Fat Blues
Today's Weight 204.5lbs
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I realised at the weekend just how far I am from being fit and healthy, and having a healthy attitude to food. If a journey of a thousand miles is supposed to start with a single step, I feel as if I’ve been walking backwards for the past 15 weeks. Christ, if I’m this bad now, what the hell was I like back in March? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
We went to a real ale and blues festival in Sussex, which essentially meant that we stood around in a grassy field just outside Chichester for 14 hours straight, drinking, eating and listening to a succession of blues bands.
Though I like to kid myself that I’m hip and cool and that I love that sort of thing, the unvarnished truth is that I’m simply carrying far too much excess poundage to find 14 hours in an upright position a comfortable experience. By about the four hour mark my shoulders and neck were stiff, my back was aching, and the soles of my feet felt as if they’d be flogged by a length of hosepipe. Only another 10 hours to go!
I looked around me, and apart from a few old timers sitting on deckchairs, everyone else seemed to be standing without any visible discomfort at all, which made it all that much more humiliating and demoralising. I felt like The-Fat-Chick-Who-Couldn’t-Hack-It, and it was a horrible awakening. It’s bad enough being uncomfortable in common with everyone else, but when you’re the only one that seems to be struggling it somehow feels so much worse.
Anyway, I got through it by gritting my teeth (hey, wasn’t this supposed to be fun and enjoyable?), and without any apparent long term damage to my spine, which felt like it was at breaking point by the time 1am. finally arrived. Maybe if I’d been getting steadily lashed like my companions on ale and scrumpy and smuggled in Absinthe I’d have numbed the discomfort and been able to enjoy myself more, but I stuck to mineral water and Diet Coke because I wasn’t about to waste good calories on drink...not when there was so much food on offer!
Here I’ve got to face another uncomfortable truth – I still have a problematic attitude towards food, particularly in a social setting. I don’t know why that surprises and saddens me so much, but it does. I guess I thought 15 weeks of healthy living had ‘cured’ 40 years of problems. A tad optimistic, maybe?
Anyway, if my observations of naturally slim people are accurate, they seem to be almost oblivious to food until they’re hungry, then they will choose exactly what they need to satisfy their hunger, and that’s the end of the matter. That doesn’t sound so hard, does it? So why can’t I be like that?
From the minute the gates opened at 11am, I was obsessed with food. I didn’t go mad or shovel down loads of crap, but on the other hand I couldn’t simply push thoughts of food to the back of my mind and think about anything else. If it had been a food festival that may have been appropriate, but this was a music festival, for chrissake!
I was constantly aware of how long the queues were at the various food stalls, and what the folks around me were eating. There was very little decent food on offer, and I started getting more and more anxious that those stalls might run out of the good stuff and leave me with a choice of just crap, crapper or crappest.
It was as if I was on the verge of a decade-long famine of biblical proportions. My mind went into a potential-food-deprivation-tailspin, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything else until I’d got at least one healthy meal inside me.
The good news is that it was the healthy stuff that I was anxious to get my mitts on, and none of the real crap tempted me at all. There was the ubiquitous van selling chips, spine-burgers and other dodgy ‘meat’-related offerings, which I was able to walk past without feeling even the teeniest bit tempted. Ditto with the hot donut stall (especially after I caught a glimpse of the owner’s filthy fingernails). And since I don’t like pork, the hog-roast stall also offered little in the way of temptation – the British love of pork crackling never fails to turn my stomach.
Eventually I wore K down with my whining, and we ended up at a Moroccan place, and I had a flatbread piled high with homemade chilli paste, caramelised onions, coriander-infused olive oil, three small vegetarian spicy sausages, salad and green lentils. Filling and delicious, and reasonably healthy. At least the fat all seemed to be ‘good’ fat, so I just ate it and tried not to worry about it.
Even then, though, I couldn’t stop thinking about food. What would I have for supper? Would the jacket-potato van have sold out by the time K was hungry again? What if he got so engrossed in the music that he forgot to eat completely?
Honestly, I was a woman possessed. It was only at 10pm (a full 8 hours later!), with my jacket-potato-and-beans supper in hand, that I was finally able to take a deep breath and relax. Famine averted. Healthy choices achieved. All well with the world. Now if I could have just laid down for a little bit I might have actually started to enjoy myself!
