The Fatslayer Chronicles

Today is the start of my second 6 months of trying to live a healthier lifestyle, so I thought it was time to sit back a little and reflect on what I've learned and achieved in the past 6 months.

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1. I've learned that complete cyber-strangers (many on the other side of the world) constitute a wonderful, wise, witty and welcoming peer support network. Thanks everyone that's ever written a blog, commented here or posted on any of the message boards I frequent - you're wonderful and tremendous and I owe you all BIG TIME! I couldn't have got this far without you.

2. I've learnt that it's possible to lose 42lbs in 26 weeks without feeling hungry, deprived or miserable, and that its also possible to get some honest-to-God enjoyment from the process. Man, weight-loss gives me such a BUZZ!

3. I've (finally) learned not to get upset with the number on the scale  - it doesn't any longer have the power to ruin my whole day. 180-odd days of daily weigh-ins have proved to me once and for all that scales are capricious, unpredictable, illogical things, and can only give me at most a flavour of how I'm doing. If I want to taste the whole dish I have to supplement the scales with many, many other side-dish factors.

4. I've finally developed a menstual cycle at the grand old age of forty! Losing these 3 stones seems to have gone some way towards regulating my poly-cystic ovaries, and I've started having proper monthly periods of a few days' duration, rather than my previous pattern of having the menstrual equivalent of a biblical flood after months and months of drought. Yay me - and sorry, Tampax, but your profits are set to drop like a stone! Heh heh.

5. I've learned that going cold turkey on crap (by which I mean chocolate and fried food and sugary sweet stuff and pastry and cakes and biscuits and butter) really does counteract carb cravings. If you really and truly do cut it all out of your diet completely and are totally disciplined for a week or so, all subsequent weeks are plain sailing (or at least that's how it's been for me). It's as if the week of torment breaks the addiction, and the cravings just disappear and stay gone.  And as a former chocoholic, who has thus far gone 26 weeks without so much as a sniff of the stuff, that's saying a hell of a lot!

6. Conversely I've found that getting into a regular exercise routine ISN'T plain sailing, and that old habits of inertia and sloth are hugely difficult to break. All it takes is one day off from exercise, and suddenly I find myself thinking of a 100 reasons why I should take tomorrow and the next day (make that 'forever') off too. Sigh. I don't think I'll ever be one of life's natural sporty athletic types, and this is something that I'm really going to have to work at.

7. I've learned that losing 42lbs doesn't make saggy boobs perky or turn a flabby belly into a six-pack. My boobs are beginning to look like spaniel's ears, and my belly like a deflated beach ball. Man, I am so drop dead gorgeous at the moment! Heh.

8. I've learned that however much weight you lose, there is always someone skinnier. (Actually, just about everyone's skinnier than me still, but it IS something I've observed, sort of in advance of myself and my losing curve.) Hence I've learned that comparisons are odious, and that the only person worth measuring myself against is the former me.

9. I've learned that taking incessantly about my weight and diets and food nutrition and body image and clothes sizes and tape measures and scale readings and BMIs and phantom hip-bones and metabolic rates is really bloody tedious and boring for anyone who isn't on a similar evangelical mission to lose half their body weight. Heh. [Sorry, K, are your eardrums still bleeding? Good job you love me, hey?  ]

10. I've learned that - fat or thin - nothing about ME changes fundamentally. So if I didn't like myself fat, I won't like myself thin either. Thankfully I was always a bit up my own arse, so I think I'm going to like the thin me just fine! Heh, heh, heh.

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That's it - I think ten things are enough to be going on with for the first six months.....roll on the next six months and the next 42 lbs!!