The Fatslayer Chronicles

Today's Fatslaying Workout 75 minute bike (861 cals burned); weights planned for later.

Today's Weight 200.5lbs

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YAY - HARRY POTTER DAY!!!!

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Life has been interfering with my weight loss efforts, and I'm beginning to feel uncomfortably wobbly and unbalanced - at the moment it feels as if I'm walking a tightrope, and it wouldn't take much of a strong wind to blow me off the wire and send me tumbling back into the fat abyss.

Contrary to what skinny folks think, turning your whole life around and abandoning a lifetime of bad habits isn't a walk in the park. It takes effort, concentration, determination, money and time - lots and lots of precious time.

Time to write out healthy grocery lists and shop for fresh fruit and veggies on an almost daily basis. Time to prepare and cook varied and nutritious meals (luckily K does this for the both of us!) Time to log food and exercise and analyse the patterns that start to emerge. Time to exercise. Time to write blog entries to keep myself accountable. Time to hit the message boards at 3 Fat Chicks for support and inspiration.

All of that is fine and dandy when the rest of my life is going swimmingly, but when other pressures start to build up, ringfencing the time I need to take care of myself becomes almost impossible. Thats when the cracks start to appear.

For the past month I've been working a minimum of 65 hours a week, and those 65 hours have been incredibly stressful and pressured. I've been dealing with intransigent subordinates, capricious bosses, impossibly arrogant consultants, and an avalanche of work that needs to be done by almost impossibly tight deadlines.

And every day it becomes harder and harder to eat healthily when I'm at work, and then come home and exercise in the evenings. It just seems like too much hard bloody work on top of everything else that's demanding my energy and attention.

I'm incredibly lucky because K doesn't work, and most evenings I come home and he's already prepared dinner. All I have to do is sit down at the table and eat it - and he won't even let me do the washing up afterwards, because he'd rather I concentrated on finishing the work I've bought home with me from the office. The man is a living saint, and I simply don't deserve him!

God only knows what kind of state I'd be in if (like most women, probably) I had to come home and be the happy homemaker on top of everything else. I know instead of sitting down to beautiful salad and protein combos, I'd be eating toast or crackers or something equally fast and trashy. I know, because it's what I've always done in the past when I'm stressed and busy.

So believe me when I say I'm getting seriously worried that I'm heading for a meltdown. I can't afford to be complacent and think that this time it won't happen, because it's happened to me so many times in the past.

Back in 1994 when  - after 6 solid months of dieting and exercising - I was the skinniest and fittest I've ever been in my adult life, I had a total dieting meltdown when K became ill. The stress of his illness and repeated hospitalisations caused a fall from grace so total and complete that I've never, to this day, made up the lost ground.

I've had some half-hearted attempts to get back in shape in the intervening decade, but something has always come along to derail my efforts - the constant worry about K's health, the self-imposed hike up the career ladder because I've got to earn enough for two, the guilt that I'm getting healthy when K's health is deteriorating.

All of those excuses have eventually and inevitably caused me to throw in the towel, because, frankly, it just seems too bloody hard to keep plugging away at something so self-indulgent for month after month after month, making painstakingly slow progress, and still having so far to go to after all that effort.

So yes, I admit it, I'm scared. In fact, scared just doesn't cut it. I'm absolutely bloody petrified that I'm teetering on the brink of a dieting freefall.

So far I've not slipped food-wise, but each day the motivation to get off my arse and exercise diminishes a little more. I'm lucky to get in 4 exercise sessions a week now, and yet I swore to myself solemnly that this time I'd make time to exercise every single day.

Christ, there's no bloody hope for me at all when I can't even keep such a simple promise to myself, is there?

So - at least as far as exercise is concerned - I'm starting to slip, and I'm scared I'm going to slide all the way back to the bottom. I've never - not once in my entire life - been able to stop myself in mid-slide. It's total bloody freefall, plummeting like a stone, every single time.

I just don't want that to happen to me this time, because my body just can't afford many more of these reversals. I never just quit and maintain, you see. I quit and immediately start regaining all the lost weight at an alarmingly precipitous rate.

And every time I fall, it becomes that much harder to pick myself up at the bottom of the abyss and start the long climb back towards the summit.

I'm so in awe of you ladies out there, you Dietgirls,  YoYoGurls,  Scale Hos,  Megs and all the rest of you (you know who you are, right?) who slip, fall a little bit, then somehow manage to stop, regroup, recommit and recover before you've lost all that hard won ground. I want to be like you! I want to know what it's like to stumble and get back up again, instead of stumbling, falling and staying down.

I want to grow up and be like you!

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I'm sorry this post is so whiny and negative. What was I saying yesterday about being a naturally positive and buoyant person? Maybe I should take that back. Today at least that confidence and optimism seem misplaced - I feel like I'm just gritting my teeth and hanging on for dear life at the moment!