It's Fat Club Tonight And Spring Is In The Air!

Another Tuesday, another meeting of Fat Club. Maybe three pounds, maybe four gone? There's still four hours before I step on them scales, with much of the trepidation the ancient Egyptian's ka must have felt when brought by Anubis into the Hall of Ma'at.

The discipline of Fat Club and the pressure to perform, to have something to show as evidence of my self denial, this is ridiculously important to me.

Even though I have my own excel spreadsheet detailing every pound lost, how many gone thus far, how many still to go, %age to target, %age total bodyweight lost, Body Mass Index, and however many other facets I can dream up to admire, record and celebrate the fact of my weight loss, I still love the validation of standing on someone else's scales, in a public place, and having them write those magic descending numbers down in my official book. Sort of validating somehow; authoritative. It just feels good. Even though it's not the only time of the week I step onto scales.

Hardly! I've never been OCD before, apart, of course, from keeping all my CDs in absolutely strict alphabetical order, but that's a straightforward and very practical thing: when you get into the multi-thousands (and I hesitate to tell you quite how many), if discs aren't filed properly, you'll either 1) spend hours searching for the tune you need to hear NOW, or 2) end up buying another copy of that album you could've sworn you had on CD but haven't wanted to play in years, or (most usually) 3) end up buying another copy of an album you already have but couldn't put your hands on just then so you convinced yourself you didn't have it after all and that you really needed it.

Sad, eh?

My son has done very well out of this third tendency over the years, particularly when I was still drinking. The combination of a bottle or two of wine, the Amazon website, a credit card, and a mouse is extremely dangerous. Most recently, he's got a double CD of Albert Ayler live in Greenwich Village on Impulse, the complete recordings version; not a cheap error on my part, dammit!

Anyway, having dealt with my long-standing bit of OCD, let me tell you about my new one: running off to the bathroom, stripping off and jumping on the scales. Three or four times a day when I'm at home, more on Tuesdays. Fat Club later, you see. Need to encourage myself toward thinness.

I know there's plenty of Jeremiahs out there who will say 'it's really not about the numbers on the scales, it's about turning useless fat into healthy muscle and improving body mass and tone, and this will inevitably slow your weight loss down, but this is a good thing really, blah-de-blah.' It's not difficult to find this attitude: it's been represented on every weight loss forum I've ever peeked in on, and there are a million build-you-uppo web sites blasting out the same news.

Which is good news, yes, but.......... the but being I really don't have the time for this. It's an alien mentality so far as I'm concerned, one which just doesn't understand the visceral shock you feel when you eventually become conscious that you really are nigh on 400lbs! Imagine waking up like James Bond in Doctor No, to find a tarantula crawling across you. Most of us are not James Bond, cold blooded killer, and would simply react by wanting that thing off of our bodies IMMEDIATELY and doing whatever it takes to get the bastard thing gone, never mind that there's a more sensible, controlled and safer way of waiting until it had gone its own leisurely way in its own spiderly time (don't scare it and it won't bite you).

Well, I feel exactly the same about my fat as most of us would about a hairy-arsed poisonous arachnoid crawling across our chest: I want it off me, and I want it off now. And once it's gone I want never to see it again. Ever!

Which is not irresponsibly to ignore the general fitness issues, and the need to build up good muscle tissue in lieu of ugly, useless fat. I can not (will not) speak for anybody else, but my view on this one is simple, albeit possibly wrong-headed, but at least I can with (some presumed)justification claim to be borrowing from the wisdom of Solomon (Ecclesiastes,3: 1-8): this here is the time for breaking down. The time for building up will follow, and it won't be ignored! First break down the fat (we just loves a spot of ketosis!), then build up the fitness. Generally raise the tone around here, if you know what I mean.

When I started this weight loss thing, I must admit to being well-irked when my wife told me that a friend had said to her that my weight had gone too far, that I hadn't thought through what I was doing in terms of shedding it, and that it was bound to fail, didn't understand about portion control, and would probably cause myself irreparable health damage en route. Talk about Jeremiahs, eh? Massively encouraging.

This really upset and angered me at the time well-meaning though it doubtless was. In fact, right from before I ever actually started down the LighterLife path because, I had my cunning plan all laid out. You see, I've long accepted (though admittedly not always practised) the age-old maxim that 'failing to plan is planning to fail.

At the risk of repeating myself, I went the radical LL food replacement route because: 1) I needed a clear break from my existing pattern of eating (and drinking): 2) I needed a diet that would kick-start me quickly so I'd be seeing immediate results that would hook in my competitive spirit and reward my effort (or abstinence): and 3) it would enable me to move swiftly to the point where my weight actually registered on the excellent home scales I was too damned heavy to use (thereby, as it proved, opening the door to my ongoing and awfully-OCD weighathons). This last point meant that, if I wished, I'd be able to step back as soon as possible from total immersion in the LL route, and assume responsibility for managing my own weight loss. In other words the exact opposite of what my friend seems to have assumed.

Mine's really not a complicated plan as plans go. Hardly a patch on Operation Overlord, for instance, but it suits my purpose, is working pretty well, and I'm just about 20lbs away from bringing one of its next not-at-all-complicated elements into play: exercise.

My stupid ex-doctor told me shortly before I sacked him and me when I was still 400lbs that I should swim every day. In the Channel? In a gale? In midwinter? After you, doc. Anyone with a brain cell could tell that this wasn't going to happen. Down in the garage, I have my bike. I'm not riding it now because my weight is still be sufficient to possibly blow the tyres out but more importantly, and much more indelicately, there is the plain unavoidability of what Fugmeister Ed Sanders once referred to as 'the testicular torture inherent in the Levi problem', more accurately in this case in 'the saddle problem': all that weight bearing down on a sensitive point squeezed on a cycle saddle? Eye-wateringly nasty.

[Mention of The Fugs leads me into the following trumpet-blowing detour. Last night, watching University Challenge, one of the questions began 'Which 1956 poem begins with the words...' whereupon I immediately started reciting in perfect time with Paxman, 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, I saw the best minds of my generation rot.' I was delighted to be able to not just answer the question, but do so before the bloody thing had even been asked. Evidence of a magnificently and properly mis-spent youth!]

Back to the plan.

In about six weeks time, I'll haul the bike into the back of the car, and take it round to the local bike shop, Michael's Cycles (which is an emporium of all things on two-wheels, straight out of my 50's childhood, unchanged and immaculate). I'll get them to give it the sort of thoroughgoing service that only a bike a decade ignored in the back of a garage ever requires, and, if we're sitting comfortably, then I'll begin. One of the many deep joys of living on the West Worthing sea front is having direct access to about four or five miles of dedicated, flat, traffic-free cycle path right outside running up and down the promenade. About five years ago I was peeved when the council spent a couple of hundred grand putting it in, but I'm certainly going to get a return on my tax-money this year.

It strikes me that the prom and I are going to extend and deepen our relationship big style over the next while (my hitherto dodgy - but gradually improving - right knee permitting), which should bring limitless beneficial effects as I continue my long old downward route towards landing in weight loss target heaven.

As that holy place approaches, I shall gradually start to address the many other bits of my body requiring attention, and shift my mass so that the 173lbs I will be, comprises more muscle and less fat. I accept that I will never, ever be Mr Apollo, can never hope to 'wrestle poodles and win', no more would I wish to, crikey, no. But I will be slim, fit, and healthy (the long list of nasty illnesses I haven't got surprises and delights me: how have I managed to get away with it?), and this will all be happening for me soon. Because I'll be making it happen.

In fact, it's already happening a little bit more every day. Each ounce lost makes its contribution, by taking away another little bit of the stress I've forced my body endure all these years. Day by day, I'm getting well.

If you're doing what you need to do to shed your own lard too, then so are you. We deserve congratulation, so let's give each other the clap we deserve. That could have been better expressed, but you know what I mean.

I've lately taken to peeking in mirrors. Not exactly sneaking admiring sideways glances, let along asking 'who is the fairest of us all?', but at least acknowledging the things are there. This is after years of pointedly ignoring them (a clever trick, since we have some very large mirrors in our places; mentally blanked them out. Didn't WANT to see what was filling the frame). Sometimes now, when I look in the really huge eight-foot tall, ten foot wide mirrors on the doors of the spare bedroom wardrobe, I see quite a decently proportioned bloke, not too damaged for his age, decent head of hair, reasonable face.

Other times I see a big lardy lump of unremitting fat bastard. My difficulty is in controlling which me I happen to see at any given time: can't do it. The one thing I know for sure is that, whichever image I see, I won't tolerate it getting any bigger - ever again. And I'm genuinely determined to be seeing less of me in the future.

The annoying thing is the 'to see ourselves as others see us' bit. While I spend most of the time being pleased with the way things are going, and friends can say (as one did the other week having just returned from three months 'out east', 'where's the rest of you, then?', everybody else who sees me still sees a big fat dollop who ought to take himself in hand and get sorted. They don't know what I've done already and that, by George, there ain't no stopping me now. Let's face it, we know from bitter and humiliating experience that people don't want to see big fat folk all over the place, taking up too much room. Here's a secret, neither do I for that matter. Nothing so damning and condemnatory as a recent convert, is there? But really, none of us needs be fat any longer. We have the power to fix it. Just got to tap in, get the strength.

The excellent Mama Sebo and I pondered this in-the-world's-eyes perception problem some while ago, that maybe we should all wear large badges announcing to the world 'You think I'm fat now? Blimey but you should have seen me 6 months ago!' Because that's pretty much how long I've been doing this now. My one regret is that I didn't start earlier.

Correct that: my regret is that I wasn't able to - couldn't persuade myself to - start earlier. Water under the bridge: I started when I did, and it's going well - 116lbs less than I used to be, 108lbs more than I want to be, but moving forward. Maybe I'll get a result when I do my daily scheduled definitive 7pm weigh this evening - that's the one that really counts for me, what do I way before supper time?

Then it'll be 8pm and off with the chaps at Fat Club, to compare notes and congratulate each other on another week of incremental success. Get some nicely reduced numbers inscribed in my book, evidence that I'm gradually winning this war: we're away from the beaches now, and pressing on into the Normandy countryside, with no stopping until we've trampled this fat thing in the mud once and for all.

There's a strengthening light today, and a clear scent of something new on the warm south westerly air. The first snowdrops are starting to open in the garden. These last couple of nights, a blackbird has been singing his little heart out when Lexie and I have been out around midnight, because a dog has her grands et petits besoins, as the French so delicately put it, you know. The year is renewing itself, same as I am. Winter won't be done with us yet, even in our sheltered littoral micro-climate (though I hope, if it has to come back, that it spares our blackbird who deserves his summer). But you get a strong sense of the spring that is coming. That's when I'll be out there pedalling my bike along that prom like a good (and slimmer) 'un.

What will you be doing to celebrate your spring, because it's going to be joyous being lighter and healthier than last year?

Even starting with real commitment today, you'll be in time to make a difference, so don't hang about: get to it and start getting healthy.

I'm really looking forward to Fat Club tonight. No question but a bit of positive group reinforcement works a treat, and will help anyone toward their goal. It's helping me. If you can find a way of getting some for yourself, I strongly recommend it.

Till the next time,

Your old pal,

Fred


PS Couldn't wait. Sneaked an early look on the scales. Another pound gone. Which means a five-pound week. Deep joy, deep joy!