The Fatslayer Chronicles

Can the person who stole my mojo please return it, because I need it back immediately! I’m reduced to eating chocolate for breakfast at the moment, so have a heart and send it back to me, OK? I’m becoming a desperate woman…

Man, it’s depressing to be the only one who’s not back on track yet. Every other blogger seems to be remotivated and reinvigorated after the festive break, but I’m still floundering and failing miserably. I’m not doing horrendously badly, but I’m nowhere near back to my conscientious best. Despite numerous pep-talks to myself I still haven’t got my exercise groove back, and, ominously, the eating is also beginning to go off the rails.

But I bet you guessed that by the chocolate for breakfast comment, huh? Hmmm, I thought that might be a bit of a giveaway.

I guess I should have listened better to the Christmas midnight mass sermon, which was all about pride and arrogance coming before a fall. Well, I guess I’m living proof of that at the moment.

From March to December ’05 I was so damn stoked with myself! I prided myself on having iron discipline, and taking this diet malarkey in my stride. Weak-willed? Not me! Finding it tough going? Hah, it’s a breeze. Having feelings of blind panic? Of course not…

So it’s humbling to see that I’m hopelessly fallible after all.

Humbling and horrible! I hate feeling like such a failure.

I was seeking perfection - a flawlessly orchestrated shedding of the blubber, with a spotless track record of saying no to temptation and becoming an uber-athlete into the bargain - and now look at me! It hurts to admit how far I’ve fallen short of those high-falutin ideals.

A perfect ten? Hell, I’d settle for a less than perfect seven or eight at the moment, ‘cos if I was scoring my recent performance, I wouldn’t give myself anything more than a mediocre five.

And I’ll tell ya, when you want a ten, a five just doesn’t cut it.

I have the kind of personality that hates to show weakness or to admit failure. In many ways, that’s been a positive force in my life, driving me to higher achievements. But the downside is that I’m always wound up really tight, and I don’t cut myself much slack when things start to unravel.

Which it feels like they are at the moment, all those neatly knotted ends unravelling inexorably into a big, woolly mess.

The rational part of my brain tells me that I’m still doing OK – I’m keeping my calories below 1800 a day, and almost everything I’m eating is healthy and nutritious. But the irrational, perfectionist, wound-tight part tells me that that’s not good enough.

Nothing but perfection will suffice.

If I can’t be perfect, why bother at all?

Jeeze, those are nine DANGEROUS little words.

When everything was going swimmingly back in the summer and autumn, I kept marvelling at how and why I’d gotten so big in the first place. I wondered why, if I could achieve such discipline and control now, I’d been incapable of being disciplined and controlled then.

It was a question without an answer, because I just couldn’t understand it.

Since then, I’ve done a bit of navel gazing and realised that I tend towards extremes of behaviour – I either address an issue head on and make a full-out effort to tackle it, or I wipe it off my radar screen completely and don’t bother to tackle it at all.

My dieting history tells the tale – it’s a master-class in doing all or nothing. A classic feast and famine cycle (almost literally). Initially there’s a total refusal to acknowledge that I have a weight problem at all. This is followed by an extended (but ultimately doomed) period of ultra-controlled, take-no-prisoners dieting/exercise. My resolution eventually falters, precipitating a landslide fall from grace into another period of total denial (accompanied by a refusal to follow even rudimentary healthy-living guidance). No half-measures for me, because if I can’t diet perfectly, why bother dieting at all, right?

WRONG.

It’s time to break that cycle.

It’s about time I learned the lesson that I don’t need to be perfect to get to goal. The approach doesn’t have to be flawless – it can be as bumpy as hell as long as I get there in the end. I don’t have to stride towards the finish line like a colossus, leaping skyscrapers in a single bound. Perfection isn’t important, but persistence is.

I need to get it through my thick head that a slip, trip or fall isn’t the end of the world. Falling short of perfection isn’t a good enough reason to throw in the towel completely. Imperfection doesn’t matter. If I stop trying so damn hard to do this perfectly, maybe I’ll stand a better chance of actually succeeding, even if I have to limp and stumble every step of the way.

Hell, even baby steps are better than no steps at all.