Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Stick a fork in me

My GOD I feel bloated today. (Nice opening sentence. I've become one of those women, haven't I) Kept feeling like I might accidentally do the unspeakable in front of the office, but managed to contain it. I'm not sure how professional I'd appear going at it like a set of bagpipes mid-meeting.

I blame the potatoes and bananas. A bad case of the Ponanas.

The office was so hot today - 32 degrees at my desk - that even I wasn't up for eating much so I had:

bacon and mushroom and tomato and lettuce butty for breakfast.

Left over potato salad for lunch.

Lowfat yoghurt for afternoon snack.

Now I'm going to have left over spaghetti. It's wholewheat so hopefully it won't do too much damage.

And now having a nice glass of rose.

On my way home Fatdar spotted a hugely obese homeless woman, which is wierd because I always assumed that not having a fridge was the route to slimness. I guess the magazines are wrong ...

Have agreed with my friend Jules that we'll weigh in each week and gee each other along. She's pretty scary and a consumate dieter so hopefully she'll keep me on track.

Day three and all is well.

XX

Thursday, July 24, 2008

The Fight Begins

I have always struggled with my weight. I've been a Ten Tonne Tessie and a tiny wee little thing that would give Nicole Ritchie a run for her money. At the moment, I'm the former. I no longer like looking at pictures of myself - I don't look anything like I think I do and am horrified by the girth that was once a fairly saucy bunch of curves.

Oddly, though, I have always expected to be fat. When I got really skinny it wasn't through planning, it was a bi-product of some other issues I was having. It was a surprise to see my rib cage poking out and feel the bones in my butt, but it wasn't as though I'd followed some special way of eating to get that way. I simply hadn't eaten and the weight had fallen off me. And then, of course, over the past ten years, it's all piled back on. I'm not quite where I was when I started, but I'm not far off and it shocks the hell out of me. I used to think that being that big had been a freak accident, but now I think it's because I'm fitting my personal profile - you know, the thing where if you think it hard enough, you will become it.

No matter what size I've been, apart from those two years or so, I have felt huge. I have really quite ridiculously large tits which add on a whole raft of hugeness in themselves and maybe that's why I always felt so much bigger than everyone else.

When I was at school, I remember feeling like a hippo, but I look back and I'm completely normal. I look just like a slightly curvier version of everyone else rather than a candidate for stomach bypass. In my mid-twenties, as I began to put weight back on, I moved to London and once again, I felt like the Big One. But I look at pictures and I'm not. In the slightest. Or at least, not then.

I'll always be curvy, but I really don't like that I have become the Fat Friend. I hate the way strangers feel comfortable enough to mention the fact that I'm large. That I untag pictures of myself on Facebook because people who haven't seen me in years will see that I've become a hefer.

I am my own self-fulfilling prophesy.

And I want to have kids and it scares the shit out of me that I'll get pregnant and after I've had the baby, I'll stay looking pregnant forever.

When I stopped eating, I did it because I wanted control. It was a horrible period in my life and so, part of the my eating patterns now are a reaction to that - in a way, I'm overjoyed that I can eat as much as I like now and not panic and for years I've kind of embraced that. That and the overwhelming guilt and self-hate that bubbles up at the end of a particularly gross pigout.

Ultimately, I don't eat that badly anymore and I can control my portions - it's the exercise that I need to up now and the booze I need to cut down on.

Over the course of the next year, I would like to lose two stone. I would like to be fitter and firmer and happier with myself. But, in all honesty, I really don't know if I can do it. In the main, my only experience of succesful weight loss is through an eating disorder. The only time I did something that worked was with Slimming World where I lost a stone. So I'm thinking, maybe it's time to do that again.

I'm going to do Slimming World to lose those two stone while listening to Paul McKenna and reassessing my body image and this blog will be my record of how I CAN lose weight without going mad and how I'm not going to be the Fat Girl for much longer.

I need to focus and commit and stop whining and get on with it. I wasn't born fat, I have just convinced myself that that's who I am. But I'm not and I don't want to spend a minute longer wishing that I were slimmer. How dull would the next ten years be doing that?

So tomorrow morning is the Big Weigh In and it all starts then.

So, here I go ... Good luck me!

XX