It Starts...

Ok, so I didn’t get off to the best start. This weekend was a bit of a blow-out, but all in a good cause as it was our friend’s Superhero birthday party which was a really great night. The question of what to wear though caused no end of problems. See, the problem with superheroes is that they’re all superskinny and their super powers include being able to fit into skin-tight leather or spandex and still maintain functioning, un-squashed organs. Of course everyone was very kind and kept suggesting sexy red-headed superbabes for me to dress up as, such as Poison Ivy. It was unanimously decided however, that I should be Catwoman due to my love of, er, cats. They meant well, but hadn’t really thought it all the way through as these women, awesome though they undoubtedly are, fall into the aforementioned category of spandex-clad feats of engineering. The best I could hope for was Catwoman who’d really let herself go.

I did toy with the idea of going as Cat Lady – dressing in mismatched clothes, a cardigan buttoned up wrongly and a hat made from a whiskas box, but in the end even my pride proved too much to let me attend a party half-filled with strangers looking like I’d abandoned my post as the resident mentalist of a bus. So I wimped out, put on a black dress, a cat mask and some elbow-length gloves and went as a very unconvincing Catwoman. At least we could still enjoy the fun of making Tony’s outfit though! As a point of interest, he’s Thor, not She-Ra – unfortunately that was the only wig we had.

So anyway, I drank too much, ate cake and generally over-indulged. We also didn’t fully get up on Sunday until about 3pm meaning that we wasted the warmest and most beautiful day of sunshine that we’ve seen this year, altogether not my finest hour. I have to admit that I felt pretty ashamed of myself and started wondering how the hell I was going to actually start losing weight if this was what I did on my first weekend into the crusade. In my hungover state though I started watching a program called “I Used to be Fat” on Viva – yes, I know, not the greatest channel to choose for intellectually-enriching programmes, but it seemed the most that my brain could deal with. I was however, pleasantly surprised by the American life-style programme I had found. It featured one teenager per episode (I watched about 3) who took the summer before going to college to have a complete blitz on their weight. They were given a personal trainer, an enormous countdown calendar and, most pleasingly, a complete make-over of their lives. They were encouraged to think differently about food and exercise, to try several different activities, to learn to cook and eat healthily and their families were also included in this re-education and taught how to support their child and help them succeed. Here was a programme about normal people – not perfect, airbrushed characters in Beverley Hills or some other part of California, teaching teenagers that only beauty and an unnaturally thin body can make you really happy – here was a programme teaching teenagers that there are a lot of people who are fat, that they are fat for many different reasons, that every single one of them is a person you can really like and that being fat isn’t just about being lazy and eating cake – in these cases it was about emotional instability, mental-abuse in one case, family-lifestyle and poor nutritional education. I can honestly say I thoroughly enjoyed watching these kids transform their lives and their attitudes and lose upwards of 70lbs in around 100 days.

Of course, this isn’t really a viable option for me; having a job kind of eliminates the option of working out 6-8 hours a day with a personal trainer. It did, however, make me remember the last time I lost all my weight – I was living at home after university and a very, very bad break-up and attending the Jackie and David bootcamp for fat daughters. Putting my life and my health in the hands of my parents was the best thing I could have done. They regulated meals, bought me a membership to their gym and made me go, they forced me to attend weight-watchers every week – not to follow their meal plan, which I really don’t agree with, but to be weighed. Even though their methods were hard work and they very often made me feel pretty worthless for being fat, they brought me back out of myself and helped me rebuild my confidence. This time though I have to do it alone, I have to motivate myself, not let dips in my depression-cycle overcome me and keep on pressing towards my goal, and that’s frightening. Especially since I left my boyfriend, my cat, my home and my friends two and half weeks ago and moved my entire life down to London to live in a room in a shared house and start a new job. This is the time to be making changes, it's a fresh new start and a logical time for a physical spring-clean (it being spring) and to learn how to do it alone, without my support network. It's also the worst time to do it - without my support network.

So, when I get paid on Wednesday I will buy a swim membership and go at least twice a week (hopefully three times), I will walk home from the tube station at night instead of getting the bus and I will climb the two flights of stairs to work twice a day. These are my starting steps, they are not big, but they are manageable. I’ll let you know how it goes...