Being the Change you want to see in the world. Pfft.

GAH. I'm right in the middle of the blasted doldrums. No lovely breeze, no sailing forth, no other maritime clichés - of which I am clearly ignorant. I'm still running (bit hard on the water *da-dum-dum-tsssh* ... I should be ashamed, you're quite right) and have definitely changed, but I'm slap bang in the middle of one of those horrid slumps where you wonder what the fuck you're bothering with any of it for. 

Yes, I'm a bit lighter, I'm fitter, but when I look in the mirror I am still, for all intents and purposes, a fat lady. BIG WAH, right? But my point really is that I never noticed this shit before. The double chin was just part of my life, now it hangs about on the underside of my face, like a succulent grotesquerie of a limpet, making me see a jowly fucker who needs to put down the pies and not someone who runs almost every day and watches what she eats. My legs have completely changed and not entirely in a good way. They're more solid for sure, but you can probably see the cellulite in my thighs from Mars. Cellulite! What the fuck is that - except hard proof that there can be no benevolent God? Globular clusters of Nature's gelatinous fuckery, that's what it is. And we'll not even begin to mention the state of my stomach. GAH, I say again. This losing weight/healthier lifestyle has it perks, but there's only so much feeling better and not having headaches all the time that you can take before ... okay, so it's actually brilliant, I am definitely healthier and I generally feel pretty good about myself ... until I take a look and then I'm right back to wanting to gag the mooch in the mirror and shove her in a cupboard until she's skinny! And I hate skinny! I don't want to be skinny, I just want to be a regular size so I can shop easily for clothes and not have to invest in badly designed, overpriced tents. I want to be able to run, jump, hop, skip, whatever the feck I feel like doing whenever I feel like doing it, and not be anchored to the earth by my Lusitaniac arse. And that metaphor makes me think about torpedos up the bum, which means I have lost my way here somewhat ... 

Frustration is a right royal arse pain and I am the queen of driving myself crazy with all the "what-I-can't-dos" rather than focussing on what I can. Reality? What's that? Long term thinking? What use is that to me right at this very sulky, pessimissitc, slightly churlish minute? The thing about change, the thing that we all know, is that it's hard. But it's even harder when you're chiselling the behemoth down from 22 stone and nobody sees the 7 stone you've lost, they see the 4 or 5 more you should probably get on with losing instead of whining about it here. Including me. GAH. 

On a serious note, the changes I've made have given me a new understanding of eating disorders, which I thought were quite alien to me - until I realised I was a compulsive over-eater (midway through jamming the fifth or sixth packet of crisps into my mouth when I felt frustrated, lonely and downright low) Compulsive eating and anorexia are so easy to dismiss by anyone who's never felt the extremes that the combination of food, bad self-image, low self-esteem and their ineffable mutation can produce in the mind. And I mean extremes. None of your Special K/Lorraine Kelly-esque "three pounds off for summer" shitdickery. I'm talking about the "if I eat that/don't eat that, everything will be all right" psychoses that can turn your world into a waking nightmare of control or lack thereof, a battle that is exhausting and might eventually kill you.

I started losing weight and consciously becoming more healthy because I realised I was so far out of control that if I didn't do something about it, I was going to die. Simple as. So I took command of my ship, made a few decisions, and it felt good (that makes it sound so easy. It wasn't) But dealing with the self-image problem is the hardest part of it. My self-esteem has never been the best and now I am finding fault with myself over things that I don't, if I'm objective, actually have much more control over than I'm already exerting - not unless I want to slip into the crazy, and dangerous, world of yo-yo dieting. But this doesn't stop me finding fault and letting it affect what is a very delicate rebuilding of my "self". 

I guess my real point is that losing weight is hard fucking work. At times it can be traumatic, it can be confusing, then elating, and then it can kick you to the floor. Hard. It can be the best idea you ever had and it can be the very worst. I feel like not much has changed, but it has - no matter what I might say, I can see that. It's just ... tiring. Not all the time, sometimes it's invigorating, often it’s rewarding. But quite a lot of the time I get the urge to fall face first into a giant chocolate cake slathered with chocolate frosting and not come up for air. To fall asleep in all that sugary evil. Because I'm tired. I’m right in the middle of the doldrums and I need the breeze to lift my sails. 

Beans for lunch then ...