The Fatslayer Chronicles

An old friend (and WW buddy) came round for dinner yesterday, and she was a living example of ‘how to do maintenance.’ I first met her when we were both 18 year old university students, and she was 5’1” and weighed 240lb and I was 5’1” and weighed 180lbs. Though personality-wise we were chalk and cheese, as friends we hit it off immediately.

In the 22 years since then, we’ve both lost and gained a shed load of weight. Her highest ever weight was 313lbs, my highest was 230lbs. My lowest was 156lbs….her lowest (as at yesterday) is 138lbs. She lost 175lbs a couple of years ago, and last week was her 2^nd anniversary at goal – and she looks bloody fantastic!

She lives in Italy now so I don’t see her that often, and the whole night was taken up with talking about weight loss and health issues. I’m ashamed to say I ruthlessly pumped her for tips and guidance – and luckily she was more than happy to share the secrets of her success.

Firstly we talked about what makes one diet ‘click’ when so many previous ones have failed. Because, lets face it, neither of us has had a very good track record when it comes to getting to goal and staying there. In fact, if I’d had to bet on it when we were in our twenties and early thirties I’d have said I was the more likely of the pair of us to succeed at a diet because – well, to be frank, she was a good time girl, who liked to live large in every way – big eating, big drinking, big partying etc.

She never really let her weight hold her back the way mine did – she was always the girl dressed like a Vegas stripper, heavy on the décolletage and killer heels, with a queue of horny guys waiting to feel her up at parties. So her weigh-loss attempts were always half-hearted, and would falter at the first pop of a cork or unveiling of a tub of chocolate body paint.  

So in her case, it took something pretty drastic to change her lifestyle, and for her that catalyst was some really serious health setbacks. Firstly her twin brother died of cardiac arrest at the age of 32, despite being less overweight than her and a lot fitter to boot. At around the same time as that happened she had some health problems of her own and was told she’d got a ‘fatty liver’ and type 2 diabetes. Then the third blow was developing knee problems and being told she couldn’t have surgery until she’d lost at least 50lbs – not only to protect the new knee joints but also to reduce the chances of her dying under the anaesthetic.

She took a good long look at herself and didn’t like what she saw, so she cleaned out all the high sugar, high fat crap from her fridge and cupboards, put herself onto a low fat, low cal regime, and started swimming every day before work. Then she sat back and waited for the weight to drop off…

…and waited….and waited….

……and by the end of the first month she’d lost half a pound.

That was back in the summer of 1997, and it took her until September 2003 to lose the entire 175lbs. Because her metabolism was so screwed, the weight came off torturously slowly (her highest loss in any one week was 1lb), but she kept plugging away at it, telling herself that staying the same or losing even 10oz was better than relentlessly gaining. She gradually increased her swimming until she was swimming for an hour a day, and she ate sensibly, cut out alcohol completely (she was an alcoholic so moderation wasn’t an option for her) and tried to incorporate more activity into her day (walking further to the car, pottering in the garden rather than watching TV etc.)

Other things she did to keep motivated…apart from keeping one ‘fat’ suit that she could use to measure how far she’d come, she ruthlessly took all her clothes to charity shops as soon as they became too baggy, so that she’s never be tempted to start regaining the weight. If she shopped for new clothes (she always loved her clothes!), she always bought at least one outfit a size too small, to give her a goal to work towards. She bought tailored clothes and avoided elasticated waistbands and stretch fabrics. She started growing her own salad veggies and herbs to encourage herself to eat wholesome, organic food, and so that she could never use the ‘it’s too expensive to eat healthily’ excuse. She started booking her client meetings for mid-morning or mid-afternoon in the office (she’s a publisher) so that she could avoid the customary three-course expense-account restaurant lunches every day. She booked herself onto activity holidays (scuba diving, surfing, mountain biking, hill walking) in beautiful sunny locations (Greece, Italy, Spain, Mexico) to encourage herself to aim for shorts and bikinis – and eventually she went the whole hog and married an Italian architect and moved to Rome where looking chic and beautiful is a national obsession.

She didn’t set herself any ‘numbers’ goals – e.g. “I’ll lose 50lbs/be a size 14 by my birthday”, because she knew that effort and determination alone weren’t enough to guarantee she’d hit those kinds of targets. Instead she set goals that she could properly control by effort and hard work (barring accidents), such as ‘I’ll drink 3 litres of water a day; I’ll be lifting 10lbs weights by Christmas, I’ll increase my swimming by 5 minutes a day by this time next month, I’ll walk 10000 steps a day with my pedometer.”

She never allowed herself “a day off”, on the premise that you should never compromise on living healthily, even for a single day. So if she indulged in something high in calories or fat for lunch, she’d compensate by taking a walk afterwards, or having steamed veggies or a simple salad for dinner. She wrote down every single (edible!) thing she put in her mouth – no exceptions – and never allowed herself to drift too far from the South-Beachy type of plan she’d elected to follow.

So that was how she lost 175lbs, and how she’s managed to keep it off for 24 months. ‘Cos when it comes to maintenance, apparently it’s just been more of the same. Still exercising, still keeping a food and exercise journal, still keeping her calories below 1500 a day, still incorporating more activity, still asking herself whether the food she’s about to eat is worth the rise in blood sugar.

I asked her the million dollar question - has all that effort, deprivation and unceasing vigilance been worth it – especially for a high-living, life-loving kinda gal like her?

You’d better believe it! She said she’s never felt better, never had so much energy and enthusiasm, never gleaned such pleasure from simple things like cooking colourful healthy dishes, being able to swim and walk effortlessly, and buy beautiful clothes. She still parties hard, but now she’s drinking virgin cocktails and dancing the night away with Paolo on the dance floor (activity points!), rather than getting trashed on wine and coke and eating her body weight in chicken wings and peanuts. Life, she tells me, is different but better.

So there you have it – proof that it can be done, and enjoyed, and that it’s worth all the effort. It’s great to hear a success story and realise that if others have done it, I can too – I feel all fired up and reinvigorated now! This time next year I’m gonna be so hot I’ll be a fire hazard!

What is it about weight loss that turns some people into tyrants and others into unquestioning sheep? It’s amazing how many people ignore the evidence of their own experience and senses, and simply swallow the current dieting advice hook line and sinker.

One thing life in general (and trying to follow a healthy diet in particular) has taught me is that when it comes to diets, we’re all different. There are no ‘rules’ to follow that will guarantee you the holy grail of successful loss and maintenance – you have to sift through the information that’s out there, experiment,  and see what works for you and what doesn’t. Not everything that you taste is worth swallowing (heh heh – I’m sure you can think of examples!), and it’s the same with information – you have to learn what’s palatable and what you should spit back out again. It’s a lifelong learning process and there aren’t any shortcuts.

This has been on my mind a lot since yesterday evening, when I made the mistake of going into a diet chat room – boy, did I soon regret it! The room should come with a health warning - “Abandon any attempt to have a light hearted chat or rational discussion, ye who enter here!”

There were a few brand new dieters there requesting advice, and the conversation soon turned to weighing – how often do you do it?  Some folks said “”Never” – that bitter experience had taught them to give scales a wide berth and use other gauges to monitor their progress.  At the other end of the spectrum I said I weighed daily, faithfully recording the ups as well as the downs but only really paying attention to the moving average and not allowing a stalled or misbehaving number to ruin my day. Others (mainly the WW crew) were evangelical about weighing only once a week, and one lady – a WW leader in Florida - started to get really strident, stating as a “fact” that weighing daily was psychologically damaging and caused people to lose heart and give up, whereas weekly weigh-ins (at WW of course) were the only possible “guarantee of success”.

I said that surely it depended on the individual – personally I used to find it much more disheartening to step on the scales for the ceremonial once-a-week weigh and find I’d gained or stayed the same after 7 days of effort. It would feel like the end of the world, whereas in reality it may simply have been a ‘blip’ in the middle of a whole run of lower weights. “So,” I said, “psychologically I’m better to weigh daily and learn that my body fluctuates naturally, and that ups are as inevitable as downs and nothing to get wound up about.”

The response from the WW leader?  “That’s just stupid!”

“Oh,” I said – “why stupid if it works for me?“

“Well it WON’T work for you in the long run,” she said. “WW have been in the weight loss business for a long time and they know what works and what doesn’t, and weighing daily NEVER works!”

I retorted that I’d been a WW member in the past and it hadn’t worked for me, and that I’d seen plenty of dysfunctional behaviour at those meetings. Before every meeting I’d seen women removing their watches, earrings, wedding rings etc., squeezing out every last drop of pee (well, I didn’t witness that bit, obviously, but you know what I mean), heard them saying they couldn’t wait to weigh so that they could finally eat and drink something (and the weigh –in was at 5pm!). Often I’d hear women saying that they regularly had a food binge on weigh-in night because they had a whole week to get back on track, or heard them apologise to the leader for skipping last week’s meeting, but they’d been ‘scared’ to step on the scales after a bad week. Wasn’t that dysfunctional, psychologically damaging behaviour?

The WW leader became increasingly aggressive, saying that “people like me” were “dangerous”, and should “stop misinforming people”. I’ll spare you the rest of the conversation, but basically she tried to browbeat me and everyone else in the room into accepting her version of the “facts”, even if they didn’t dovetail with our own experience. Apparently it’s a “fact” that ‘independent’ diets don’t work, it’s a “fact” that public weighing (and fee-paying) is the only thing that keeps you accountable, its a “fact” that “lifetime membership” stops you backsliding.

What a load of unsubstantiated fucking propaganda!

Now, to set out my stall so there’s no misunderstanding, I can sincerely say that I’ve nothing against WW, or any other dieting organisation – I think they provide a valuable (if expensive) service. I’ve been a WW member 3 times in the past and had some success with their methods but I never made it to the finishing line (for which I blame my own shortcomings, not theirs). Their methodology and structure works for some people, and if folks need the support and don’t mind parting with their cash that’s their prerogative.

What I don’t like are their fucking thought-police advocates, who try to coerce everyone into accepting their version of the ‘truth’, and try to shoehorn everyone into the same uniform one-size-fits-all pigeonhole. It’s arrogant, insulting, and irresponsible. I don’t blame WW per se – these people aren’t official spokespersons and they probably peddle a bastardized version of the WW message – but I wish they’d choose their leaders better!

What these browbeaters don’t acknowledge is that we’re all unique individuals – different ages, sexes, sizes, races, histories, goals, metabolisms, psychologies, motivations, desires, hang-ups…the ONLY thing we have in common is that we’re all trying to lose weight.  Why does it follow, therefore, that there’s only one successful methodology? It’s a form of dictatorial dieting-by-numbers, and while it’ll work for some, it’ll fail for others.

I’m learning to embrace my uniqueness and individuality and to be proud of it! So what if I’m different - who the hell wants to be ‘ordinary’ – or an unquestioning sheep - anyway? I’m an experiment of one, and I’ll learn over time and through trial and error what does and doesn’t work for me. I’ll take as much advice as you all care to offer, and all your tips and success strategies too, but when push comes to shove, it’s my life and my body, and no-one’s going to force me to do it their way.

I’ve been doing a lot of cycling lately, because – gasp – I actually enjoy it! I like the fact that I can just don the shorts-of-shame, hop on my trusty steed, and cover around 15 miles of beautiful English countryside in a little over an hour. I can cover so much distance, and with a following wind it’s almost like flying – I feel more free and vibrant and alive on a bike than at any other time. Last night I was out for an hour and because I was whizzing along on the bridleways hardly making a sound I saw hares, rabbits, foxes, otters, a few deer, a couple of herons and a man with a huge penis peeing up a tree. (Yes, I looked. He was embarrassed. Serves him right. Heh, heh.).  I felt at one with nature, and nearly stopped to hug a tree (but didn’t in case the tree-pisser had got there first) – no other sport makes me feel so damn good about myself and life in general.

But as with all good things, there’s a drawback. Despite my women’s-specific gel-filled anatomical saddle with pressure-relieving cutaways and my state-of-the-art 10 panel cool wicking cycling shorts, I’m getting so bloody saddlesore it’s beyond a joke. Jeeze, we’re talking actual bruising here of my – ahem – tender bits, and I’m walking around so bandy legged from the pain that I’m beginning to resemble a freshly deflowered virgin at a sexaholics convention.

I was expecting to have hardened up by now and become all leathery and tough down below (ahem again – sorry K!), but the more miles I rack up, the sorer I seem to get. Its torture, I tell you, torture! Having read about Carrie’s nipple woes and her success with lettuce, I was tempted to see if that would provide me with any relief – or if lettuce didn’t work, then cucumber slices, cold teabags, pro-biotic yoghurt, chilled jelly (jell-o to you American readers) or all the other things that old wives advise you to put on eyelids and other puffy or inflamed parts of the female anatomy. Sadly, though, my shorts are way too tight to allow the insertion of anything other my big fat arse, and I also couldn’t really work up any enthusiasm for squelching along with a crotchful of yoghurt, jelly, tea-leaves or cucumber pulp – my shorts already make me look as if I’m wearing a filled nappy, without feeling like I’m wearing one too!

Fifteen years ago I used to cycle to work and back every day on a rattling old bone-shaker with no chamois shorts liner, and I didn’t have half as much trouble as I’m having at the moment, so I’m wondering whether it’s my excess weight pressing down on my pubic bone that’s causing all the problems. If so, there’s light at the end of the tunnel – in a year’s time I’ll be at goal, and maybe I’ll be able to have sex again. Whatever the reason, I’m not going to be beaten, and I WILL toughen up…but in the meantime sex is well and truly off the agenda, and I’m reduced to sitting on bags of frozen peas after every ride until I get the hang of this damn bloody bike riding business.

Who wants to be a statistic? Not me, that’s for sure.

I don’t know who it was that said that there are “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”, but he had a point. I’m an accountant and I work with statistics on a daily basis, and I know from experience that I can manipulate them to support just about any argument that I want to make. So I take most statistics with a very large grain of salt.

So a statistic that I keep reading – that around 95% of dieters regain all their lost weight – only scares me a little bit. I tell myself that the statistic is probably exaggerated, or manipulated in some way to satisfy the fat-hating prejudices of the government and the diet industry. I tell myself that it’s all part of a wider conspiracy to make fat people hate themselves more than they do already.

It scares me a bit despite myself, though, because I know that my previous practise attempts have contributed in some way towards generating that statistic, as have the efforts of my friends, family and acquaintances. Put bluntly, I’ve never met (in real life) a person who has lost a substantial amount of weight (50+ pounds) and managed to keep it off successfully for more than a year.

With a sort of sad inevitability, all those Duracell-Bunny-iron-will-powered-dieting-and-exercise-evangelists fall by the wayside, and gradually lose all the good habits that they’ve worked so hard to instil in themselves.

Why, why, why? Why is maintenance so bloody difficult?

It must be hard, because so many people fail at it – sometimes countless times. People who are wildly successful in all their endeavours – academically, romantically, professionally, personally (even ‘dietingly’) can’t seem to get a handle on this maintenance malarkey. And unless I learn and understand the pitfalls, there’s no reason to assume that I’ll be one of the minority that gets it right – why should I be one of the charmed 5% this time,  when bitter experience tells me that I’ve always been one of the regaining 95%?

There’s something to be said for a slow weight loss – it gives you more time to prepare yourself for maintenance. I reckon I have around a year to learn the theory on how to do this right, before I’m called upon to put it into practise. I’ve got to get myself as mentally prepared as possible, to give myself the best fighting chance. This time I’ve got to do things differently.

From what I’ve read so far, we former fatties can’t just think it’s over when the fat lady’s sung her last song. For us, the hard part is just beginning when we get to goal. Maybe it’s because we’ve fucked up our metabolisms or maybe it’s just genetic predisposition, but for us it’s never going to be a walk in the park.

Unless I acknowledge that upfront, and work through the accompanying resentment, I don’t think I’ll be able to move forward and make a proper success of this.

Helping to disperse the resentment is the realisation that it’s not necessarily a walk in the park for all those ‘naturally slim’ people either. I think they have to work at it just as hard, but they do it with less fuss and bother, and just knuckle down and get on with it. It’s taken me 40 years to realise that!

When I’m not dieting I’m totally unobservant about my body’s requirements. I allow myself whatever I feel like eating, with no regard for whether it’s what my body actually needs nutritionally, and with no reference to what I ate yesterday or this morning, or half an hour ago, or what I’ll be having for dinner. It’s almost as if each eating episode is an isolated incident, unconnected from those episodes before and after.

At suppertime I might have half a dozen Hobnobs, without taking account of the fact that I had chiliburger and fries for dinner. Similarly, I chose the burger and fries rather than the salad because I’ve effectively forgotten about the Snickers bar that I had mid-afternoon. And I have the Snickers bar because I’ve forgotten that I had a slice of pizza for lunch and a doughnut mid morning because it was a colleague’s birthday. And I eat the doughnut without batting an eyelid at the two slices of buttered toast and marmite that I had for breakfast.

Tell me again why I got to be 100lbs overweight, because I keep forgetting. Heh heh.

Have you ever known a ‘naturally slim’ person eat that unrestrainedly? In my experience, thin people keep a running tally in their heads, and you can better bloody believe that they’ll remember the doughnut when they’re reaching for the Snickers bar, and they’ll put the bar back in on the shelf. Haven’t you ever noticed that?

They seem to view their eating episodes as part of a chain, with each one linked to the half dozen adjacent episodes. If they overeat at one meal they adjust accordingly at the next – or they go to the gym for an hour to burn off the excess. They don’t act as if they have short-term memory loss, and can’t remember what they just ate – they look at the bigger picture.

Do non-dieting fatties do that? Hmmm…I don’t think so. Or at least this non-dieting fatty didn’t! I’d compare my double chins with Miss Skinny’s chiselled jaw line and think “It’s not fair! It comes naturally to her, but I gain weight just by looking at a bar of chocolate!”

And of course I failed to register that I did a hell of a lot more than simply look at chocolate, whereas she ate Ryvita and cottage cheese every day for lunch and worked out like a dervish 6 days a week.

Hmmm, yeah, the metabolism gods had certainly smiled on her and been really unfair on poor little ol’ me, hadn’t they?

Taking exercise as another example, it’s something that a lot of non-dieting fatties turn a blind eye to, and avoid religiously. When I’m in non-dieting mode, months and months can pass with me doing nothing more energetic than pressing the TV remote or reaching on tiptoes for the biscuit tin.  On a really abstract, non-engaged  level I observe my shortening breath, my widening girth, my increasing heart-burn, my creaking knees – but I never put two and two together and think – ‘Hey, maybe I should get some exercise!’

Hell, no! That would be far too much like hard work – and for a Triple I personality such as mine (Idle, Indolent, Inert) it’s something to be avoided at all costs.

I think so-called naturally slim people are never that unobservant and disengaged from their own bodies. They pay attention, and they listen to what their bodies need. They move, they exercise, they’re active, they never sit still, they’re always on the go – driving us indolent couch-potatoes crazy with their refusal to sit still for a goddamn minute!

To be a successful maintainer, I’ve got to be more like them! Before I get to goal I’ve got to have transformed my personality from a triple I to a triple A (Active, Aware, Accountable), because I reckon it’s the key to being a successful maintainer.

Damn, that’s going to be sooooo hard. Not impossible, but pretty bloody difficult.

And it’s going to be more difficult because before I even get there I’m already resenting the effort that it will require. I want this weight maintenance thing to be effortless and automatic – so that I can set the autopilot and live like a healthy person without having to give it too much thought. I don’t want to be forever weighing and measuring portion sizes, dragging my lazy arse off the couch and into the gym, and depriving myself of all of life’s eating goodies. I want to be able to forget about all that!  I want it all to come naturally to me, without any thought or effort on my part!

In other words, I want to carry on living like a fat person, while looking like a thin person!

Yes, siree, that’s my holy grail.

So you see the mountain I’ve got to climb? I’ve got to transform my entire attitude and outlook before I get to goal to give me a decent shot at staying there, with my body conspiring to derail me the whole time. It’s as if I’m one of those foam bendy dolls, and through dieting I’m forcing myself into a new and unaccustomed shape, but my body can’t wait until I take my eye off the ball and it can rebound back into its natural attitude. It wants to be lazy and indolent. It wants to gain weight, because that’s what it’s used to doing!  And I’ve just got to ignore its bitching and whining and force it into submission, because that’s the price of admission into Long Term Maintenance Land.

K has lost 20lbs since the beginning of May, which is over 10% of his starting body weight. For a first time dieter he’s done exceptionally well, and I’m so bloody proud of him! It’s not so easy for him to stick to a healthy regime as it is for me, because he doesn’t really like many fruits or veggies, he detests fish, and he’s not really keen on whole grains or low-fat dairy produce – put simply, he’s a typical English bloke, and prefers white bread, meat and potatoes, cheese, chips and everything else that’s bad for him. BUT, despite these disadvantages (yes, being a man is a disadvantage. Heh), he’s dredged up some self-discipline and self-motivation, and hasn’t once needed any nagging or cajoling from me. Which is, frankly, not typical male behaviour, in my experience.

This is the first time I’ve ever had a dieting buddy, and it’s certainly easier sticking to a healthy diet when someone else is doing it alongside me. It makes a hell of a difference. I’m extremely fortunate because K doesn’t work, and consequently I come home from work every evening to a prepared meal – it’s like being royalty and having my own personal chef. Now I understand why it’s easier for the Oprahs of this world to get themselves into shape – half the bloody hard work is already done for them. If K would only transform himself into a personal trainer too I’d be set for life. Heh.

Talking of personal trainers, one of my friends started a weight loss programme at the start of the summer, and she hired herself a personal trainer, who comes along to her house every day at 4.30am and forces her (kicking and screaming) into some form of cardio activity. Some days it’s running, some days it’s cycling, some days it’s circuits etc. I thought it sounded like some form of cripplingly expensive medieval torture, and I was wondering why she put up with it every day and even paid for the privilege ….until my friend and I ran into him last night when we went swimming, and it suddenly (for a brief while at least) all became clear to me.

This man makes Brad Pitt look like a bulldog chewing a wasp. He has the face and body of an Adonis – all long lean tanned legs, six pack abs, beautiful strong arms and shoulders, nice firm bum….he’s truly gorgeous. He was wearing the ittiest-bittiest pair of Speedo nut-hugger swimming trunks, and every eye in the swimming pool was trained on him – he was such a head-turner. By all accounts he’s a horrendous flirt with a mammoth ego, who loves himself to bits – but hell, if I had the female equivalent body I’d want to walk around naked at every opportunity just so I could admire myself, so I can hardly blame him for being proud of his physique.

However, before we hit the pool, we went to the gym’s juice bar for a pre-swim smoothie. He sat in the bar in just his trunks (oh puhleeze) and displayed the most gargantuan ego, talking about himself incessantly, belittling and humiliating his girlfriend at every opportunity, making loud, viciously vindictive comments about the looks and appearance of everyone else in the bar and pool, spouting one tedious, trite, sour-natured opinion after the other…his nature was truly ugly and completely negated the impact of his physical attractiveness. My friend and his girlfriend hung on doe-eyed to his every word, but as far as I was concerned having the souls of my feet flogged with a knotted rope would have been a more pleasant way of passing the time.

I couldn’t wait to get away from him in the end, and I was soon back to wondering why my friend feels it’s life-enhancing to be dragged out of bed every morning by this guy – having to put up with his insufferable egotism every morning would sour my whole day.

Changing the subject a little, I was surprised that instead of her usual bikini (she has a great body) my friend was wearing a sort of lycra bodysuit to swim in, which covered her completely from her neck to just above the knee. I thought it was a bit odd, but didn’t feel it was any of my business to comment, but when we were showering after our swim she peeled off the suit to reveal deep, angry-looking purple bruises across her stomach, thighs and buttocks. She told me that she’s been pounding her flabby bits (what flabby bits?) with a hammer to break up the subcutaneous fat (on the advice of said Adonis), because he’s told her that “ugly stubborn fat” deposits won’t break down any other way.

WTF?!?!?

I suggested that a better use for the hammer would be to pound him across his thick, ignorant, insulting skull, but sadly I don’t think she’ll be following this advice any time soon.

Later she phoned me to say that she’d relayed my views to him that his so-called fat busting methodology was crazy, dangerous, unscientific and absurd, and that I couldn’t believe folks paid good money for such preposterous, fatuous guidance. His response – “Well, a fat ugly cow like her would say that, wouldn’t she?”

So obviously rational debate isn’t one of his strong suits, either, and all I can do is try to de-brainwash the pheromone-fried synapses of my friend, before he uses her as a guinea-pig for more of his half-cocked, half-baked, wholly-dangerous weight-loss theories.

Today is the start of my second 6 months of trying to live a healthier lifestyle, so I thought it was time to sit back a little and reflect on what I've learned and achieved in the past 6 months.

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1. I've learned that complete cyber-strangers (many on the other side of the world) constitute a wonderful, wise, witty and welcoming peer support network. Thanks everyone that's ever written a blog, commented here or posted on any of the message boards I frequent - you're wonderful and tremendous and I owe you all BIG TIME! I couldn't have got this far without you.

2. I've learnt that it's possible to lose 42lbs in 26 weeks without feeling hungry, deprived or miserable, and that its also possible to get some honest-to-God enjoyment from the process. Man, weight-loss gives me such a BUZZ!

3. I've (finally) learned not to get upset with the number on the scale  - it doesn't any longer have the power to ruin my whole day. 180-odd days of daily weigh-ins have proved to me once and for all that scales are capricious, unpredictable, illogical things, and can only give me at most a flavour of how I'm doing. If I want to taste the whole dish I have to supplement the scales with many, many other side-dish factors.

4. I've finally developed a menstual cycle at the grand old age of forty! Losing these 3 stones seems to have gone some way towards regulating my poly-cystic ovaries, and I've started having proper monthly periods of a few days' duration, rather than my previous pattern of having the menstrual equivalent of a biblical flood after months and months of drought. Yay me - and sorry, Tampax, but your profits are set to drop like a stone! Heh heh.

5. I've learned that going cold turkey on crap (by which I mean chocolate and fried food and sugary sweet stuff and pastry and cakes and biscuits and butter) really does counteract carb cravings. If you really and truly do cut it all out of your diet completely and are totally disciplined for a week or so, all subsequent weeks are plain sailing (or at least that's how it's been for me). It's as if the week of torment breaks the addiction, and the cravings just disappear and stay gone.  And as a former chocoholic, who has thus far gone 26 weeks without so much as a sniff of the stuff, that's saying a hell of a lot!

6. Conversely I've found that getting into a regular exercise routine ISN'T plain sailing, and that old habits of inertia and sloth are hugely difficult to break. All it takes is one day off from exercise, and suddenly I find myself thinking of a 100 reasons why I should take tomorrow and the next day (make that 'forever') off too. Sigh. I don't think I'll ever be one of life's natural sporty athletic types, and this is something that I'm really going to have to work at.

7. I've learned that losing 42lbs doesn't make saggy boobs perky or turn a flabby belly into a six-pack. My boobs are beginning to look like spaniel's ears, and my belly like a deflated beach ball. Man, I am so drop dead gorgeous at the moment! Heh.

8. I've learned that however much weight you lose, there is always someone skinnier. (Actually, just about everyone's skinnier than me still, but it IS something I've observed, sort of in advance of myself and my losing curve.) Hence I've learned that comparisons are odious, and that the only person worth measuring myself against is the former me.

9. I've learned that taking incessantly about my weight and diets and food nutrition and body image and clothes sizes and tape measures and scale readings and BMIs and phantom hip-bones and metabolic rates is really bloody tedious and boring for anyone who isn't on a similar evangelical mission to lose half their body weight. Heh. [Sorry, K, are your eardrums still bleeding? Good job you love me, hey?  ]

10. I've learned that - fat or thin - nothing about ME changes fundamentally. So if I didn't like myself fat, I won't like myself thin either. Thankfully I was always a bit up my own arse, so I think I'm going to like the thin me just fine! Heh, heh, heh.

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That's it - I think ten things are enough to be going on with for the first six months.....roll on the next six months and the next 42 lbs!!

I’ve not been updating this blog quite so regularly lately, mainly because I feel increasingly unconcerned about the whole weight loss business.

I haven't lost interest in getting healthy and in losing weight – I’m still losing a pretty steady 1.5lbs per week. It’s just that I’m no longer focusing on the process, and consequently it doesn’t seem remotely important to discuss it.

To illustrate this a bit better, I'm (amongst other things) a woman; a girlfriend/partner; a daughter; one of 6 siblings; a Geminian; a red head; a political left-winger; a cycling enthusiast; a guitar player; a Boss fan; a terrible singer; a chartered accountant; a boss; a subordinate; an avid reader; a dog owner; a cheese-hater; a car driver; a cottage owner; a roller-coaster lover.

All of those things are a little bit of what I am, but none of them define me, and I rarely if ever think about them consciously. I don’t leap out of bed each day thinking ‘I’m a red-headed female accountant born in Gemini with a Leo rising sign…’ for instance. I’m aware of these things on some level, I guess, but they rarely if ever intrude into my daily consciousness.

It’s the same with weight.

When I started back in March, I thought of little else BUT my weight loss programme. I could hardly concentrate on anything else, because I was feverishly calculating how soon I’d get to goal, how much exercise I needed to be doing, what my BMI and basal metabolic rate were, how many calories I should allow myself, how many inches I needed to lose.

Jeeze, I was like a woman possessed.

Then the novelty wore off, and I realised that this journey was the equivalent of emigration, not a two week hop to the Greek islands. I suddenly realised one day that it was days, if not weeks, since I'd really sat down and thought of what I was doing as dieting. I was eating healthily almost on auto-pilot, and not thinking about diet, or calories, or rules or regulations at all. I was just eating - healthily - without any self-consciousness or design or concentration. I was just doing it.

That was a bit of an epiphany for me. On my previous 'practise attempts' I'd been obsessed from the start - right up to the moment when I fell spectacularly off the wagon.

The intensity and obsessiveness hadn't yielded long-term success - probably because that sort of intensity simply isn't sustainable in the long term.

This time I feel that something has finally clicked for me. It's all so normal and ordinary. I don't lie in bed every night feeling for hip-bones, or scrutinise myself in the mirror looking for cheekbones or evidence that the number of my chins is decreasing. All of those things will come in their own sweet time, and they won't change my life in any fundamental or important way when they do. Sure, it'll be nice to find I have a neck and collar-bones, but in the grand scheme of things it's pretty small fry.

By the same token, I haven't been overwhelmed by the need to shop for new clothes, either, even though K's started calling me Coco-the-Clown because my existing clothes are so baggy. When I really need new clothes I'll go and buy some, but for the time being it's nice having plenty of room in the ones I've already got. I never was particularly vain or concerned about my appearance, and it's nice to see that that hasn't really changed - I'd hate to become one of those shallow clothes-horses that I've always taken the piss out of previously - that would be a step too far in the hypocrisy stakes!

I'm just taking the gradual alterations in my shape in my stride, taking a second to feel good about the positive changes and then moving on to think of other things. I think that's pretty healthy - don't you?

For the first time ever during a weight-loss phase I'm not thinking about the process at all, and barely registering the results either - and guess what - it's strangely liberating!

Thank you so much for your helpful comments re yesterday's post - I am trying to do the right thing by my friend, without falling into the trap of trying to live her life for her or try to make her live hers the way I'm living mine (does that make sense?).

Sharing my concerns here helps me to clarify the issues in my mind and gives me a clearer way forward. I think the problem is too deeply entrenched for any quick solution, but I knew you folks would come up with some sensitive and helpful suggestions, and your thoughts and comments are very much appreciated.

**********

Two (skinny) women in the past 24 hours have warned me not to get too thin, and to ease off on the weight loss.

Man, this gets me so mad!

My weight loss has been steady, but not especially or dangerously rapid. It averages out at a fraction over 1.5lbs per week, and has been achieved though sensible eating and moderate exercising.

I’ve dropped from a UK size 22/24 to a (tight) size 18, and my BMI is still 36.2. Not exactly teetering on the brink of anorexia. I need to lose another 33.5lbs before I’m even officially ‘overweight’ instead of obese, and I have to lose a further 26lbs after that to reach a BMI of 25.

Jeeze, I’m not even 40% of the way through this yet, and folks are already telling me to quit before I make myself ill. What the hell is wrong with these people?

Realistically I don’t expect to be at goal much before this time next year. I’m shooting for 12 September ’06 as my reaching-goal date as that’ll be the 18 month anniversary of me embarking on this journey, but if I overshoot it that’ll be fine – I’ll get there eventually, I hope.

But if these recent comments are anything to go by, I’ll spend the next 12 months justifying why I need to carry on losing, and defending my decision not to settle for still being obese. That is going to be such a drag!

For one thing, one of the factors behind my obesity was complacency – the belief that I ‘wasn’t that bad’. How I could have decided that - when I was 5 foot tall and weighed 230lbs - beggars belief, but believe it I did.

So I’m concerned that if enough people tell me I’m getting too thin, that I’ll start to believe them, and slacken off. Dieting is hard enough when you’re fuelled by a deep realisation that something drastic needs to be done – but if I start to believe that the problem is solved, then keeping on the straight and narrow will be doubly difficult.

I don’t know if people are trying to be kind when they try to persuade folks like me that we’ve done as much as we need to. Maybe they are, or maybe they have a less altruistic ulterior motive. It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is not to let the siren voices lure me from the right path, because if I get lost it’s a nightmare to get back on track.

This has unsettled me a bit, because I’ve never been slim – not for one day in my entire life – and so I have no inner yardstick against which to compare myself. At the moment I feel quite skinny, but only in comparison to how I felt at 230lbs. If I could remember myself at 140lbs I’d probably be feeling really fat – but the last time I weighted 140lbs I was probably still in junior school.

So yes, I’m feeling quite skinny, though all objective observers would still consider me to be significantly overweight. It’s a dangerous dichotomy. If enough of those supposedly objective observers tell me that my perception of skinniness is correct, it would be the easiest thing in the world to believe them, and to allow complacency to creep in.

I can’t afford to be complacent. Not any more. I’m forty years old – there are only so many years that you can dodge the diabetes bullet, not to mention the cardiac arrest, musculo-skeletal damage and stroke bullets. I can’t afford to fall by the wayside again.

So I wish these people would do me a favour and stop tempting me to quit!