except of course whatever the reason, it's kicked me into a kind of gear again - walking, not eating things that are outright stupid for me, portion control and all that good happy stuff.

So this is just a quick note from the front to say hoorah, let's crack on. Three and a half to the borderline.

The Exploding Wagon And The Winter Coat

Apologies all, been away a week and a bit. Not intentionally, just never got round to posting the blog as is expected on my Tuesday weigh-in days.

So let's get some straightforward stuff out of the way. Have been more or less off the Disappearing Wagon for those two weeks. haven't walked but once since I fell over in the nearby tunnels - is it a bit pathetic to still be in my forties and confess I sooooort of have a thing I have to now get over about walking through the tunnels which lead to my best, easiest and most sprawling walks? Mostly a constructed thing - I'm half deaf, and have what the specialist gloriously described as 'a severe insult to the organ of balance' - it's a bit of a party trick now: if I close my eyes and march on the spot, I will inadvertantly rotate a full 180 degrees, without being even remotely aware in the moment that I'm doing it. I even have a pal who didn't believe that till she'd seen it with her own eyes.

What that also brings with it is a tendency towards dizziness and falling over when I move rapidly from light environments to dark ones. Such as tunnels. Or, as we've discovered many a time, from lit rooms to dark corridors. I swear sometimes d's just there counting the seconds under her breath until I fall over or crash into things.

Anyhow, so there's that. Plus of course, I'm a natural born klutz with an intimate relationship with the ground, who's previously broken both ankles, a big toe and a femur, so there's a growing cache of experiences screaming at me when I go into situations of potential up-fuckery. But falling this time, even though I didn't break anything, seems to have left me with a rising tension in the chest when I approach the local tunnels. Have done it once since then, but found it massively easy to find excuses since. Clearly, it's a thing that needs beating. I just haven't been motivated to beat it yet.

That, added to a certain loosening of the self-restraint belt, meant that last week, when I got on the Nazi Scales, I'd gone up from 17st 7 and some to 17st 10.5 - roughly three pounds up.

Went ahead and had another, almost equally wild week, and this Tuesday, tipped the scales at 17st 9.25. So...up on two weeks ago, down on last week.

Clearly though, I need to get my shit together. So...yeah. This is my 'getting my shit together' face. Grrr...

I guess the one good thing to claw from these results is that I'm one good week away from getting back to the last, best, result I had.

Which would be fine if I'd had a good week. Haven't really - had Chinese New Year, and a banquet which was glorious beyond measure, topped off by a Fererro Rocher Sundae, which was a mistake on absolutely every level.

And so it goes. Haven't weighed since Tuesday - mostly on the basis of fear, if we're honest - but got a nice boost today. As Storm Erik, the most Viking of weather fronts, prepares to roll in and blow us all from pillar to post, it was time to dig out the winter coats when we left the flat this morning. It would be overstating things a lot to say I was dreading putting mine on, because last winter it was tight to the point of a sausage ready for sizzling, but certainly when there appeared to be a comfortable gap between where my belly ended and where the coat began this morning, I left the flat feeling a rather more cost glow than I did laast year. This, I guess, is the importance of perspective. Yeah, sure, I had a week where I put a few pounds back on, and a week where I lost a bare smidge of that again - and it's actually anyone's guess how things will go next Tuesday - but I'm still lighter than I've been in quite some time. Sometimes the longer timescale can give you a reminder than not everything lives or dies from one weigh-in to another.

Still and all, the 'getting my shit together' face is needed. Onward! Downward! Cheeearrrrrrge!

The Psychopath Dial

Yes, yes, yes, hello again.

I always feel a little diffident these days when I come back to this blog, as though I'm creeping back in with a blanket over my head. No interviews, please - The Calorific Criminal is back for another period of self-flagellation, till he gets too busy and/or leaps off the Disappearing Wagon again and then doesn't come back for aaaaaages.

Well....yeah, kinda. If a blog is anything worth writing, it's a reflection of the real world. Annnnd that's my real world. So - take me while you get me, folks; I seem unlikely at this stage to get anything book-length together, so right now, it's this or nothing.

So, where were we? Oh yes, Tuesday.
Tuesday is weigh-in day.

I don't know how to explain this, because at the moment I look rather like Santa Claus' less reputable, gutter-living brother, but weigh-in this morning was:
18st 8.

260 pounds, for those not staring down the barrel of a Brexit. Near-as damnit 118 kg, for the metriphiles.

Now in cold hard black and white those may not look like great numbers for a nearly-47 male of five feet six, or...oh gods, hold on...1.68 metres (if you're British or French) or 1.68 meters (if you're not).
Nevertheless, in recent times when I've felt the need to restart the blog, I've usually been at least a stone (14 pounds) heavier than that, strugglling to 'see an 18'. So if nothing else, we start this time out slightly ahead of the previous game.

I'm also under orders to test my blood sugars - which, thanks once again to a refusal to have any kind of internationally standard system, will mean buggerall to anyone, but let's just say I was told that between 6-8 is ideal, and anything in single figures will do in a pinch. After having quite a reasonable stint on single-figure results, recently I've been having a bunch that are jusssst the wrong side of that that. Today is 10.5, yesterday 10.6, the day before 10.3 etc. So clearly, something needs doing that hasn't been happening recently. To be fair though, my lifestyle's been pretty unhealthy again lately. So yyyyeah - tackling that seems to be A Thing To Do.

On the distinctly up side, most of the tourists have now fucked off from our little seaside town, which will mean it will be possible to go for more walks without feeling the surging, seething need to hit people with sticks. I mean, I might still feel the need as we hurtle toward a calamitous Brexit, but if they're harder to find, I probably won't click over on the psychopath dial to actively hunt them down.

So here we are again. for those who don't know the rules of the game, the aim is to lose two pounds per week, which is the medically advised weight loss. There'll be weeks when that doesn't happen, there'll be weeks when things go catastrophically in the other direction. But the intention is to push down, and down, and down, over the course of one year. Two pounds a week is 104 pounds a year, which would put me at 154 pounds, or 11 stone. Believe it or not, at that point, I'd still have 14 pounds or 1 more stone to lose to achieve me ideal weight, according to bastards who probably eat pizza every day and never get fat...

So...yyyyeah. Here we jolly well go again - though this time, in a town mostly comprising of fish and chip shops, cake shops, an old-fashioned sweet shop, cafes, gastropubs, restaurants and a fatally delicious kebab shop.

What could possibly go wrong?

Get Thee Behind Me, Milkshake

You remember that whole rant about how I walked in the rain, rather than using the brand, spanking new treadmill that's sitting in my comparatively warm, comparatively dry office?
Yyyyyeah, today I did my whole 10,000 step route in the absolute pissing rain. So - clearly, that works. I feel like I've just done 5,000 steps of walking, and 5,00 strokes of swimming. I may need an intervention, or something like a Post-It stuck to my forehead or somesuch, with the words "That's Why You Have The Treadmill, Dickwad!" on it.

Of course, if I had that, one, I wouldn't be able to read it, and two, it'd fall off in the pissing rain, so...maybe a tattoo on the inside of my retina or instead.

Mind you, I walked in the rain last night too. Came home, sank into a hot bath to warm up.

"You're right, you know?" said d just as we were about to go to bed.

"Really?" That seemed so massively unlikely I had to check. I wasn't sure what I could possibly have been right about, but I was willing to take it.

"Yes, really."

"Good then."

"Those Nazi Scales are messed-up."

"Oh," I said. "Yeah?"

"Yeah, they're all over the place. I just got on them four times and got four wildly different readings. Think they need a new battery or something."

"Ah. Cool then. When they tell me I'm a monstrous Disappearing failure in the morning, I'll tell them to go fuck themselves."

"Yes dear. That'll be fun for you."

And so we went to sleep. As I mentioned, I was really rather annoyed with the way the week had gone - yesterday when I woke up, I weighed in at 18st 12.5, which pissed me off because at various points in this week, I've seen 18st 7, and I've walked most days this week and done nothing especially out of the ordinary, so the bounce-back felt monumentally unfair.

As it happens though, a lot of walking yesterday and a relatively liquid diet along with it, and I weighed in this morning at an official 18st 7.75 pounds.

So that's one unfortunate fart away from a stone and a half (21 pounds) lost since a couple of weeks before Christmas. If nothing else, that proves to my body I'm not just dicking about with this this time. It also means I'm seven pounds and a fart away from the 18 stone border, which is the point at which I start to feel like I'm actually Disappearing. What that means is that it's gone from hard work to second nature. Which in turn means it's things that are first nature that can still, sometimes, trip me up.

Last night, prior to the Nazi Scale conversation but after marching up and down Cardiff Queen Street again, this time in protest at the Orange Obscenity's sudden anti-human clampdown on entry to the US, d had asked me to pick her up a couple of hot dogs from Five Guys and bring them home. No problem, no drama - went, put the order in...

...and then time tunnelled around me. I looked across at the Five Guys milkshake menu, and oh my ever-loving gods, but they sounded good. Having subsisted most of the day on one bowl of oatmeal and many coffees, and clocking up s faintly disappointing 17,000-odd steps, it was the most natural thing in the world to go "Oh, and a malted milk peanut butter shake, no cream..."

I heard myself say it. Heard my brain scream 'Wwwwwwhat the hell? This is what we don't do any more? Whaddaya dooooooinnnnnng?!' And I had the argument with myself - 'Fuck you, it's liquid. It's just a liquid, where's the bad, Oatmeal-Boy? Who can tell you not to do a thing? You know how good they taste. Surely 17,000 steps earns you a shake, right?'

The time tunnel collapsed. The server was looking at my face expectantly.
"Hmm?" I said, having one of those moments where you genuinely don't know if you've said something or only thought it.
"Is that everything for you?" he asked again. I glanced over at the milkshake menu again, felt the longing, the craving. Swallowed.
"Err...yeah. Thanks." And the moment passed.
Or almost - I had five other time tunnel moments while waiting for the order to be delivered, to the extent that I almost tried to take someone else's food when it came out before mine, so keen was I to stop my brain from dangling the icy, creamy pleasure in my path, and point out that there was no line, and that I could just nip across and add a shake to the order, no problem.

Sigh. See? Beware of your first nature - it's the primal pleasure principle and the idea of denying it is where the idea of 'sin' comes from. But, at least for this day, the 'demon' Milkshake didn't trip me up, which means the erratic Nazi Scales this morning were relatively kind, and on we jolly well go. I'd like to tell you the next stop is 18 stone, but it probaby, in all honesty, isn't. There'll probably be some amount of dicking about in the upper half of the 18s before I start to make progress to things like 18st 4. Then, in all likelihood, there'll be endless faffing to get down beneath the border of 18. But the goal at least is to a) get beneath 18st 7, and then b) get beneath 18 stone.

The Disappearing Christmas

The week before Christmas is a very odd time to start Disappearing.
A very necessary time, as it turns out, but a very odd one, all the same.

Christmas is of course all about overconsumption - before it was tinselled up and Christianised, this time of year was Saturnalia - banqueting, continual partying, gift-giving. Much of the point was, to quote comedian Mitch Benn, 'to eat until it hurts, then drink until it don't hurt any more.'

Of course, there were centuries between that and the Victorian Christmas which in many of the important ways has merely evolved into our modern version, but the notion of celebrating by having 'more than usual' at Christmas was a farily constant one. When the Victorians (and particularly the Germans) got their hands on a British Christmas, the good times rolled again, and everywhere, the imperial overlords promoted the idea of more, more more at Christmas, with the evolution of puddings and cakes, the enlarging of dinners, the development of sweet snacks and such, all of it more or less to say a right royal 'Screw you!' to northern hemisphere bitter weather, to give a sense of survival and celebration to the midwinter feast.

Dickens, of course, was an almost ridiculous genius, and one of his absolute best stories was A Christmas Carol. That works on so many levels it's practically a puzzle box, but one of the things it does, whether intentionally or otherwise, is to associate abstemiousness at Christmas with miserliness of spirit. Scrooge is pictured as a skeletally thin figure, a man who cares only for the making of money, not the filling of his clothes or, beyond the strictly necessary, the sustenance of his body. By comparison, Fezziwig, who embodies the 'right' spirit of Christmas, the joyful, carefree spirit of the season, while absolutely getting his cardio-funk on with Mrs Fezziwig and leading the dancing of the Sir Roger DeCoverley, is pictured as having a well-rounded pair of breeches, and the chubbiness associated with Victorian gaiety. It's been said before that for the Victorians, except when it came to the shape of their women, where they followed their diminutive queen, bigger was always better. So we get the idea of Christmas generosity represented by groaning tables, giant turkeys, plum puddings the size of small children, mince pies by the plateful, nuts, chocolates, yule logs and so on and on on, a feast which, like the Roman version, goes on for days, getting progressively more inventive and desperate to re-use the same ingredients in different ways.

Having a Disappearing Christmas then feels inherently far more miserable than by rights it should, because it feels like by not indulging in all the consumption, you're tacitly opting out of merriment and open-heartedness, and people begin to look at you with that sneer that whispers 'Scrooooooooge.'
Admittedly, the 'Bah, Humbug!' hat probably doesn't help to counterract that image, but still...
The point, really, is that your body doesn't know it's Christmas. Christmas is an entirely social construct, built on permissions and societal agreement that eating to an excess is somehow, suddenly, OK for everyone at this time of year. Your body though has no truck with social convention, it just understands biological mathematics - what goes in as food, what's in store as fat, what goes out as energy through exertion.

But what the social convention means  is that if you're going to have a Disappearing Christmas, you need to get your head in the right space.

The right space, fortunately for me, is very much a 'Fuck You' headspace. Oddly enough, it's a headspace that being significantly overweight gives you little option but to get comfortable in, because some people who aren't overweight feel they have a right to judge you most of the year round for your appearance, and you won't get far as a fat fuck if you can't get into the headspace of 'Ffffffuck you, you're not me.'
So perversely, having a history of overindulgence gives you the armour you need to not necessarily follow the crowd.

We went out for Christmas Dinner this year, d, my mother and I.
Mulled wine, starter, family meat platter main (three kinds of protein), Christmas pudding and custard, mince pies, cheese and crackers.

For lunch.

And yes, absolutely, when you get water instead of wine, and when you have a main plate that's mostly meat and veg, and then you sit there watching a dining room do the last three courses without you, it's a surreal experience, and even in your own mind, the narrative plays. 'Oh, go onnnnn, it's Christmas, ya miserable bugger. Have a spoonful of pudding, go on...'

But as I explained yesterday, a single spoonful collapses all my resolve. Moderation is not something that makes sense to either my mind or my body. One spoonful and before you know it, I'd be face down in a box of Black Magic, pouring hot chocolate on my head.

The early stages of Disappearing are among the easiest bits, because you're on a new quest. But the trick to doing a Disappearing Christmas is re-wiring your behavioural instincts, because your instincts are to do precisely that, to grab everything there is for grabbing, especially during a period when grabbing it is smiled on more than it would be at any other point in the year.

Saying no when every instinct you have says yes is a particulary weird thing to have to do at any time of year. At Christmas, when the rest of society is practically encouraging you to eat everything that's available to you, it's extra weird.

But here's the thing. The extra weirdness made it stand out, gave me an alert to react to, and let me do the whole 'No thanks' thing in spite of the cultural convention and the instinct to go 'Gimme evvvvverything and twice!' So actually, a Disappearing Christmas, by virtue of the weirdness it entailed, was relatively easy this early on in the Disappearing process.

What nearly got me was the day after Christmas, when I went to my local Costa coffee shop for...well, coffee, clearly. It was such a natural instinct to 'pick up a little something sweet to help the coffee go down,' and the cultural permission had swung so naturally back to the way I normally experience it - 'Fat fuck, about to eat something sweet in public, oh my god, doesn't he realise what he looks like? Don't do it, you monster!' - that I got to the barista and stared at them like somebody'd hit me in the face with a trout.

'Is that all?' asked the girl, after I realed off my absurdly convoluted coffee order.
'Errm...' I said.
She smiled.
'Errrrrrrrrm...' I said, my eyes flicking to marshmallow biscuits, and Christmas pudding-shaped cookies, and weird rocky road brownies that appeared to have had a lab accident and grown to a size suitable for the incredible Hulk.
I snapped my jaws together, for fear of drooling. Smiled, through a shaggy, Santa's-drunken-brother beard.
'Yes thanks.'

And went about my decaff skinny day. A Disappearing Christmas can make you feel like the world's biggest Scrooge for not eating. But outside the Christmas window, your own historic routines can trip you up before you even have the chance to think about and amend them if you're not alert. Disappearing, for me at least, is a kind of war. The trick is to know how sneaky the other half of your brain can be, and stay alert for the patterns of behaviour that you need to re-wire.