The Fatslayer Chronicles

Who wants to be a statistic? Not me, that’s for sure.

I don’t know who it was that said that there are “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”, but he had a point. I’m an accountant and I work with statistics on a daily basis, and I know from experience that I can manipulate them to support just about any argument that I want to make. So I take most statistics with a very large grain of salt.

So a statistic that I keep reading – that around 95% of dieters regain all their lost weight – only scares me a little bit. I tell myself that the statistic is probably exaggerated, or manipulated in some way to satisfy the fat-hating prejudices of the government and the diet industry. I tell myself that it’s all part of a wider conspiracy to make fat people hate themselves more than they do already.

It scares me a bit despite myself, though, because I know that my previous practise attempts have contributed in some way towards generating that statistic, as have the efforts of my friends, family and acquaintances. Put bluntly, I’ve never met (in real life) a person who has lost a substantial amount of weight (50+ pounds) and managed to keep it off successfully for more than a year.

With a sort of sad inevitability, all those Duracell-Bunny-iron-will-powered-dieting-and-exercise-evangelists fall by the wayside, and gradually lose all the good habits that they’ve worked so hard to instil in themselves.

Why, why, why? Why is maintenance so bloody difficult?

It must be hard, because so many people fail at it – sometimes countless times. People who are wildly successful in all their endeavours – academically, romantically, professionally, personally (even ‘dietingly’) can’t seem to get a handle on this maintenance malarkey. And unless I learn and understand the pitfalls, there’s no reason to assume that I’ll be one of the minority that gets it right – why should I be one of the charmed 5% this time,  when bitter experience tells me that I’ve always been one of the regaining 95%?

There’s something to be said for a slow weight loss – it gives you more time to prepare yourself for maintenance. I reckon I have around a year to learn the theory on how to do this right, before I’m called upon to put it into practise. I’ve got to get myself as mentally prepared as possible, to give myself the best fighting chance. This time I’ve got to do things differently.

From what I’ve read so far, we former fatties can’t just think it’s over when the fat lady’s sung her last song. For us, the hard part is just beginning when we get to goal. Maybe it’s because we’ve fucked up our metabolisms or maybe it’s just genetic predisposition, but for us it’s never going to be a walk in the park.

Unless I acknowledge that upfront, and work through the accompanying resentment, I don’t think I’ll be able to move forward and make a proper success of this.

Helping to disperse the resentment is the realisation that it’s not necessarily a walk in the park for all those ‘naturally slim’ people either. I think they have to work at it just as hard, but they do it with less fuss and bother, and just knuckle down and get on with it. It’s taken me 40 years to realise that!

When I’m not dieting I’m totally unobservant about my body’s requirements. I allow myself whatever I feel like eating, with no regard for whether it’s what my body actually needs nutritionally, and with no reference to what I ate yesterday or this morning, or half an hour ago, or what I’ll be having for dinner. It’s almost as if each eating episode is an isolated incident, unconnected from those episodes before and after.

At suppertime I might have half a dozen Hobnobs, without taking account of the fact that I had chiliburger and fries for dinner. Similarly, I chose the burger and fries rather than the salad because I’ve effectively forgotten about the Snickers bar that I had mid-afternoon. And I have the Snickers bar because I’ve forgotten that I had a slice of pizza for lunch and a doughnut mid morning because it was a colleague’s birthday. And I eat the doughnut without batting an eyelid at the two slices of buttered toast and marmite that I had for breakfast.

Tell me again why I got to be 100lbs overweight, because I keep forgetting. Heh heh.

Have you ever known a ‘naturally slim’ person eat that unrestrainedly? In my experience, thin people keep a running tally in their heads, and you can better bloody believe that they’ll remember the doughnut when they’re reaching for the Snickers bar, and they’ll put the bar back in on the shelf. Haven’t you ever noticed that?

They seem to view their eating episodes as part of a chain, with each one linked to the half dozen adjacent episodes. If they overeat at one meal they adjust accordingly at the next – or they go to the gym for an hour to burn off the excess. They don’t act as if they have short-term memory loss, and can’t remember what they just ate – they look at the bigger picture.

Do non-dieting fatties do that? Hmmm…I don’t think so. Or at least this non-dieting fatty didn’t! I’d compare my double chins with Miss Skinny’s chiselled jaw line and think “It’s not fair! It comes naturally to her, but I gain weight just by looking at a bar of chocolate!”

And of course I failed to register that I did a hell of a lot more than simply look at chocolate, whereas she ate Ryvita and cottage cheese every day for lunch and worked out like a dervish 6 days a week.

Hmmm, yeah, the metabolism gods had certainly smiled on her and been really unfair on poor little ol’ me, hadn’t they?

Taking exercise as another example, it’s something that a lot of non-dieting fatties turn a blind eye to, and avoid religiously. When I’m in non-dieting mode, months and months can pass with me doing nothing more energetic than pressing the TV remote or reaching on tiptoes for the biscuit tin.  On a really abstract, non-engaged  level I observe my shortening breath, my widening girth, my increasing heart-burn, my creaking knees – but I never put two and two together and think – ‘Hey, maybe I should get some exercise!’

Hell, no! That would be far too much like hard work – and for a Triple I personality such as mine (Idle, Indolent, Inert) it’s something to be avoided at all costs.

I think so-called naturally slim people are never that unobservant and disengaged from their own bodies. They pay attention, and they listen to what their bodies need. They move, they exercise, they’re active, they never sit still, they’re always on the go – driving us indolent couch-potatoes crazy with their refusal to sit still for a goddamn minute!

To be a successful maintainer, I’ve got to be more like them! Before I get to goal I’ve got to have transformed my personality from a triple I to a triple A (Active, Aware, Accountable), because I reckon it’s the key to being a successful maintainer.

Damn, that’s going to be sooooo hard. Not impossible, but pretty bloody difficult.

And it’s going to be more difficult because before I even get there I’m already resenting the effort that it will require. I want this weight maintenance thing to be effortless and automatic – so that I can set the autopilot and live like a healthy person without having to give it too much thought. I don’t want to be forever weighing and measuring portion sizes, dragging my lazy arse off the couch and into the gym, and depriving myself of all of life’s eating goodies. I want to be able to forget about all that!  I want it all to come naturally to me, without any thought or effort on my part!

In other words, I want to carry on living like a fat person, while looking like a thin person!

Yes, siree, that’s my holy grail.

So you see the mountain I’ve got to climb? I’ve got to transform my entire attitude and outlook before I get to goal to give me a decent shot at staying there, with my body conspiring to derail me the whole time. It’s as if I’m one of those foam bendy dolls, and through dieting I’m forcing myself into a new and unaccustomed shape, but my body can’t wait until I take my eye off the ball and it can rebound back into its natural attitude. It wants to be lazy and indolent. It wants to gain weight, because that’s what it’s used to doing!  And I’ve just got to ignore its bitching and whining and force it into submission, because that’s the price of admission into Long Term Maintenance Land.