A low calorie look at life, writing and cake.

Friday 11 May 2012

Fifty Shades of Fat

Call me a glutton for punishment – well, just call me a glutton really – but I have gone and done it again. Oh yes, having perched and protruded on a zillion rickety chairs in a million church halls being preached to about syns, calories and points along with all the usual fascist (fattist?) teachings of a perfectly proportioned leader - I have joined yet another slimming club. To say this is a road already well-travelled would be a slight understatement as my reputation goes before me in the world of pounds and puddings. As a serial slimmer I am notorious with every slimming club leader within a fifty mile radius of my home. We all know there is little hope - me and slimming clubs are to fat what Liz Taylor and Richard Burton were to true love. Like those star-crossed Hollywood lovers, I keep going back, seduced by promises that this time it will be different. But just like Richard and Liz, the passion soon dies, reality sets in and I'm faced with failure, disappointment and divorce.  

So as a shiny new member of a slimming club (again) I'm ignoring lessons from the past and devouring pictures of cake porn while imagining warm scones slathered with cold butter. All the time I'm filling my hungry head with obsessive internal maths: ‘If I lose 2 pounds a week then in six weeks time I’ll be blah...’ Unfortunately ‘blah’ is a good way of describing my waistline right now. It’s sort of fat and meaningless. But my life isn’t – it’s fun and full and busy and happy – so why do I feel the need to drag myself to a cold prefab on a warm day and pay to sit zombie-like in front of someone who's telling me stuff I already know? Why? Because I am in thrall to freshly baked, crusty bread, red wine and gooey Brownie heaven in a way I never could be with an apple – no matter how ‘crisp’ and ‘green’ and ‘fresh.’ Does chocolate taste as good as slim feels? No, it damn well doesn't, the chocolate tastes so much better. When I want stick-to-the-roof-of-my-mouth chocolate goo - I want it now! And I will never, in that single, lustful moment, equate what I’m putting in my mouth with the consequences to my hips. This is why, for most of my life I have worn varying shades of fat.

 But I will go on, swimming against the tide, joining slimming classes year on year like some crack head looking for a cure. And over the next few weeks I’ll count syns, points, calories pounds and proteins in an OCD checking fashion while wondering why I’m so obsessed with food (!!).  But what else can I do? I know slimming clubs aren’t the real answer, but failing an intervention from Jillian Michaels, the alternative is too horrific to bear. Left to my own devices and desires I would embrace the heavily buttered warm scones and engulf deep chocolate cake harbouring whipped, fresh cream without guilt or self flagellation. Oh but I already did that  ...and trust me the results ain't pretty.

So it’s rickety chairs in church halls and confessional classes filled with guilt and envy and maths and Summer’s coming and I can’t do another sweaty holiday of black jersey and bulging bingo wings.
And if I eat 1,000 calories a day I could lose two pounds a week and then in six weeks I could be ...blah?

I’ll keep you posted....