I weighed in yesterday morning at 67.8kg. I’m getting tantalisingly close to 66.8kg, aka 10 and a half stone, aka my lightest ever adult weight. (Achieved for one week only during my last month at university, the week when I went to my WeightWatchers meeting in sub-fusc and the leader told me how proud she was of me for coming straight from an exam. I was back up to 10st 10lb the next week, then there was celebration, graduation, and a graph that kept going up for about four years...) My current weight feels like Thursday: I can almost smell the delights of the weekend next mini goal, but unfortunately there’s some highly inconvenient work to do before I get there.
I learned a valuable lesson this week. I learned that if the pattern of alternate days I’ve got into doesn’t match some social event, and I need to alter it, I really must not do this by having two 500-calorie days in a row. We had people coming for dinner on Sunday night, so I needed that to be an up day, but Friday was a down. Friday was fine, no more than usual hunger levels, but Saturday... oh dear. By about lunchtime on Saturday I was fit for nothing but lazing on the couch, and by bedtime I was ready to eat the pillow and plagued by serious thoughts of bingeing. Lesson learned, and I feel a bit stupid because really, how difficult was it to work out that eating 500 calories for two days in a row is not a clever idea?
On Sunday we went shopping as I needed a dress for a friend’s wedding, and had lunch at Zizzi. We split some of their truly fabulous garlic bread with cheese, which got me thinking about the Two Fit Chicks podcast on goals that I listened to while driving home a few days ago: Carla said that you should be mindful in your actions, and always ask yourself “Is this behaviour going to take me towards or away from my goal?” The answer will sometimes be “far, far away!”, and you will sometimes do it anyway, but you are at least acting mindfully. I ate that garlic bread fully aware of its potential effects on my weight-loss curve, but I enjoyed every damn bite... And to compensate slightly I had prawn linguine for my main course rather than one of the cheese-laden or beef-heavy options.
Dinner was roast chicken: dry-roasted for fat-reduction after reading a Nigel Slater article in the Guardian recommending the method. It worked really well: the chicken was still beautifully moist and the skin lovely and crisp. It probably helped that I’d bought the most expensive chicken I felt I could afford – not sure you’d get such good results with one of the 3-for-£10 specimens Tesco also had. For dessert we had homemade gingerbread and custard... the custard was bought, slightly to my shame until I tasted it. Pudding Place make better custard than me, and I don’t mind admitting it!
Monday was uneventful. On Tuesday I had a super-beginning skiing lesson at our local dry slope. We only did very basics (go, stop), but it was highly enjoyable and I have booked in for a beginners’ course. The lesson showed me some of the mental progress I’d made. Skiing was an activity I’d tried a couple of times as a teenager, and found that my weight, inflexibility and lack of fitness rendered practically impossible. So for every task the instructor set us (except, perhaps, putting on the skis) there was a little voice in the back of my mind saying “You can’t do this! You tried! You can’t! You know you can’t! You’re going to fall over and make an arse of yourself!” But I was able to say “Well, I’m going to try. And even if I do fall over, well, so what? It would be a whole lot less embarrassing than refusing to try sliding down a very gentle five-foot slope, wouldn’t it?” I did try. And not only did I not fall over, I was probably one of the better ones in the group – turns out skiing is far easier when you’re not obese. Therefore I have a message for that little voice: SCREW YOU!
(That one tiny lesson took me further than I’d managed to get any of the previous times, so in future lessons the “I CAN’T!” at least will be based on fear, not actual experience. I find that makes it easier to fight.)
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