Motivation with fat bastard

Have you ever wondered WHY it is that some people feel the need to make comment on things that people (who they usually don’t know at all) are doing? Or why guys feel that nothing turns a woman on more than them hanging out the windows of cars or off building sites yelling “hey gorgeous, show us your tits” . As my boobies are actually the kind that need to be rolled up like football socks and stuffed into their bra cups each morning, I reckon if I did decided to flash “the girls” that it wouldn’t be all that exciting for anyone getting an eyeful. What does this have to  do with weight loss? Last Friday I did my fitness test with Mistress Pain and I am absolutely rapt to report that I knocked 5 minutes off my time. I am les than rapt to report that the entire 27 minutes I was slogging my guts up and down the fitness course, I was cheered on every time I got back to the start line by a few ACTEWAGL guys. Now, don’t me wrong – friendly ribbing and banter is fine but these guys were making all sorts of comments like “look at the fat chick run” and “I think this is registering on the Richter scale”. My feelings aren’t particularly hurt, mainly because I came to terms with being fat quite some time ago (and am now working on NOT being fat) but I find the whole commentary puzzling and really, pretty stupid. I reckon maybe I would have been a bit more hurt if I wasn’t concentrating on not bringing up lunch but I’ve got to say, yet again the gods of the ridiculous did give me something to have a quiet laugh at. The person making the most comments was, well, let me just say he would have made Fat Bastard from Austin Powers look svelte. His overalls were open and his singlet was straining to cover what looked like a good 35 years of eating crappy food and drinking the equivalent of Lake Burley Griffin in beer. You know the type. Anyway, he felt the most entitled to make comments and in the end I was having trouble not laughing. Mainly because all I could really hear was “I’m dead sexy” (watch Austen Powers 2 if you need to work out what I’m talking about) every time he opened his mouth. Hee hee

So, all in all it was more motivating than upsetting and this week has been a great one for diet and exercise. I even managed to do something I thought I would NEVER have the willpower for – when one of my kids didn’t finish some two minutes noodles, I threw them in the bin rather than eat them. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it is almost equivalent of a junkie throwing his heroin in the bin. 2 minute noodles have always ben the first food I would “break” a diet on and it has taken a long long time to get to this stage. I didn’t even hang around the bin, sniffing at it. Don’t ask, you really don’t want to know.

To all the foods I loved before…

Yep, those of you that are either nerdy enough or old enough are now hearing the classic tune immortalised by Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias (and yes, I had to look up how to spell Julio’s last name). I was wandering around the local shops today and whilst standing there, slowly salivating down the front of the cake cabinet of the bakery, I began to wonder exactly HOW “bad” or “good” a food can be. How do you define something that is “bad”? Well, there are the obvious, such as selling your kids on the internet (although there are some days where this is just almost too tempting to ignore) or stealing stuff, but when it comes to food, I have noticed that some people react to it in quite weird ways.

An example: sitting at a café with friends, a piece of chocolate mud cake arrives. The person who ordered it then sits there under the eyes of the others and tries to prove why they can eat this “bad” food. This has always puzzled me, as I am pretty sure that most of my friends don’t give a rat’s bum if I eat the cake or not. Well, they might, but because they know I don’t need extra padding and a fruit salad would be a healthier choice, but NOT because they think I am about to condemn my should to hell by eating chocolate cake. Therefore, is food really “bad”? I just find it strange that when it comes ot food, it seems you are either on the side of the angels or devils and I am wondering about what falls into that no man’s land in between – what I like ot call “food purgatory”. When I think that something is bad,  it is because it has done a wee on the carpet or nicked off with the rent money. I like to think of my food in terms of the level of affection I feel for it. This has, however, started to be re evaluated in recent times, as even though I am fond of a certain food, it may not in the long run be helping me. Kind of like that “friend”you make at the work christmas party because you gave them a lift home when their taxi didn’t turn up, but now won’t piss off no matter how much you drop hints that their personality and different attitude to hygiene just really aren’t things that you like.

Confused yet? Ok, this is what I mean in the food context : I love chinese and turkish takeaway food. I reckon that if I had the money, I would eat it at least twice a week. On the affection scale, it is a very deep like, bordering on infatuation. Sooooo when I found out that one of my favourite chinese dishes, Beijing Chilli Beef, has 1500 calories PER FRICKEN’ SERVE, the affection meter slipped to a mild interest. If I eat that meal, it means at least 120 minutes on the step machine or a whopping 4 hour swim. The food isn’t BAD, per se, but the after effects of eating it aren’t that grand. I must also admit that my attitude to veggies is somewhat luke warm on the old affection scale, but they’ll do for now and I am willing to work on the relationship. There will just be days when I don’t care how “good” they are, they will still piss me right off and no matter how much affection I have in reserve, it just isn’t going to work.

I guess what I am trying to explain here is that for me – and I suspect others like me – changing your attitude to food is like changing how you see a relationship. To all of you who just see food as fuel and don’t have any emotional attachment to food, what I am talking about now will make no sense to you at all and you should just go and chomp on some mung beans. Changing in a relationship can be hard and at times, the trauma is not worth it. I will stick with it though. I am hoping to move celery up my affection scale from “you’ve got to be joking?????’ to “not so bad”. Does this mean I need vegetable counselling? I hope not.

Squidgy bits

ha ha. When I first typed that title it corrected it to ”squiddy bits” – not sure how appropriate that is

I have good news about my squidgy bits – they are shrinking! If you check my vital statistics you’ll see that since starting I’ve managed to shed around 16cm, which makes me really happy. My PT is happy too – she wants to see the weight come down to, but she said the cms are really important too, as it means I am replacing fat with muscle, which means that now when I wave at someone, it is more of a “wibble wobble” than an air displacement roughly the same as a 747 taking off. Those are my words, not my PT’s – she had much more scientific stuff in there that I can’t remember.

Am back on the healthy eating again, which is great, except am detoxing from caffeine, which makes me a bit grumpy etc I miss coffee more than I miss alcohol (yes, I know, TRY not to pass out from shock). Giving up the plonk has been relatively easy – I do love a tipple but I find I don’t actually miss it that much. this is also doing wonders for our budgeting – takes much less when I do actually drink for me to feel “merry”, so good stuff. KFC (the bastards) have bought out mashies again, which is one of my all time favourite things but so far I have remained stoic and driven past the tempting sign. Hey, don’t ask me to explain – some people feel the same way about tim tams, which I can’t stand and am bewildered by the idea that ANYONE could sit down and eat a WHOLE packet of them – yuck!!

So, I am still training hard, am avoiding most of the explosions in the minefield of “food to avoid” and am shrinking my squidgy bits. Not too bad, not too bad. And I’m keeping an eye out for any squiddy bits – sounds dangerous.

Ring of fire gnocchi

I recently had the wonderful experience of having to try and rustle up something resembling food after 7pm in a hospital cafeteria. My options were the leftover “fresh” caesar salad (fresh meaning that is was made sometime that week) that was mainly a few lettuce leaves, half a boiled egg and some croutons having a swim around in a fair dollop of salad dressing or gnocchi in some kind of white sauce. I went for the gnocci as it looks pretty innocuous – it tasted innocuous. I think it was meant to be some kind of cheese sauce, but I think the cook forgot to put the cheese in as it ended up having the consistency and taste of perkins paste (oh come on – we all ate perkins paste or clag once). What I was not prepared for was the impact the next day – let’s just say that since eating a stricter diet that my gut is a little more finely tuned to less-than-desirable food than it used to be. It was that or the sauce the gnocchi was in had chilli or prunes that I didn’t detect, so I got to know the hospital toilets pretty well too. Mmmmm ring of fire gnocci – it sounds like a weird dish in an Italian cafe, doesn’t it?

Temptation, get behind me. Or take a seat over there. Or something

I’ve been at home with our youngest, Will, this week. Scared the life out of us by coming down with flu suddenly on Monday (NOT swine flu, just flu). Spiked a huge temperature and we rushed him into a doctor at the hospital. He prescribed tamiflu and told us to keep an eye on him at home, as the chance of him picking up a secondary infection in the hospital was pretty high. So, a rather sleepless couple of nights with a very sick little boy has meant that Tim and I are stressed out of our brains and rather ditsy with tiredness. What the fark has this got to do with diet and exercise? I hear you sigh. Well, I’m GLAD YOU ASKED.

This week has shown that I have made a major shift in my thinking. When this kind of thing happened before, I would immediately stress eat and drink. Loads of junk and alcohol. I am talking LOADS, not just a packet of chips and a glass or two of wine. No, I went all out in trying to “make myself feel better” – two minute noodles, chips, eclairs (not the diet ones), pies and a bottle of wine a day. Not a pretty sight and NOT a pretty result, either physically or mentally. Physically – well, let’s just say my bum didn’t get any smaller – and mentally I would just hate myself just that little bit more for being such a weak willed twat. This week (and last week, but there was no stress then) I have just been able to stay focused on the main game of healthy eating and keeping some bloody perspective. Stress happens (so do eclairs, but enough said) and my old habits were almost literally tearing me to pieces. Might as well smack both my feet with cricket bats for all of the effectiveness it was having – more pain and feeling pretty stupid for doing it to myself in the first place. If there are some readers out there who DO smack their feet with cricket bats for pleasure, well, bully for you. And get a therapist. Pronto.

It’s nice to have some good news to report, I suppose. It may not seem like much, but it is a big deal to me that I can stop my initial reaction to feeling upset and stressed, which is to eat and drink myself into a stupor and then hate myself for days or weeks afterwards. I also know that there will be some not great weeks or days when it will all seem to farking hard, fark the diet, I want hot chips and I WANT THEM NOW!!!!!! But if I can put temptation behind me, or at least somewhere else, more often than not, it means a big step forward. And less wobbly bits where I shouldn’t really have them. Now that I think about it, what I should do is put temptation where I seem to leave my keys – I lose track of them several times a day. I’ll be slimmer in no time!

Eclairs of happiness

Oh yes, I am a happy woman. Whilst I know that eclairs are food of Satan and I must resist, the angels at Weight Watchers have heard my prayers and come up with an awesome answer for those who must abstain from choux pastry, cream and chocolate – weight watchers Belgian Eclairs!!!!!!! They cost a bomb, are tiny but none the less, they are ECLAIRS!!!!! With CHOCOLATE (substitute) and some kind of synthetic stuff that is meant to replicate cream but I DON’T CARE. I am SOOOOOOOO HAPPY. Oh yes, eclairs of happiness. That’s what I’ll be eating while I watch the Bledisloe Cup tonight. True rugby food.

Origin night and no pie and chips? Are you kidding me????

Yeah, planned this well. Although I am a rugby union girl, I don’t mind sitting down and watching state of origin, especially since my long suffering husband allows me to do my own commentary over parts of it, which of course I think is hilarious. However, this time round there will be no pies with mustard and tartare sauce (don’t make vomit noises like that, it’s great) as they are in the “food that is so evil that even Satan shuns it” section of my calorie counter. Bum. And don’t crap on about all of the fabulous low fat, yummy options out there. Low fat chips taste like cardboard and the whole point of a pie is that is that it is so full of fat you can’t taste what else is in there.  Ah well, have to go, my salad is calling me.