The Trampoline Factor

First week of the new year, and there has been, at least, a little movement.

Today's weigh-in has me at 17st 10.75.

In other words, for anyone following this nonsense, it's two weeks ago. Again. Or indeed three weeks ago for that matter, as there was a week of no movement. The upside of course is that the half a pound I put on last week in the distinctly muted madness of a Christmas and New year celebration has evaporated. The downside, for those of my own, rather more melancholic nature, is that 0.5 pounds is a pretty poor repayment of effort for a week which has at least seen me begin walking again.

Hey ho, let us dance the happy dance of weightloss, but let us dance it with a trademark Alan Rickman sneer, just for balance.

It feels almost like being on a trampoline, with weekly snapshots taken at whichever point on a repeated bounce-wave I happen to be at on a Tuesday morning - 17st 10.75, 17st 10.75, 17st 11.5, 17st 10.75. Of course on that imagery, what I aim to do by a week today is to plunge through the black rubber of the trampoline and touch the ground underneath - the ground which in this case reads 17st 8.75. In itself, that feels like a nothing result, but the key is that if I achieve it, the week following, I'll be under another milestone - 17st 7, or the halfway point of the 17 stone spectrum. It feels hard to escape the logic of course that says next week, the trampoline will twang me back up, because for the fourth week in a row I haven't been able to get beneath the 'barrier.' Must do though, because of course, it's actually not logical at all, it's an invention which runs the risk of getting way out of hand. Let's act like we believe in zen calm and all that, and acknowledge that barriers are only barriers if we believe they're barriers.

Be the weightloss, be the weightloss, be the weightloss.

Ach, bugger zen calm and chanting - more walking, less food seems to be the order of the week. Woohoo.

Oh, and rather annoyingly, the blood sugar results are spiking again this week - this morning, 11.0. Yesterday 9.5. Day before, 11.8 (though there's a a rational reason for that - d's birthday on the 5th meant there was steak, and a rich madeira sauce, and arancini starter, and even a slice of appallingly gorgeous chocolate cake...), so 11.8 the following morning was relatively reasonable. 5th January was 10.4 - an annoying smidgen outside the lines. 4th - 9.7, a smidgen the other way. 3rd - 11.6. 2nd - 9.3. 1st, after a New Year's Eve Indian banquet - 10.9.

Apart from the logical results after big feasts, I could invent reasons randomly for the elevated results this week - possibly more fruit juice in my system than water? But let's take a little stock, shall we? I've just - believe it or not, and despite seeming to realise it last week, I've JUST realised taht the day after the Indian banquet was when I last weighed in, and that might just possibly explain a thing or two about last week's result. And I've similarly just realised that this week has included d's birthday feast, including cake, which may well have slammed the brakes on any greater loss this week. It was worth it, to be fair, so that's where you find me - having stomped the bounce and preparing to go all stern-eyed and walky to achieve a loss from this low point next week. Game on. Cake off. Downwarrrrrrrd!

The Imp Of Physical Carnage

Yes, yes, yes, started again. Yes, again, again, again.

By the time of this first Tuesday since the reboot, I've done a few days of not eating what I want, not drinking anything but plain water, coffee and the occasional fruit juice, deeply, thoroughly wanting to beat people to death with giant Toblerones (usually a Day 2 phenomenon, I'm over it now), walking hither and yon just to force my ass up and my legs to move, and so on.

Yeah, it kinda sucks, frankly - when it starts to feel good, believe me, I'll let you know, but right now, it just kinda sucks.It's the resistance you get when you first start sawing a plank of wood - you're cutting against the grain of long experience, habit and expectation (both physical, in that you crave sugar, and mental, in that you turn the denial of that craving into the world being unfair very specifically to you).

Perhaps most creepily, when d goes to work, there's still something impish in my mind that flares to life, saying 'Ooh, it's playtime! What kind of self-destructive shit can we cram down our throat and get away with today!'

Not that I was cramming self-destructive shit down my throat to an enormous degree before I started back on this Disappearing lark, but certainly, if I decided I wanted a chocolate bar, I'd have it and not think about it (Evil Tip - if you do it early enough in the day, it doesn't mess up your next morning's blood sugar that much). Now the imp of physical carnage screams in my ear about five seconds after the door closes, and there's no-one to shut it the hell up but me. And I have to tell you, swigging plain water in those moments absolutely sucks the big one, and also doesn't really work as an antidote to the imp.

But still, here you find me, restarted, having resisted a bunch of blandishments - it's an adjustment for everyone around me when I slam back into Disappearing mode on the snap of a finger, so people still offer me stuff, and I have to remember, and refuse them politely - and as yet, have managed to resist either beating people to death with the Toblerone, or indeed ramming it, Pyreneean, down my neack for a sweet, sweet nougat hit...

...

...

Sorry, where was I?

Oh yeah - so, first Tuesday. Weigh-in day. Well, we're starting off this time in a place more reasonable than most recent attempts - I've had attempts in this last year that have started at 19st 7, 18st 7 and so on. This time, we're starting out at 18st 2 - which is actually the lightest I've been in some time, though it's not light enough at the moment to let me like the bloke I see in mirrors and photos, who seems to me to be an overstuffed sack of spuds. 18st 2 is close enough to the 18 stone border (lol I've explained stones to the world several times - I'd suggest going back a few entries, it'll all be there) to give me something immediate to strive for. More to the point, I never feel like I'm properly Disappearing till I'm into the 17 stone realm. Now of course, this is purely based on prior experience, and by the time I was in the 17 stone realm the first time I did this, I'd already lost three stone, so it's a completely false reckoning, and really speaking, I shouldn't feel like I'm properly Disappearing this time till I'm in the 15s, but hey, habits, right? If getting into the 17 stone zone spurs me on at this moment to shut the imp of physical carnage up, I'm taking it. That's the thing, really - there are lies aplenty available to you. Use them. Use them allll. If they help you climb in the direction you want to go, it doesn't matter that you know they're basically bullshit. Call on any god you like, ascribe value to one particular threshold or another, it really doesn't matter - do it, get over that line, take strength from whatever belief is open to you, but get over that line, where the imp of physical carnage, the voice that says it's not fair that you have to do this, or you're going to fail, or it's your birthday, or you're on your holidays, doesn't sway you as often as it does at the start.

Defeat that little bugger any way you can, because only your mind gives a damn about rationalizations. Your body? Just cares about what you put in it, and what you do with it. It makes no excuses, and it makes no allowances, sadly.

So - onward. Hopefully, a week from now I'll either be on the 18 stone border or eeeeven just possibly a smidgen under it.

Oh, and for those who want to know such things:
Blood sugar:
20th November - 9.1
19th November - Skipped, accidentally, as had breakfast before remembering
18th November - 9.2
17th November - Skipped
16th November - 9.2
15th November - 9.0
14th November - 11.9 - my bad, only took half my diabetic meds the day before.
13th November - 9.7
12th November - 9.3
11th November - 10.5 - late supper
10th November - 10.3 - late supper
9th November - 9.5
8th November - 11.4 (acting like an ass, clearly)
7th November - 12.2 (acting like a super-ass, even more clearly)

So while there's still a way to go before I get back into the 6-8 range now deemed optimal, I'm seeming to establish a pattern of single-figures with occasional assery at the moment. Will be interesting to see how that goes as the imp of physical carnage is squished more and more beneath my thumbnail.

The Bloody Truth

Hello again. Three weeks or so since I blogged last. Reasons for that are many and silly, but mostly bound up in a) weight gain, and b) arsery. Arsery which has seen me notsomuch fall off the wagon as leap off and burn the fucker to the ground.

Here's the thing though - that ends right now.

First thing's first, it's Tuesday. Ermmmm, last I recorded, I think I'd gone back up to 19 stone dead, or 266 pounds, which was irritating.

Following week I went up to 19 stone 1 pound.

Week after that, up again to 19 stone 2.25.
Clearly, there's drift going on, but given that I've done bog-all exercise and have been slugging and slothing my way through life for the past three weeks, it was going up alllllmost as slowly as it was previously coming off. But not quite, obviously.

Today, weighed in at 19 stone 2.25. Static from last week. Right now, I'll take that.

Now. Have been, as anyone who reads this will possibly remember, getting set up with the doctors in this area. Did the usual HBA1C blood test for long term blood sugars a few weeks ago. No sooner had I done it than they sent me a letter to say 'Balls. Need you to come and do that again.'

The image of course went through my mind of the diagnostic machinery going into overdrive, lights flashing, warning messages flashing, and then the whole kit and caboodle exploding in a puff of smoke when trying to process my blood. So I went and had it done again. Alllmost immediately the letter came back to say 'Yyyyeah, we can't afford to lose another machine. You need to get your ass in to see us, cos this shit ain't clever.'

Went today.

To explain the HBA1C, they like you to have a reading of under 50. I've previously managed under 50, but over the last few years, I've had a tendency, as the weight's crept back onto my bones, to hover in the low to mid-50s. Turns out last October, when we moved here, I had quite a bad result of 76.

Latest scoors on the doors? 117. One hundred. And then another 17. So, over twice what it should be.

#BadTony.

Badder Tony than the slow-ass drift of a pound a week here and there ever lets you know.

The nurse gave me a simple finger-pricking blood sugar test today. Again, in the UK, you're looking for numbers between about 6-8. Yyyyeah - 22.8. So - roughly three times what it should be.

'How are you not walking around with a huge dose of thrush?' she asked.
'Erm...should I be?'
'I'm surprised you're not, yeah,' she said, a touch too breezily for my liking.
'Oh, well, I won't panic when that happens then,' I muttered.
'I'm surprised your skin's not dreaful too,' she added.
'Oh it is, it's more or less turning to ash in the sun.'
'Aha!'
'We're happy about that, are we?'
'Visible symptoms,' she explained. 'Thing is, while your blood sugar's shot through the roof, your body's adapted to it quite well by the looks of things.'
'Thank you,' I said.
'But what we can't see is the untold damage it's doing to your systems inside,' she added.
'Oh.'
'First thing I'd be worried about is your heart.'
'Oh. I've already got an atrial fibrilation...thing going on,' I told her.
'I see that,' she agreed - I like to think she saw it in the notes on the screen in front of her, rather than being possessed of some weird and wonderful NHS juju that could let her spot fibrilation cases by eye.
'There are extra pills I can give you - we've got lots more stuff than we had even just five years ago,' she enthused. 'Weightloss injections and suchlike. The one I'd like to really get you on is for people with good kidneys. You have excellent kidneys.'
'I know,' I smarmed - back a decade or so ago, my mother, who at the time was more of a Tory, had shelled out to get me a BUPA head-to-toe check. They told me I had platinum-level kidneys. It's absurd, but it turns out my kidneys may be my best feature.
'The pill would let you use them to maximum efficience, so you'd pass the sugar out that way. Lose you about 300 calories a day. Also, your current pills aren't really touching the sides just now.'
I came clean that I'd been taking them with screaming irregularity pretty much since we got here - at first because there was a delay in registering and a month when I wouldn't have been able to get any prescriptions from them, and subsequently because I'd just gotten into bad pill-forgetting habits.
'Hmm,' she considered.  'Alright. Take your blood sugar measurements every morning. Some evenings too if you like, but essentially mornings. We'll see what you're like then. Oh and take the pills as prescribed, eh?'
'Will do,' I promised.

So, the stupid shit stops here and now. She gave me a testing machine to take away with me, so now I intend to bore you on a slightly more regular basis with measurements of blood sugar. Just because I can. More water, more walking, the bike is uncovered and just waiting for me. Less carb, less batter, less altogether stupid shit. The plan is to live here at the seaside. That means LIVING here at the seaside, and that in turn means doing what's necessary to stay alive as long as I can here at the seaside. So. Stupid macho posturing face on, and let's do this thing.

The Evolutionary Flop

There are moments, when you've been swimming against tiny, irritating eddies, and suddenly find yourself gulping for air, flopped on the sand, when you take a breath, and think 'Blimey, that was harder work than it should have been. Maybe some lungs and some legs would help.'

It feels, in short, like changing from one environment to another, hand having the whole long palaver of 'being a land animal' ahead of you. Still, you gasp, and rest, and then begin to waggle your tail to stop the water seizing you and dragging you back.

Did the stupid 'day-before' unofficial weigh-in again yesterday - no, I have no idea why, you'd think I'd no better. Did it in the middle of the day, when I was sloshing with a variety of liquids and packed down with a cereal breakfast - weighed-in at 19st 4.75.

After which came a day including some roasted cashew nuts, a baked potato, and a chunky ciabatta chicken sandwich.

Then...
Well, then I went to sleep.

Was up at three with a belly that felt like you could bounce canonballs off it. Much peeing later, I appeared to have let out the rigidity.

Up at five, startled from a dream of being about to go on stage, live, in my first stand-up gig to a hostile audience, and searching backstage for any kind of bathroom before the show began and I naturally died in front of a home-town crowd who would hate every word I said. Anxiety dream? Sure, if you like, but it did wonders for the solid stomach - seemed to shave another shirt size off the ball bearing belly.

Woke this morning, went to weigh-in.

18st 12, said the Nazi Scales.

'Fuck off,' I casually whispered. Losing nearly half a stone in the space of about 18 hours?
I stepped on them again. 'Wellll, alright, see if this feels more realistic then,' they wheedled.

18 stone 13.75.

I got off, switched them off, got on. 18 stone 13.75.

I did it one more time for a confirmation reading, vaguely kicking myself that I hadn't taken my luck when I'd first found it.

18 stone 13.75 pounds. 265.75 pounds, for the Americans.

Finally pushed down beyond the 19 stone barrier. 18 is still nothing to celebrate - I tend not to feel like I'm genuinely Disappearing till I see a 17 - but still, given this time's rather slower beginning, this is me panting breathless, taking my first waggle up the beach as some kind of land animal.

The Disappointment Bubble

The temptation to carve up time into tiny chunks can be dangerous when Disappearing.
That means unofficial weigh-ins between proper weigh-ins can potentially throw you for a loop, and affect your motivation. That's happened to me this week - an unofficial weigh-in showed only slow progress, and a subsequent unofficial weigh-in actually showed no progress, and the temptation then, when you're putting the time in to increase your exercise quotient and very specifically not eating a whole host of things you want to eat, is to feel distinctly pouty and stone-kicky and, not to put too fine a point on it, tantrummy.

I actually expect no progress at all on tomorrow's officiall weigh-in, so any that does come will be a bonus (a psychologically useful thing, this last-minute moving of goalposts to maintain equilibrium in the face of what would otherwise be bad news). The truth, I suspect, is that my body has acclimatized quickly to the things I'm doing, and is sitting there going 'Yeah. What else ya got?'

The additional truth of course is that I've got quite a lot. This has been what I hope it's OK in this absurd Brexitworld we live in to call a Soft Disappearing, at least in terms of its beginnings. I have still yet to clear enough of the carnage of boxes from around my exercise bike to get back on it since this Disappearing began. There have been days this week when deadlines took precedence and I didn't walk. And even on the days when I did, the distance has been sub-10,000 steps (thought I was somewhat heartened to read a news story this week that said the 10,000 step target was pretty much arbitrary).So there are certainly things I can, and will, do to make the Disappearing bite rather harder in the week ahead. But right now, it would be foolish to deny I'm in a bit of a Disappointment Bubble, because almost every time I've tried, I've lost more than this in the first two weeks, and you get used to, and expectant of, that initial bump-down of water-weight to power-surge your ego and push you on.

That hasn't happened yet this time. Perhaps by giving the Disappearing a few more teeth, I can start to impress my system with the fact that this is happening.

The Hunger Games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now then - to the walking path!

Cometh The Rainmaker

Tonight was weird.

Just weird.

Came home from a haircut and it started to rain, just as I was considering going walking.

'You total and utter bastards!' I fake-yelled to the sky, to the raindrops that had started falling on my head.

'Well, isn't it good that you still have work to do?' asked d, breezily.

I scowled at the sky. Pursed my lips. 'Yes, dear,' I agreed, and, without really lowering my eyes from the rain clouds (and with the screamingly logical result that I nearly fell in through the door), I followed her in.

Did work. Because...well, what else is there to do?
Time passed, and then more time was going to pass and I couldn't put the damn thing off any more - we'd had dinner, and I'm still in the game of trying a) to walk after eating my evening meal, and b) not eating after that until breakfast time.

Got my ass out the door - the rain had stopped. Result.

I got past the gas station that acts as my first landmark. And then the rain decided I was clearly serious about this thing, and decided to fall on me. More or less all at once. I normally wouldn't do this, but I actually hid in a bus shelter, trying to outsmart the rain.

Now, I swear this is true. I was drenched. Just drenched. But looking out from my hiding place, nothing was falling. Seriously, there was water on the streets, but none of it was falling, hitting the streets. I stepped out - wallop. More rain, more me - just call me Spongebob. I stood there, getting soaked, still staring at the floor, where no rain was hitting the floor. Clearly, at this point, I was the biggest thing on the planet that wasn't actually the planet. I was the Earth's umbrella, saving all the vulnerable ground from getting wet.
'Fuck it then,' I said, out loud, striding on into a maelstrom the like of which made The Tempest look like a toddler's pee-stream. The street? Still nothing. Allll me.

There was nothing to do but keep walking. By the time I got to the back stretch of the walk, which goes through a lot of relatively deserted streets, there was only one thing to do. I turned the dial of my iPod to 80s soundtracks, and started singing and dancing to some of the best from those days. I Footloosed, I Back To The Futured, I Lost Boyed. I sang, and danced, and spun, and spread my warms to the wind and the rain and I did the whole Singin' In The Rain thing, treating the rain like a personal shower. I recommend it - it's deeply therapeutic, especially in these hideous days. Turning the whole experience of being pissed on from on high into something through which you can sing, and dance, and not care about the rain. I recommend it.

Of course, eventually, on the way round my route, it stopped raining again. And then, as I was close to home, it started again, and I didn't have the right distracting music, and the rain was relentless, and cold to the bone, and dispiriting. The point is obvious of course - ultimately the rain gets in. But while the rain is getting in, if, for just a little while, you can sing and dance and laugh too, you'll feel better. Stronger. Better and more prepared for the times when it gets in. OK, it won't keep you dry, but remembering that you can sing and dance and laugh as well as feeling the chill of the rain reminds you that the rain is not the be-all and end-all. That its power is ephemeral. That it can only get you down while you let it.

And then you come home, and get warm, and keep safe from the rain in which you can't dance. And a new day comes.

The Double Walking Jive

Right. Yesterday I decided, in the wake of more or less static news from the Nazi Scales, that Something New needed to be done. So - did something new.

By pure force of time-management and meetings, I actually didn't eat breakfast, but decided to nip out at lunchtime for a quick once round the route I've developed - only with the novelty factor of daylight to guide me. That seemed to work - I was able to push on into a couple of different nooks and crannies I hadn't previously investigated for fear of trippage in the dark.

Got home with some more Dracula listened to, which was pretty satisfying, then carried on with my day-job afternoon. Had a reasonably early dinner - pork, home-made stuffing, jacket potato, corn. Then looked over at d. We'd discussed things the night before.

'So...this is when I should actually go out and do the proper walk then?' I checked. 'After eating? So as to fire up the overnight metabolism?'

'Well...yes,' she agreed. 'But I'm not gonna make you go out in the cold...'

'Nono, that's fine,' I said, the masochism of this whole thing really rather appealing to me. 'It can be a double-walking day.' In my mind I saw the step-counter whirring like a clock in a film, showing the passing of time. 'Right. This is me. Going. Again.'

'Have fun, honey,' she said, waving me out the door.

So, fun was had - the route was known, and I didn't feel the need, the second time round, to push on into new and unfamiliar places in the dark. This was all bonus, all extra, so I did a version that cuts about a thousand steps or so out of the route. Got back around 9.30, no more Dracula under my belt, but a podcast and a half listened to (I have waaay too many of those to get through, so this could be useful). Came home and drank more still water than I have in weeks, deciding, through a semi-occasional torrent of invective when I tried to move, 'That felt good - am going to try and get up at 6.45, and get a morning walk in tomorrow, start tryign to do it morning and night, rather than lunchtime and night...'

6.45 came this morning. The Morning Mood from Peer Gynt played in our bedroom as delicate sunbeams danced through the window, lit upon my cheeks, and like fairies, tried to tease me into wakefulness.

I farted, rolled over and crushed them to death.

7.15 came, and I did the mental mathematics required to let me stay in bed. If I got up now, went for a pee, shuffled into my clothes and sodded off, I still wouldn't be back at my desk by 9. Bugger. Tomorrow, then.

Slept on till 8.45. Got up like one of the big slabs of Stonehenge, with much use of pulleys, ropes and log rollers. Not to be a total smartarse, but these are just some of the joys of working from home.

Lunchtime's not here yet, but - and whether this is just a mark of my own masochism, or a comment on the current challenges of the day-job, I'm not sure, but - can't actually wait for lunchtime, to slip the trainers on the feet (haven't yet required the proper walking boots on anything but one snowy day so far this year), and head on up the road. And sickly, I'm quite looking forward to doing it the second time, later on, too.

Oh and for those following the intimate workings of my innards...water. Yep. That seems to work...

Right - on with the day, and another double-walker, hopefully. Next up, probably some incoherent whinging about blisters!