Food Glorious Food!

So I chose the holiday season or as I prefer to call it, Christmas - to go on a calorie controlled diet. I started out strong, very strong in fact mainly because I had miscalculated my weight in kilos leading the online programme to categorise me as 'marginally obese' and setting me up with the corresponding daily calorie limit - LIMIT being the operative word. Of course what ensued was an uncontrollable obsession with food and hunger.   I lived for legitimate sustenance times.  Bedtime couldn't come fast enough because the sooner I was asleep - well the sooner breakfast would come.  And so on all the live long day.  Until, one day, I just didn't feel as hungry.  Ah, I was beginning to see how this whole diet thing worked.  Then came the lethargy, then the short fuses, then the temptations.

It was by pure chance that I met an Italian fellow at a friend's art show who explained that if he (at 6 ft 4 inches) weighed 94 kilos I (at 5 ft 1) could not possibly weight 155 kilos and that on that basis, I was probably not eating enough which would explain the whole feeling hungry all the time.  Rocket science.  Needless to say the man saved my life.  I promptly updated my profile - ready to make up for lost Kcals - only to find it gave me the exact same calorie limit.  Hello Stupid!

I've since been told these websites will all basically just recommend the average daily recommendations to everyone - regardless...which I think is a bit fresh really because if I (and I'm really only looking to lose 5-10 lbs) was delirious with hunger, imagine a proper ten tonne Tessie.  It strikes me as terribly dangerous No?

Anyway none of it mattered in the end because within 2 weeks from starting this weight loss lunacy, the office, friends and client Chrismas lunches/dinners began - which was not so much a slippery slope as a gullet avalanche with me standing at the bottom of the hill, mouth wide open. 

Yesterday was the last of those binges at my delicious South African mate's house who is partial to a little tipple of white wine and doesn't like to drink alone (aside from alchys - who does?)

So it's back to celeriac soup and Yoga.  Actually, I can't live without Yoga and the last few days of not being able to do it have left me feeling a bit shyte - hey! there are worse things I could be addicted to.

I'm aiming to not touch the sauce now until Christmas Day and even then  I might get all anal about it.  I can be like that when I really want to - ask any of my old friends, it's probably the one thing they hate about me (she says deludedly). 

Actually, it's very possible I may not drink until New Year's Eve...and then again I may hit the bottle in the next half hour.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Even flow

Oh my Christ! Christmas crept up on me this year.  Woefully unprepared as I am - I do feel that it will be a great Christmas all things said and done.  What a year it's been my delightful supportive friends.  This time last year I was pretty much in the depths of despair wondering whether I had bitten off more than I could chew in what was then my new job.  Crippled by the push-pull of work-parenting and unclear really on what it was I wanted from life now that I'd managed to drag my family back over the Atlantic to London.  Things with The Silverback were as you might expect them to be when you find yourself adrift in the sea of guilt and resentment.

Today - a full year later (you need to take a deep even breath here....and exhale) Oh it's like the difference between night and day.  To say it is much improved would be to do the evolution of it all a great injustice.  To put it in moronically simple terms:  Happy has come home. 

A combination of even flow, persistence, resistance, reluctant maturity, massive amounts of yoga and - hell yeah - a truck load of karma and luck has brought me to this place of content.  Jesus, I don't think I've ever known calm that has felt this sustainable. But it did take hitting Rock Bottom first. 

It's the only way, I guess, for someone as famously (among my circle) fickle as me will ever commit to long term decision making.  Wow - could it be that at 40 I've finally overcome the crippling case of arrested development that has plagued my adult life so far?  Could be my friends, could very well be.