I’ve been somewhat preoccupied these last few days. Hence my silence for which I apologise although many will doubtless be relieved. Doubtless,'twas ever thus.
Anyway, I had a nasty turn, which caused me a degree of irrational anxiety when, a week ago today, I stepped on the scales, whistling a jaunty tune and with my entirely metaphorical hat on the side of my head, when looking down, brimming with confidence and bonhomie, I was horrified to discover....that I’d put on a pound. That’s what.
Now, I know there’s a body of opinion which decries my slavish adherence to the scales, which doubtless parallels my devotion to the WMCA Good Guys’ Fabulous 57 during my rocking and rolling adolescence. I’ve seen the arguments nowhere better put than here, boldly headed Why The Scale Lies.
Only I think what’s being ‘economical with the actualité’ in this instance is that headline itself: the scales don’t lie. They report what is: nothing more. One of the things they don’t do is interpret 'it' for you. One of the things we’re constantly doing as intelligent sentient beings is receiving and processing an endless barrage of information about the world we live in. Every minute of our lives, we are wildly busy interpreting our experience of the world, and making useful sense of it. I don’t see any reason to stop doing that when we step on the scales. The scales tell us what’s happening, and it’s up to us to work out both the how and the why. So we need to pause, take a minute, and work out what it is the scales are telling us - but whatever it is, they're not lying!
Fine and dandy.
It took me another 24 hours, and the addition of another four pounds, before the penny even began to drop with me: in the meantime, I was quietly panicking. I had put on five pounds in less than 48 hours. Not right at all. Since I started down the weight loss road last June, I had only twice put on weight: firstly during my three weeks in the gastronomic heart of France, and again over Christmas and New Year. An entirely forgivable two pounds each time; easily dealt with.
This time, though, I’d changed nothing on the carb or calorific fronts ,and even (let’s be indelicate for a moment) allowing for the overall physical balance of solid inputs and outputs, this did not make sense. There was only one possible answer: I’d started soaking up water like a sponge with an Irish navvy's thirst on him. Not that I’d been dehydrated to start with; everything had been normal. I was eating and drinking to plan, and the weight was going down at a rate that all concerned parties (me, my Fat Club counsellor, the doctors, my wife and dog) were happy with. So what was going on. Intellectually I knew that this could only be water. Nothing else it could be. I knew it could be dealt with. I just didn’t know why it was happening, or how I had to deal with it, and it was scary: I’ve invested an awful lot of my psychic capital into making this weight loss work, and suddenly my mind was roaming free and coming up with
Eventually the bleedin’ obvious button lit up and throbbed. Something had changed in my little world (Don Camillo reference intended). A day or two before I woke to see the weight increase on the non-lying scales, the doctor had changed my blood pressure medication. One of my weight loss spin-off goals is that, when I get to target, I’ll have licked my blood pressure back into shape and I’ll be able to drop the pills for good. My BP has already improved significantly by the removal of what is thus far 120lbs of unsightly fat from my greatly relieved (and thereby de-stressed) frame. The medics decided they could now safely change my medication to a lighter formulation. What they forgot to mention was that they were moving me from something which had a mildly diuretic effect to a tablet which is known, in a small percentage of users, to encourage…..(you’ve guessed it)….water retention. And, by Jove, I was retaining like a parched Saharan camel at a remote desert oasis.
The phone call went through to the doctor just gone eight on Monday morning. And his decision was immediate. A new script was written and the astonishing nine pounds I’d put back on, started to flow away, like the spring at the end of Jean De Florette.
Now, this is no big deal in the doings of the world. It’s not up there with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but for those few days (indeed, really until yesterday, when I knew that things had sorted themselves out, and that I’d actually managed to lose two pounds underneath this aquatically retentive carry on), my concern was, to quote the wonderful Damon Runyon, ‘more than somewhat.’
I’m pretty certain that some people (and I’d include myself in this, during my less determined periods) would have used this as an excuse for giving up. Let’s be ungenerous: anybody trawling the weight loss forums will too often encounter whiny and self-pitying messages (cue Captain Beefheart for those so inclined) posted by people feeling overwhelmed and daunted by the stones they think they’re seeing in their pathway. It strikes me we have a duty of care to refuse to pander to these absolutely common frailties, and to take the same view demanded by those bloody, rotten scales: ‘look, it is what it is, and we just have to make sense of things and get on with it. And don’t think it’s going to be easy and not ask stuff of you, since you’re looking to change things that have become really fundamental in the constitution and make up of You.’ No one said it’s going to be easy (or if they did, they was a-lyin’ atcha, and like the Ministry of Information told us in the gloomy days of 1939 (and as I've mentioned here before), just Keep Calm And Carry On (but don’t hesitate to check in with the docs, if things aren’t running to plan).
And every day you will become stronger and more assured and assertive in being you. You must be prepared to make demands of your significant others: that they fit in with your fads, fancies and especially your refusals as you make your weary way back down. You’ll have to explain it to them, and more than once, but it really will become easier and they will come to understand more and to positively buy in whooping for joy, as they see your return to health and also to a much more manageable size.
I had a Tweet yesterday from the Dalai Lama (nice of him), which I think says it all, in 140 characters or less:
‘Genuine love should first be directed at oneself – if we do not love ourselves, how can we love others?’
This weight loss project we’ve all signed up to is very much an adult ‘me-time’, and it involves us all gradually coming to terms with the simple but astounding fact that, really, we’re each one of us all right after all. Actually, it's a key ingredient of the mix. If we don’t get that bit sorted out this time around, we’ll be yo-yoing back up in no time - fated to fatness.
And surely we’ve all got better things to do with our time?
Apropos of absolutely nothing and only for those of us with a taste for the singularly odd, a morsel from YouTube I found only yesterday, being Vivian Stanshall and Roger Ruskin-Spear in the very short-lived biG Grunt (sic), Eleven Mustachioed Daughters, lord protect us all.
Till the next time, by which times our biG GRunt induced nightmares may have stopped,
Your old pal,
Fred
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