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75 days without booze or chocolate. 9 kgs down.
Not feeling like going back or missing these things this time. Enjoying the extra energy and the less disturbed sleep and no longer waking up with some unnameable dread. Seem to be able to eat tonnes of food (including some treats) as long as I keep an eye on calories. The morning dog walk (and occasional run) up the hill are definitely helping too, but I am doing nothing like the intensive exercise I did the last time I seriously lost weight, yet still losing weight at about the same pace. So the lesson is, be lazy.
No it’s not, I am doing a lot of walking.
The lesson is that if you do more exercise you can eat more food.
I started the year at a whopping 99.6kg (though during 2018 I did stray over the 100kg mark, which did inspire me to do a mini diet, but that one didn’t hold and I was soon heading back up in that direction), but a couple of times this week the scales had dipped under 90kg (on one occasion I went to grab my phone to record this miracle, but when I stepped on the scales again I had inexplicably put on half a kilo in the 40 seconds that had taken!) In 2014 I briefly got down to under 80kg, so I am about halfway to that target, but I’d settle for another 3 kgs and be delighted if I could shift another 5 or 6. And then the challenge is to keep it off.
But even though I weigh myself obsessively I am not getting obsessed with my weight. Plateauing and weight vacillating are all part of this and the danger is that you lose heart when another week passes and the weight is more or less the same (or slightly more), but if you keep things going and are patient there will be a sudden drop and I think as long as I lay off the chocolate and alcohol and keep walking the dog that things will tend downwards.
The important thing is to keep greedy, doesn’t-give-a-fuck drunk Rich at bay and make this my new lifestyle and not succumb the inevitable slide back (if reading this in the future and you can’t be bothered to go through all this AGAIN then head forward six months to see me talking about how being pissed is great and what a fool I was for not eating cake). But it’s the hope that makes us strong and I think I am usually missing getting drunk by this point, but at the moment I have no compunction to have a beer of a cool glass of white wine (mmmmm) or a big slug of whiskey. I thought it might be funny to have Me2 still drinking in the snooker podcast, because that wouldn’t be me and I could still claim that I was on the wagon. But unusually for me, the reality is more important than the joke. And I don’t want to return to disturbed nights of waking up full of unknown fear (I still wake up a lot because of my son or my 51 year old bladder, but can usually get straight back to sleep again without having to talk myself down to normality).
Years ago as I complained that weight had started piling back on someone I respect on Twitter had basically said there was no point fighting it and that we should accept who we were. And it was enough to break my failing resolve. Was he right? Perhaps. Was it worth saying? Possibly not. The trolls in Frozen also claim that people don’t really change. But are they right? Or not actually real? Is the idea that we are what we are just a convenient excuse for continuing bad habit and selfishness? It’s certainly difficult to reassess and alter choices and human nature being what it is, it’s easy to be overcome by weakness - we should probably be a lot more judgemental of each other for our failings (and also reassess what success and failure are) - but 15 years ago someone might have said to me, there’s no point in you trying to settle down and have a family, because you’ll always be the way you are and I might have said, “Yes, yes, you’re right†and continued on the slowly self-destructive course that I was on.
And by the way, my desire to lose weight isn’t out of any shame at the way my body is - I am always going to be stocky and unlikely to ever be referred to as skinny - I just want to feel better and never die. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
But anyway, for the moment, it continues to go well and I can hope that I have made changes to my life and that I am not going to relapse and stuff my face with big packs of giant chocolate buttons that we’d bought for my daughter. We’ll see.
But I want to prove those Frozen trolls wrong.
