Bloody hell, you take your eye off the ball for just a minute and the next thing you know a couple of months have passed and you’ve been teetering off the wagon!! Argh!!
I have come to the conclusion (Epiphany No 3587987549087490) that I need to manage my time better. I’m making a complete bags of distributing my time evenly between all the things I do in my life. I’ve also come to the conclusion that I spend way too much time in front of the TV – or at least way too much time in front of the TV just watching TV – so that’s the first thing I’ve tackled. I’m going to multi-task in front of the television – that’s when I’m going to blog or email or do my brain dead internet surfing. Apart from this being a time saving measure, I reckon if I’m typing or reading in front of the telly, I’m less likely to want to stuff my gob with food.
On a much more serious note though, starting this Monday I’m going to plan my days out carefully. I reckon planning an entire week in detail ahead of time would be too ambitious so I’m going to roughly outline what I’d like to achieve in a particular week – work wise/healthy lifestyle wise/leisure etc – and the night before each day I’ll plan the details. I want to start the day with some exercise so that before I do anything, before I have the chance to get too tired, before I get the opportunity to talk myself out of it – etc etc etc – before any of these things have a chance to kick in, I’ll have done at least some exercise. Also I could think of worse ways to start the day.
I’m also intending to try to get a lot of my dinner preparations done early in the day (I work mostly from home so that’s feasible), so that I have less of an opportunity to do something stupid after a hard day’s work.
In an earlier epiphany I’d come to a conclusion that if I ate healthily, that the exercise and all the rest would follow. Now I’m not so sure, I reckon I need to get off my bum and get on with it, make a big effort to eat healthily, keep track of what I’m eating and not over do it etc – but my theory is if I’m moving my arse, I’ll be a lot less likely to want to ruin all my hard work by eating foolishly. On the other hand, knowing my magical ability to justify just about anything to myself, it’s also quite likely that I might tell myself that I deserve that nice creamy bun after all that hard work! But I will be doing my damndest to avoid such a scenario happening.
I’m also trying to GET OVER MYSELF enough to go to the gym and the pool. Such places scare the bejaysus out of me. They are full of skinny people who know what they’re doing, who cannot relate to my tale of woe! At least that’s what it’s like in the deep crevices of my warped paranoid mind…. I have a lot of GETTING OVER MYSELF to do.
For years I was a bit overweight, but saw myself as horrendously obese. I’d never say the “F” word or complain directly about my weight – I’d say stuff like “What? Fit into that with my arse?!” or “Er…have you seen my chest lately?!” – different parts of the body would get lambasted but I’d never say I was actually fat, which I suppose, looking back, I wasn’t really – but that’s not how I saw it. In response to my comments, people would say I wasn’t that bad and though I’d poo poo them, I guess there was a certain cushioning effect in it. Plus, and here’s the crucial bit – in my mind I was fooling everyone – I was somehow, just about,. pulling off an act as a non fatty bum bum. Ever since, a part of me has lived with the delusion that the rest of the world is fooled by my clever deception. Except, the problem is that with each year, the pounds were piling on and on and my delusion was getting bigger and bigger. This is an example of my past logic: “I mean, the deception must be working on some level – why else would I have skinny friends? – I must be pulling it off?!” The irony of course is that I wasn’t actually that fat way back then, so I wasn’t really fooling anyone, but the bigger I got, the bigger the delusion became.
In the last couple of years however, I’ve slowly but surely come to the realisation that I am not in fact pulling it off at all. There are no clothes I can wear that hide the fat, no good camera angle to fool people with – no matter how the world looks at me – I’m obese. I no longer make jokes about my arse and boobs, I wouldn’t dare invite commentary these days – I’ve said to very close friends that I know I’ve put on weight and what’s telling about it is they don’t say “ah no, you’re not that big”, instead, they just say nothing, which says it all really.
All those years of being deluded, the cushion of thinking I was fooling everyone, allowed me to do things I wouldn’t have done otherwise – skinny people things like going out and (only with the help of copious amounts of alcohol) pretending to be extroverted. The delusion had a major downside though, it allowed me to cop out of dealing with my weight. The longer I avoided talking about and dealing with my weight, the more scary the thought of addressing it became. In fact, addressing my weight became a huge formidable monster that was hiding in the closet that I daren’t open.
The longer the closet stayed closed, the more I feared opening it. The deep sense of shame I felt grew bigger and bigger and the thought of being asked to talk about my weight, much less address it, felt the same as being asked to bear my soul while standing naked in the middle of the town square.
So that brings me back to going to the gym and the pool. I have made great strides in facing up to my weight issues, I even braved the scales at Weight Watchers (I felt so vulnerable I might as well have been naked), but the gym and the pool have thus far eluded me (or rather I have eluded them) – particularly the pool because of the whole near nakedness of the whole concept. The gym is scary because a) I’m a fatty bum bum going to the gym and it feels like a big placard is going to be above my head that flashes “FAT PERSON TRYING TO LOSE WEIGHT”. And of course b) I’m also not overjoyed at the prospect of sweating profusely (it doesn’t take much these days) in front of all and sundry.
But, I’ve got to get over all of the above. This is a battle I must win in my mind, by hook or by crook I’ve got to get a grip and ignore the fears and doubts. I’m going to try to make Monday D Day for this, but that depends on whether I get my hands on some decent trackie bottoms and t-shirts in the meantime. I live in a country area so there ain’t much choice where I live, so it depends on me going to a larger town. I normally get most of my clothes on Ebay, partly because of the shame, partly because of the lack of availability of marquee sized semi fashionable shirts in rural Ireland.
So, I am highly motivated again – back on the straight and narrow…..AGAIN. Despite my lack of blogging, I have been sort of well behaved, but not super well behaved – ie I haven’t been concentrating. My latest book was Diary of a Fatman by Paul Jeffreys and I’d highly recommend it. His weightloss story is just incredicble – he lost 10 stone in a year and wrote a book and allowed himself to be filmed for a documentary (Fat Man Slim) – while most of us couldn’t lose that amount in such a short time, I still found both the book and documentary to be inspirational and really motivating. Paul just grabbed the situation by the balls and got on with it – it was wonderful to see an obese person take control and not appear weak – he fought every step of the way. – Powerful stuff.
