Back In The Jug Agane

What do you mean, you've never heard of Molesworth? Chiz, chiz. Where on earth did you go to skool? Clearly not St Custard's. New year, head down and hard at it, as any fule kno. Back in the jug agane, all right, skool dog slinking around stealing sossages and all, but not on my frail and delicate, wraith-like behalf.

Tuesday, so it's Fat Club tonight: truth will be told. As things turn out, I'll not be too despondent. The scales will show a pound down from the last weigh-in, way back in 2010, maybe even two, and given what we've all been through lately, that's OK.

A mean, unworthy, caddish and downright rotten thing to say, given the overall circs of what she's had to put up with from My Royal Highness over the years, but the really difficult bit has been matching what I want to do on the eating front with my wife's seasonal expectations.

Usually, or more accurately, in the period since this process of mine started, we each go our own direction with regard to food. Some of the time, I'll cook for her. Occasionally I'll eat some of what I've cooked, more often I'll not. But over the Christmas break - and maybe I'm making much more of this than necessary - I felt an occasional pressure to join in with eating which just isn't there in our typical daily round.

I don't think I'm writing in bad faith, but this year I really would have settled for a Christmas dinner of a roll-mop herring sitting on a mound of sauerkraut with a couple of cornichons on the side. Lovely. Instead, and as I've proudly written before, I cooked the best Christmas dinner I ever achieved. And then I went and ate it. Plenty of it, at least. From that point on I wasn't exactly lost, but I was rather bumping along between the tracks rather than running smoothly on top of them. Not exactly out of control, but too damned complaisant for my own liking.

However I've since had the heavy mob in from the superego department, and they've given me a suitably hard time and I believe I've sorted it. In a sense, it's good to know I can't just shrug it off and excuse myself for just one of those no-harm-done-really things. I'm just grateful that now, at least, I'm back doing what I should be, and I'm 100% confident of seeing progress. Certainly by this time next week I'll have passed that elusive mid-point on my personal progress. Yippee, there will only be another 108lbs to lose... Only!

So, I've been asking myself what I need to get through what I'm starting to refer to as Phase 2. I'm back hitting hard on the VLC route after a couple of months' comparative soft-pedalling.

I suppose, particularly I need to gauge whether my expectations of me have changed now I know that I can indeed do this thing making my own eating decisions instead of relying slave-like those determined for me and handed down by the very bright (and slender) people at LighterLife. For instance, how am I going to feel in a couple of weeks time contemplating yet another aspartame-fuelled shake, or one more day of nasty-flavoured soups, because whatever LL gives its customers, it ain't a fine dining experience. If anything it's too damn' near punishment. 'You're a degenerate food addict so now you must subsist on this muck. Serves you bloody well right. You might never eat anything wholesome again....'

Having swum in the waters of an LL support group for a number of months now, I could tell myself that, for some of their customers, these magic powders are a step up from what they've been eating up to now. But that would be mean and unworthy of me. Twice in one blog. I suspect it's the contemplation of a future of powders brings out the bile in me. Even if so, it comes quite naturally and painlessly.

At this point, looking ahead down the road, it would be easy to cut and run. However, if I take a moment and clear my vision, I can start to see a bit further down the road to the point where there will be no powders because their work will be done, I'll have hit the magic 173, and the job will be educating myself to comfortably maintain. No question, but the key to this, and the only way I will ever get to that point is to find value in myself, to generate a little bit of entirely healthy, well-balanced and proportionate self-love. There is a very wise woman living up in Canada called Glenda whom I encounter on the Low Carber Forum, and she wrote to me yesterday as follows (and I suggest you transcribe these words and pin them up somewhere prominent, because I doubt you'll read anything more pertinent to the situation of the reforming food addict anywhere this year):

It's well nigh impossible to do something as difficult as change your whole way of life and mindset just to improve the life of someone you don't even much like! Loving yourself, in my book, has to be the very first step in any successful self-improvement.

Sounds more than good to me, and I can keep this thing steady on the rails, realising that the healthy me I'm moving towards isn't just my body. More and more I'm coming to realise the whole thing starts and finishes with my mind. Last month I wrote a blog called Free Your Mind...And Your Ass Will Follow. Translated into unsentimental English, this can only mean 'learn to love yourself, and you will be free to heal yourself.'

Every day, that is sounding a more attractive, more imperative prospect.

Of course, not every attempt at communication succeeds first time. But you've got to keep trying till you get it right, as The Two Ronnies demonstrated in 1976.

Till the next time, increasingly optimistically, whatever the odds,

Your old pal,

Fred