Like Funkadelic Said Forty Years Ago, 'Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow'

I have this theory: no man has ever lost his virginity. I didn’t. I had to struggle for what seemed like eternity to get rid of the bloody thing. And it’s the same with losing weight.

If you’ve visited this blog before, you’ll know that I’ve really got an entirely disproportionate, obsessive, and really getting on my own case thing about putting weight back on. When any of us does that, it means we never actually lost that weight at all, ever; instead we just sort of temporarily misplaced it, only to eagerly pick it up again like a keen young puppy finding its ball in a field. And this is what we’re not going to do any more, right chaps?

Paresh’s point about SDCM (self determination, control & motivation) in a comment a few days ago really hit home with me. This is what we have to develop and internalise, using it as a powerful lever to challenge, attack, overcome and change our stupid behaviours which have a similar effect on us to that described by Sylvio Dante in The Sopranos quoting Michael Corleone in The Godfather III, ‘just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.’ With the inevitable result we are all familiar with. Lard on.

Here’s a classic example, which I very much recognise and which I’m here stealing from my extremely tolerant LighterLife counsellor and friend, Val Perry (find her on Facebook , LinkedIn, or LighterLife itself) who says, ‘Do you know, you can pull into a petrol station and just buy petrol?’

Until July 24th when this final round of the weight loss Odyssey got started, I believe I had never once had the discipline or the control to come away from a petrol station without a triple pack sandwich, a bag of kettle crisps (chips), and either a bar of chocolate or (God help me that I was ever this depraved) a Ginster’s Buffet Bar. John Betjeman started one of his poems ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough, It isn’t fit for humans now.’ Whilst not wishing to dilute the Late Poet Laureate’s sentiments about Slough, I think we can recast the poem to include Callington in the otherwise all but blame-free county of Cornwall, because that’s where the Ginster’s factory is. And whilst I have no doubt they take every precaution to ensure that every product that is driven forth from Callington by their huge fleet of delivery drivers is entirely fit for human consumption, the curious paradox is that, despite all their care, measured on a different scale, none of it should be consumed by humans, or anything else really. Because it has no redeeming features whatsoever. So turn your back on their factory door, and just say no.

As we’ve discussed around here before (I remember Glenda making the point nicely), there is something about the juxtaposition of the words food and factory that makes me very uncomfortable. Almost shudderingly so. Looking out of my window, back from the sea, my eye goes to the ancient site of Chanctonbury Ring, up on the downs behind us, an Iron Age hill fort, with evidence of Bronze Age occupation before that, and two Roman temples after it. I am bloody sure none of the people who lived up there ever tortured their intestines with a Ginster’s Buffet Bar and were the better off for it. I grant you, that the Buffet Bar would, technically, not have been a buying option 3500 years ago, but our ancestors weren’t missing anything.

On the contrary, I rather suspect that they were doing a lot better out of their food than I’ve spent most of my life doing. But this is a tide that’s has turned, and I have bought into the Paresh Principle of SDCM 100%. In fact, I think I want to go for 100% SDCM, 100% - if you get my drift.

I have never thought that I was in any way a victim. Today’s society reveals victims all over the place, but I see many fewer victims than most social engineers would suggest I should, whereas I do see plenty of really poor excuses. For instance, try the woman who phoned the police last week complaining someone had stolen her snowman. If you’ve not heard it, you can You Tube it here. That’s a sorry pathetic individual who you know just sees herself as a victim of everything that either happens to her, or - just as often, I suspect - that she causes to happen.

Speaking for myself, I am heartily sick of the way the already nauseating ‘me generation’ has degenerated even further to the ‘poor me generation’. Who needs ‘em? Well, we got ‘em, only include me out. I refuse to be lumped in with that lumpen mob. Mama Sebo, who has commented generously on this site has a journal on the low carber forum called Eating With Consciousness. A good title, and another pointer toward a sound survival strategy. So far as what happened to me prior to getting a grip from July 24th, I’m the guilty one: I ate it, I drank it. Nobody made me do it. It was my very own 5-star greed, gluttony, selfishness, and stupidity. Nobody else’s. So I’m the one that’s got to fix it. In point of fact I’m the only one that can possibly fix us. So do I really want to? Am I prepared to put in the work? Well, if I'm interested in avoiding the crematorium’s furnace, yes. 400lb people die. 400lb 60-year olds are playing with as stacked a hand as you can get. So when I talk about dieting for life, I certainly do mean kissing goodbye to yo-yo dieting, but I’m also talking quite literally. You dump this lard, Fred, or you die.

But enough about me. Who made YOU fat?

Everything I put in my mouth and ingested, whether solid or red, liquid, and derived from grape juice, was done at my own volition. Entirely. I take responsibility for it. That’s part of SDCM. I will never whinge about what happened, but will instead do everything in my power to change it, and to keep it changed. This requires constant vigilance, and at this stage, when I still have a huge amount of fat to burn off, it means I must be wary of, and check my every move toward, food. Every day. High days and holidays included. You don't think there are short-cuts, do you?

There’s an old saying from the world of business management, ‘if I can’t measure it, I can’t manage it.’ This is so true when we’re looking at weight loss, and it’s not just talking about the number flashing up when you step on the scales.

A lot of people nowadays are conscientiously counting their carbohydrate input. When I last had to endure this process, twelve years ago when I got rid of 10 stone, I meticulously recorded my daily calorie intake (because that’s the way most of us went about it in the UK 12 years ago. Never heard of Dr Atkins or any other approach. Our doctors said ‘count calories’, so we did). I never once allowed it to do above 1600. Every drop of milk into every cup of tea was diligently recorded in a notebook I still have. I strongly recommend keeping detailed track of what you're eating, and writing it down so you have that dated record, and can easily see what worked and what didn't: why not set yourself up a journal on the Low Carber Forum? It works.

Recording everything was a good discipline and it was invaluable in helping me get where I was going. It was SDCM in action, I was indeed ‘eating with consciousness’, and I was seeing the results. Until, of course, the fall – which I swore would never happen, only it did. That once. But in this blog I am saying as publicly as I know how, the lesson has been learned. The behaviours have been recognised and challenged. My frailty has been accepted, and I’m building the strategy to ensure I succeed. Dieting is not just about losing weight. It’s about making sensible and correct decisions about nutrition every single day of your life, rather than just going for it because the stuff’s available and you can - and we can, because we live in a society where more food is available than even I could eat: trouble is, much of what's available just isn't worth eating. Above all following a proper, grown-up intelligent diet's about not not caring. There wasn’t a typo there. On reflection, examining my life, as our old chum Sophocles recommended, I have decided that for a long old time, I just did not care, about how I looked, how much fat I was putting on, how ill I felt, how immobile I was becoming. How bloody mad was that? Let it say whatever it does about my lack of self-esteem, there’s no ducking away from it, I would not have been a good advert for L’Oreal: I wasn’t worth it.

Which isn’t to say I wasn’t conceited, assertive, opinionated, vain, and generally big-headed obnoxious. All of that, but still, au fond, I did not care. Pick the bones out of that one, Sigmund. But there was no one could cure me. I’d endure the nagging, and ignore the astonished looks of strangers in the street (the French are particularly good in that regard: they don’t hold back, they point, bless them), I’d make my decision as to where we’d have lunch on the basis of which restaurant terrace had the sturdiest looking chairs. All of that, too, but I’d never confront the monster, never stare that dragon down. Couldn't be bothered (or was I too scared, thinking this thing has gone too far to be stopped?).

Until, that is, things changed; and I haven’t yet got the full handle on why they changed, despite offering my fear of morbidity half a dozen paragraphs ago. The sorry truth is, I was actually quite resigned to death. Anyway something was working to undermine this potentially fatal passivity (at best) or violent self-loathing (at worst), and that important corner was indeed turned. Looking back on that time, irrespective of whatever triggered the change, I gleaned one major insight which slots in neatly alongside the notions of SDCM and ‘eating with consciousness.’ It’s this, and it’s the sort of profound wisdom for which I should maybe be demanding thousands. Guineas, of course. Why, guineas for strength:

Here it is. Successful dieting is less dependant on what’s in your mouth than what’s in your head. Get your head right, and the rest is a piece of cake. Maybe not the best metaphor under the circs, but you know what I mean. As the great George Clinton put it all those years ago, 'Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow'. Er, right on.

Coming back to Slough, however, it’s just along from Staines; two such pretty names, aren’t they? Staines is, according to contemporary folk legend, the birthplace of Ali G and featured in his motion picture and TV shows. The local worthies have decided that Sacha Baron-Cohen held their community up for ridicule and that their only resort is to change the town name – to Staines-on-Thames. Apparently that cures all ills and will hopefully encourage investment. Massive.

And finally, at long last back to that petrol station. I for one can declare myself cured of stuffing my face with unnecessary and probably toxic stuff bought when all I was supposed to be doing was fuelling the car. This is now completely automatic and I think it's great - maybe I am worth it after all. Val’s right; you CAN choose to just buy petrol at petrol stations. I can. Amazing.

Once upon a time until recently, I’d come through that door into the station shop, credit card in hand and twitching like a dowser's wand, hungry eyes immediately and thoroughly scanning those loaded shelves to find what tasty snacks were going to force themselves in my direction. Now I don’t even register that they’re there.

What’s on those shelves has no interest to me, so I just don’t bother to see it. The packaged and proffered processed muck and garbage can trap some other unwary traveller, impede some other pilgrim’s progress. It ain’t getting me, babe. Be I in Callington or Slough, or somewhere actually decent, I’m immune now, and I'm staying that way. Same with the booze. Free at last! I’ve got SDCM on my side, I’m ‘eating with consciousness’ so I don’t have to give such meretricious temptations a moment’s consideration, I don’t have to beat myself up thinking about it.

I just say no.

Make sure you keep saying no till the next time,

Your old pal,

Fred