Today was Weightwatchers day! (Opens envelope. Camera sweeps over a lot of anxious-looking different weightloss options) And I lost half a pound! (Half a pound bursts into tears. All the other options, particularly those above three pounds or more, smile through gritted teeth) ...
Half a pound. Well, I suppose it's better than nothing, and it's "in the right direction", but I can't help be given pause for thought. This is what usually happens at Weighwatchers for me - bobbing around the 26-27 stone mark, without any real downward descent to the hideously magical "20 Stone, Just Like I Was in 2004" landmark. I didn't take my water tablets this morning before going, so I'm trying to justify this to myself as being a bit of fluid retention, but I'm not really convincing myself of that argument. I also think, well I was at "TGI Fridays" last week, maybe that added something, even though I was careful with my points ... but again, I'm not sure.
I stayed for the meeting this week, as I did last week. Hearing the other members talk about their experiences is both salient and thought-provoking. I can see myself following their routes and rules to weightloss and making significant in-roads myself. The trouble is, almost immediately my mind wanders to ridiculous images of me being able to run athletically or to stop taking my pills or to even just be one of the fitter members of my own peer group, and I have to reign in the fantasies before I start imagining "The Chariots of Fire" music and the sand and the wind in my hair. The reality of the situation is, there is a lot about my weightloss that I just don't understand. Hearing skelf-like women recount how they previous used to consume 120 points worth of food and drink regularly on a Saturday, or two packets of McCoys in a bun and a Snickers bar for their lunch every work day, it did make me wonder why they aren't a 27-stone man with gout, diabetes and a full beard too. Maybe they didn't spent most nights for four years consuming King Nan kebabs and full-fat Coke, admittedly - but the disparity between what one person eats and another, and the resultant weigh gain, is something which bugs. And the sentence "it's my metabolism" bugs me ever more. So it's a Catch-22!
This afternoon, I have my first diabetic check for three months, with the hot-and-cold nurse that can sometimes be the tersest human being in Scotland (which is against some fair competition, believe me). But that is the reality of the my situation: I need to get thinner, or my ambitions (being a writer, buying a villa in Tuscany, and still being around for the next return of Halley's Comet) will crumble to dust (along with me).
I need to find some way of turning these idle, seemingly-unachievable dreams of being fit and healthy into active, achievable goals.
D'yer wanna be a spaceman?
