The Sliding Doors Sunday

I woke up this morning with two potential days stretching out ahead of me, Sliding Doors-style. In one, I sat around at home, possibly ordering in lunch, and eventually biking. In the other, I bogged off to Starbucks, focused on some work, then came home and eventually did some biking. I threw off the covers, intending to go for option 2. Then I sighed, thought about it, pulled the covers back over myself and determined instead to go for option 1. A little while later, when d woke up, we went for breakfast at McDonalds (plain porridge and an orange juice in my case – told you I’d be back on Disappearing form today). Then she went off to work, and I contemplated a long day at home.

Then I contemplated a long day not at home.

That was some pretty enticing contemplation. I jumped on a train and went to Starbucks. If nothing else, you see, it helped me break what could have been the beginning of a dangerous habit, and if we’ve learned anything at all by now, it’s that I am a creature of habit. Having had unhealthy food delivered to me a few times this week, it’s begun to seem like “What I do when I’m home for the day.” Bad habit to get into. Once in a while, sure. Habitually, nooooo.

So I did a Starbucks flip-flop, headed to Cardiff, got an agreeable amount of work done, and, through the course of the day, ate a total of two pots of porridge and one pot of nuts. Now, having come home, it’s time to implement the only element that was nailed into place whichever of the days I went through, and get on the bike, to reintroduce my system to the notion that it moves about a bit now and then. Time, in fact, to re-establish a good habit in my days, to drive myself if not exactly down (making actual weightloss progress seems a bit of a distant dream at this point in the week), then at least to arrest the damage of a couple of days of sloth and Very Hungry Caterpillar-style consumption. Here’s to hurting like a sonofabitch when I stagger off the bike tonight.

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 Big Stick

Anyone got a big stick I could borrow?

The plan for last night was to get some dinner inside me, get on the bike and go collect d from work.

In the event I got some dinner inside me....and went to collect d from work. The flaw there, really, is that while my mind is as 21st century and progressive as you like, my body appears to still be a cack-handed 1970s unreconstructed dickhead, who stopped off in student digs along the way to blow up a few cookers.

Yes, really. At least two cookers exploded while I was using them. With a blithe self-regard that I like to think is charming, I succeed in not taking that personally, or indeed seeing it as any kind of message from the cookers of the world to stay the fuck away from them at all costs.

That means that while in the reality of the world, my none-too-ambitious dinner - chicken, brussell sprouts, rice - should have taken a maximum of 25 minutes to cook, and at most the same again to eat, leaving me plenty of time to jump on the bike and pedal, in reality, our kitchen looked like something out of a Buster Keaton movie during the more than forty minutes it took me to persuade the food to become...well, food, really. The kicker of which is that while I cooked two pieces of chicken, I ended up throwing one away, being both full and calorifically conscious.

So that's at least two nights, possibly longer, when I've done no biking. This could eeeeeeasily become a pattern - I have plenty of work to do that whispers seductively to me that sitting on my ass and getting it done is far more important than 'wasting' an hour on the bike, plus showering time, plus yadda yadda yadda.

Which is why I need a big stick. Made of, y'know, willpower and beatings.

Sigh. Tonight, goddammit, there will be biking.

Biking.

Right...

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!

2nd February - The Mile-Pebble

It would be wrong on every conceivable level to call today a milestone.

Weighed about a total of eight times this morning. First time I got on the Nazi Scales, they showed 18st 10. The next four times, they showed 18st 11. Then an 18st 10. Then an 18st 9.75. Then an 18st 10.

On balance, I’m calling it 18st 10 and sticking with it. That means that in the course of two weeks, I’ve lost my first half-stone, or seven pounds. It feels moderately pathetic to realise I’m seven pounds lighter than I was, and yet I’m still 18st 10. What that is is essentially an echo of my history, when I got down another four stone (68 pounds), and vowed never to get up this high again. But still, here we are, and here is seven pounds lighter than where we were two weeks ago.

I’d like to feel good about that, but oddly don’t. Three pounds from now, I’ll feel better, and another seven pounds from there, I’ll feel better still, but this first half-stone doesn’t feel big enough or good enough to be considered a milestone.

A mile-pebble, maybe. OK, fine, let’s do the ‘first seven pounds of mostly water’ mile-pebble dance. And then get back to trying to tighten the discipline a little – none of this Daredevil half-hour biking lark. Full hours are what’s needed. Tomorrow, I have my annual diabetic review – so that’ll be fun. Fairly sure I was significantly lighter than I am now when I had my last one, so potential riot acting will be read. But let’s not get bogged down in that, shall we? Moving on down is the key. If I could conceivably, two weeks from now, be 18st 3, that’d be almost happy-making, because it would feel like some kind of progress, in terms of my clothes. And it’d be close enough to make me believe the next proper milestone was achievable. The thing is though, the first two weeks of water loss are always the easiest. This is the point at which belts need to be tightened, resolve redoubled, and fat begins actually to be burned if the effort’s put in.

So let’s put it in.

The Walk of Shame

Yep, Monday.
Monday, which brought meetings, a magazine that's prolapsed - with features at both front and back ends dropping out suddenly, the death of a coffee maker that's barely a month old (Well hell, January was a month of death in the headlines, why should the coffeemaker survive into February), and the apparent arrival of the latest storm to bring wind, more rain, with a sprinkling of pigging rain on top.

Sigh - got to love Wales. No really, it's the law - the locals turn against you if you dare to complain.

Anyhow, before the storm hit, I met up with my mother. She's begun her own Disappearing act again, though she's much more hardcore and hardass than me - she was on a 500 calorie day. Personally I think it's a gerbil diet or somesuch, because I'm fairly sure it can't be healthy to try and sustain a human existence on that, but hey, it's her thing.

We did five revolutions of the local Thomastown Park - barely a mile, I imagine, but some of it agreeably uphill, and not a bad way to spend a lunch hour. Not as good a way as say, having lunch would have been, but at least it allows me to mark the day in the calendar as beign the moment at which I started walking again as part of the Disappearing.

Now, five revolutions of Thomastown Park, for all it was a promising beginning, is fairly pathetic. We were up to ten revolutions in just over an hour the last time we stopped doing this. So it's pretty much a walk of shame to find ourselves unfit enough to have to go back to what amounts to basics and do just the five. But - a beginning.

Healthy dinner tonight - chicken, green veg and such. Remotely influenced by the fact that tomorrow's Tuesday, and Tuesday is weigh-in day? Hell yes. I've become vaguely fixated by the idea of making a certain amount of progress by tomorrow morning, and so I was delighted with d's concoction. More biking too, but again, inspired by Daredevil, only about 40 minutes worth. That clearly needs to change. Perhaps tomorrow I'll go back to music.

If, that is, there's any biking at all tomorrow. d's mentioned a last chance to see Judi Dench on stage via the movie theatre in Cardiff, so we may go out tomorrow night. I'm certainly doing a Starbucks day tomorrow as there's work going on involving the road outside our flat, and it simply wouldn't do to go out and stick some poor guy's pneumatic drill in him sideways.

So we'll see what happens. Here's to weigh-in day.

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

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

Certainly don't weigh yourself twice a day.

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

My name is Tony and I am a weighaholic.

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

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

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

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

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