Fats73

I’m still pinching myself. Not to feel the inches, but to feel if all of this is real.

At the end of August, seven months ago, I got fed up with all the beers and the partying and the secret eating. My bin was full of takeaway wrappers and I felt miserable.

A friend whispered to me at his birthday party: “Do you fancy joining Weightwatchers?”

I’m usually utterly sceptical of these things, but a penny dropped. I said yes without thinking.

Seizing the moment as quick as I could, I joined at the very next local meeting. I stuck to the plan like my life depended on it (which, in some ways, it did).

I lost five and a half stone and counting. It happened so quickly and comparitively easily, it doesn’t seem real. Over 10 years of weight gain gone in months.

I won’t recommend everyone goes and does Weightwatchers. You need to be ready to do something like that, to deal with the emotional sludge first, otherwise you could set yourself up for failure. And it’s important to concentrate on healthy eating for the rest of your days rather than crash diets.

I now have completely different eating habits. I still treat myself, but my body is loving all the good food I eat. It doesn’t like it when I pinch it, however, but that’s only because I never thought I’d achieve weight loss!

On my last post (number 4… you see the logic, don’t you), I said I binged on pasta and Pringles.

I felt sick all night and couldn’t get more than two hours sleep. The next day was wretched. So I ate chocolate (four bars throughout the day) to comfort myself.

The day ended with a special moment in a service at my church. We were encouraged to be thankful for those moments in our lives when we felt most alive. For me, it’s when I’m writing, DJing or socialising. These are holy moments.

And I reflected on the times when I’m comfort eating. I over-eat because it’s a defence mechanism I developed when I was bullied as a child. Eating is my ‘control zone’. It’s not really about the food; it’s just an insulation against the outside world where I have so often felt powerless in the past (through bullying, grief, issues of sexuality). Eating is my way of being powerful.

But it also numbs me to those times when I feel truly alive, when the defences are down, when I am susceptible to those extreme emotions of pain and joy.

Being unhealthy (or rather, choosing to be unhealthy through my own choices) keeps me in my comfort(-food) zone, but it also shuts me off from being truly human, totally alive and exactly who I am meant to be.

End of rant.

Strangely enough, I have eaten better today.

What a mixed couple of days.

I’m still junk fooding. I had a McDonald’s on Friday night which I didn’t enjoy. The crazy thing is, I wasn’t sure whether to get a McDs or just go shopping for ‘real food’. I flipped a coin!

Sunday (yesterday) was better. I had a takeaway again but on the way to the takeaway I also did some shopping for basics, such as bread and fruit. This is one of the first positive decisions I have made about my eating habits for some time!

This positive decision gave me some self-confidence. Today was worse and I have just binged on too much pasta and pringles. I feel overfed, headachey and ill.

Tomorrow is another day and my 5th post…