29 To Go

Today's weigh-in revealed that I'm now:
16 stone 4.5 pounds.
That's a loss of 1 pound.

One lousy, stinking, evil, insignificant little pound. All the walking, all the biking, the return to the gym and the degree of self-denial...a pound.

I was quite disheartened when I first found out about that. It's a dangerous time, when you make only slight progress - far more dangerous than when you make no progress at all, or put on, even. It makes you feel like having a calorific tantrum, and I actively considered going for chips at lunchtime.

But then, if you think about it - a pound is, by definition, four quarter-pounders. As d mentioned when I told her what I'd lost, it's a pretty juicy bit of steak. You'd know about it if you were hit in the face with a pound of gold, and you'd have a hell of a weekend with a pound of blow.

Older people, like me, are always telling youngsters how important it is they learn the value of a pound. And OK, over here in the UK, we're talking about money (which in itself is fairly ludicrous, cos you can't get anything worth getting for a pound these days, despite the flourishing of "Pound Stores", but I digress). So perhaps today's a day for remembering the value of a pound. At least, I suppose, it's a pound I don't have to lose again, unless of course I succumb to petulance and blow it.

And I also guess, in my quest to beat my pal Eve to lose 30 pounds, I'm one pound closer to the finishing line. One down...29 to go...

Titanic Town

Woke up this morning from a dream of being shot.

In Brighton.

By a psychotic 12-year-old. For protection money.

I say shot…actually it was a booby-trap. I tripped a trip-wire, specially put there for me, by said psychotic 12-year-old. Blasted what can only really be called “the fuck” out of my chest. Oddly enough, the dream went on. I had to get better, and then run his gauntlet of booby-traps again, trying to get from one end of Brighton to the other, this time with d’s help. Oddly enough, I’ve never been to Brighton. d has – it was, oddly enough, the day we won the Olympics that are currently going on. Y’know, the day before some psychotic nutcases blew…again, what can only really be called “the fuck” out of London tubes and buses.

Blink…

Blink, blink…

(Shrugs). No idea. All I can tell you is that if you’re going to have to get up at Stupid o’clock on an out-of-practice Monday, it’s not a bad incentive to do so if the alternative is closing your eyes and being blasted to buggery again by psychotic, protection-money-demanding pre-teens…

Had to go to London today, for reasons that frankly passeth all understanding. Nobody else was in the office. I was my organisation today. I got one call all day – and it was for me, so ordinarily, it would have been forwarded to me at home, while I biked, or ate cereal, or scratched my arse.

(Shrugs). So there you go – eighty quid I could have done without spending. But on the other hand, it was a very nice Monday in my part of London. It was as if every bugger had left the west side of London. You could walk on the streets, singing at full volume (which I did – The Time Warp, and Sweet Transvestite from Rocky Horror is you’re curious: thanks to my mate Sian for sticking those in my brain this morning!), and no-one would hear you…or, y’know…arrest you or anything. It kinda felt like so many people must be in Stratford that the west side of London was bound to rise up in the air, and the city would snap in half at Oxford Street, like the Titanic in the movie, till the Olympics ended up taking the whole city down to a subterranean grave.

Wore big clothes today, after the dressing debacle yesterday, which on the one hand is a pain in the arse as I’ve had to hold my trousers up all day (should have bought a belt at Paddington, really – they’d have snapped my hand off for the custom!), and on the other, has allowed me to pass shiny surfaces all day and pull my T-shirt tight, and go “Hmm, see that doesn’t look too bad to me…” in a faintly pathetic attempt to deceive myself I’m making progress. Still – self-deceit has helped me stay active and productive all day, and I was able to get a lot of stuff done off my inevitable and unending List of Stuff To Do. Many ticks, and even more crossing-through today, which at least from a personal point of view is better than moping about all day inwardly wailing “I’m so faaaaaaaat!!!” and craving  comfort food. Some days, you just have to feed yourself a big fat whopper of a lie, to stop yourself feeding yourself…well, a big fat Whopper, I suppose.

What happens tomorrow? I honestly have no idea. I’d like to do a walk tomorrow morning before work, but we’ll see whether I can shift my arse out of bed after the uber-commute. Guess that depends on whether the 12-year-old catches up with me.

So…

Sleeping pills all round?

Oh - blood was 4.8 this morning, but I almost feel like that doesn't count - my body was still asleep for hours after I tested, so maybe if I woke up at Stupid o'clock every morning, my blood would be low and percolating, and maybe it only rises in the ACTUAL morning...maybe.

Scarlett Fever

Have you ever wanted to flick an "Off" switch at the back of your brain and go zombie for a day or so?

I think of this as Scarlett Fever - the immortal line of Scarlett O'Hara's, you understand, being "I'll think about that tomorrow...after all, tomorrow is another day..."

Blood was 5.4 this morning, despite a dinner of hot dogs at 9pm last night. Going insane right now though, if I'm honest - which I am when I can't be funny, as a kind of last resort.

Tried on a couple of outfits for tomorrow - back to London, for the first Monday of the Olympics...woohoo.
Neither of them fit properly. These were my 15stone outfits, so obviously, they're not gonna fit properly yet. I think it's the instant gratification thing though - been good all week, gimme results, ya bastards!

Stupid.

Doesn't help that I'm Jonesing for chocolate in the worst way. And yes, we still have the chocolate biscuits from my moment of madness this week, but while I'm still not sure that "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels", I'm not sure at this moment that anything tastes good enough to wipe out how bad tight clothes feel.

Sigh. Damn.

Damn damn damn...
Going away to kick myself in the shins right now. Then I'm going to watch some people sing and dance for no very good reason (Yeah, sue me, I'm a Smash fan...), and then I'm going to get some sleep before going to London. A day of walking and working and coffee and pondering...Dad has appointments tomorrow that I wish I could be there for.

Then it's Tuesday. I'm actually not remotely confident of progress on Tuesday, despite working pretty hard this week. But if I think about that right now, I'll go mad. I can't think about that right now. I'll think about that the day after tomorrow...after all, the day after tomorrow is another Tuesday...

B-P-T

Blood was 5.2 this morning, which was pleasing.

Went back to the gym today for the first time in weeks. Two things to say - Firstly, I'm soooo out of practice. And secondly - OW!

Did my hour of biking tonight too - Nehh, still doing it.

Came downstairs after that. Long story short - our shower's out of bounds, cos the caulking is shot, and we discovered yesterday it leaks through the ceiling. So while waiting for our bath to fill up (cos, y'know, there's nothing like stewing in your own bike-sweat), I came down. d was watching Dynamo: Magician Impossible. I pretty much like his stuff, but he creeps d out and makes her start talking about Nostrodamus and the Devil. Nevertheless, she couldn't stop watching it. I walked in, kinda less...erm...clothed than normal. d looked up.

"Ah, there you are," she said.
"Yeah, me. Not some skinny guy in a T-shirt," I said, grinning, reminding her of a couple of nights ago when I scared the bejeesus out of her by dancing into the room.
"No, I mean there you are," she said. "You've gone from flab to flap again. That's a good step back to where you wanna be."

"Flab to...?"
"Flap...the belly-bit that had sort of...re-filled. It's kinda re-emptied."
"Cool. Now all I need is to go from flaB to flaP to flaT..."
"Everything in time, o impatient one..."

Couple of other things. Pal of mine in the States, Eve, popped up on Facebook today having spotted that I've updated my profile picture.
"You got skinny!" she said.
"Hardly skinny," I said. "Still got about 84 pounds to lose!"
"Trying to lose about 30 pounds myself," she said - which frankly is absurd, but whatever...
"Cool - race ya!" I challenged her. "First one to lose 30 pounds wins...something."

She didn't actually come back to me on that. Hehehe...It's ON!

And while I was bathing, d found an episode of Cake Boss. For those who watch the show, it was the renewal of Buddy and Lisa's vows (which we've been building up to for a while). People have occasionally asked for pictures of how big I was at the start of this experiment.
"That's you!" said d suddenly. Mauro, the Cake Boss's lieutenant, was on our screen, shirtless and hurtling down a water slide. (So if ya wanna know what I looked like, look him up, I guess!)
"I mean, he's taller, so you've got to work with proportion, but yeah, that was you baby...a loooooong time ago!" she said, reassuring me. While it was good to know that I've visibly Disappeared a bit since then, something about the loooooongness of the time ago struck me. We're heading into August, and I'm still almost a stone heavier than I was on the first weigh-in I did this year, back in January. Time to really start pushing now, to get back down there, and then beyond. I seem to have got the willpower back, with the gymming and the biking and the walking at least. The lightest I've reached so far is 14 stone 9. That's 25 pounds away. I have to do my 20 mile walk on 21st September this year. That's a little under eight weeks away. 16 pounds on the traditional two-pounds-a-week scale. So I'm still not going to be at my best when I do the walk, unless there are a few accelerator-pedal weeks in there somewhere. I'm going to set that as a mini-goal - actually, I'm going to tweak that as a mini-goal. I'd like to reach 14 stone 7 by the time I do the walk. - 27 pounds in  8 weeks. That seems radically unhealthy, said like that. But hey, I can dream, can't I?

The Invisible Man

Ahhhhh we’re not there.

Can’t tell you how glad I am not to be there.

I mean, yippie skippie, the Olympics have finally started, but I’m soooo glad I’m not there. Tonight, I’m not just a Disappearing Man, but an Invisible one –

My old “manor” – as I’ve just learned David Beckham used to call it – is on TV screens around the world right now. Stratford is in the eyes of the world.

I enjoyed living there, but personally, I’m happy to watch it from a couple of hundred miles away.

My life today seems small and insignificant by comparison to the Olympics, but I’ve enjoyed it. Delivered some work to a demanding deadline, got good feedback. Went up to sit with Dad for a few hours…he mainly slept. Did an hour on the bike, burned off 650 calories, had a nice meal, settled down to watch Stratford take its place on the world stage. Interestingly, there are some countries with a smaller total population than Stratford had when we left it.

Right – that’s as much as there is to say about today, frankly – Cuba’s just arrived in Straford…only another hour and a quarter of this frankly baffling opening ceremony…

Oh – blood was good this morning, down to 5.2. Maybe the biking starting to have an effect?

I Can See Clearly Now

"Ah!!!"
d jumped.
It's kinda funny, unless you're her. Eight years we've been married now, almost nine, and even when everything logical tells her there's just the two of us in the place, I can still startle the bejeesus out of her.
The weird thing is it doesn't usually happen when I dance into the room to a reggae beat, singing.

We'd been watching a bit of Cool Runnings - hey, it's the night before the Olympics - and I was popping upstairs to get on the bike. I couldn't find my training shoes, so I'd popped straight back again to look for them. The credits of the movie were rolling, so I kinda reggae'd my way into the room, singing along to "I can see clearly now the rain has gone' - again, a more appropriate song for the current heatwave in the World Capital of Drizzle it would be hard to imagine.

"Ah!!!"
d jumped.
"Scared the bejeesus out of me..." she said.
She stared at me a moment.
"You didn't look like yourself," she said.
"Is that good?" I asked.
"Yeah, you didn't look like you, you looked like some skinny guy in a T-shirt..."
Our front door was open of course, in the heat, so it made a little more sense than you might imagine. Some reggae'ing skinny guy could have wandered along our balcony and danced his way in.

But of course he hadn't. It was me.

It was very sweet of her to mistake me for a skinny guy, but it's too early for such comparisons to be accurate. I walked five miles this morning, and did some biking tonight, and ate reasonably sensibly - fish and tomato-salad for dinner. But I also weighed this morning, and I know it's too early to start talking skinny again. Let's at least look at things clearly, eh?

Still, she is sweet...

Blood was 6.2 this morning. So no change there then. Humph.

The Road To Hell Is Paved With Chocolate Biscuits

I honestly don't know what came over me. Y'know they say sometimes suicides are going along jusssst peachy, and then something snaps, and the next thing they know they're popping the pills  and drinking the water and they have no recollection of getting the pills or filling the glass or any of that? Well without wishing to come off all heavy on your asses, it was like that. I don't know quite what happened but as the packet of McVities Dark Chocolate Digestive Biscuits went through the scanner at my local grocery store, the beep kinda went off in my head, as if to say "Eh?? What??"

Thing is, I know I went out with the express purpose of buying something bad. It wasn't especially chocolate biscuits, just something to - and pay attention to the rhetoric of the brain here, it's telling - something to wreck all the good work.

Ahem.

Regular readers will of course see the issue here, which is that I haven't been doing the good work for weeks now. If I wreck the good work at this point, I'll be 20 stone again before I wake up and smell the chocolate biscuits.

So what was the urge about? The urge to wreck everything?
I have no idea. d said a thing recently that interested me.
"There are people who have a medical problem, and they're called alcoholics. Gluttony's not the same thing, honey," she said.

I've pondered that since she said it. Thing is, there are circles to being a Fat Fuck, just like Dante's abominable Inferno. And yes, absolutely, Gluttony's one of them. I'm more than familiar with the urge to eat not just a slice of cake, but the whole cake, just because it gives pleasure, and pleasure is...by definition...pleasurable. So yeah, I'm a Glutton, and I know that. But there's clearly, irritatingly, more to Fat Fuckery than than just Gluttony. If anyone can come up with more, I'm open to offers, but so far I've only come up with Four Circles of Fat Hell:

Gluttony - This is the simplest circle - it's essentially just an over-sensitivity to pleasure.
Comfort - We're familiar with the notion that certain foods provide comfort in times of stress. Ergo the more stress, the more comfort our systems think they require, and the more of the 'wrong' foods we eat.
Self-Sabotage - A darker circle, where we eat as an escape route - from all sorts of societal pressures, like the pressure to succeed, the pressure to have relationships, the pressure to be taken seriously in business etc...
Self-Harm - the drive to actually self-destruct, or to punish ourselves for...something.

I think, along this journey, I've touched every level at some point. Gluttony is easy - when I rave and bitch that I don't have a chocolate Sundae right here right now - that's Gluttony. Comfort eating...it's interesting, I've never particularly thought of myself as a comfort eater, but then, I've never really been under stress since this experiment began. Now, I guess you could say I'm under some stress, with business and Dad. Might account for some of the difficulties I've had in recent months trying, for instance, to re-establish my discipline levels. Self-sabotage...that's what I hit today, I think. Just the mindless desire to rebel, to go mad, to spoil things, and, presumably, to control the process of my own self-sabotage. And Self-Harm of course we touched on during my chippy binge of a few weeks ago.

Anyhow...
I actually stood there in Tescos, with the biscuits in my hand, and saw my future if I ate them. Sneaky treats, leading to bigger and bigger treats, leading to a woooooooorld of treats...and before I'd know it, I'd have slipped all the way back down to Fat Fuck Hell, and be the person I was before all this began - eating madly and being surprised at my heart giving up the ghost.

So I took them home and put them in the fridge. Then, for the first time in weeks, I made the time and got on the bike.

It was rather startled to see me. I did an hour on it, which I think surprised it even more. And then I promised it an hour every day. It gave a sardonic "Yeah, we'll see, mate" handlebar-tilt and groaned slightly as I got off it.

The road to Hell may be paved with chocolate biscuits, but if Meat Loaf taught me anything when I was a child, it's that the way back out is on the seat of a bike.

Blood today was 6.5. This is too damned high for my liking as well. Let's get back under control, dammit!