Fat bottomed girls will be riding today

I was very peeved when I first started cycling, when I saw other tubsters on bikes. I wanted to believe that a bit of cycling would transform me into into a lissom young thing (yes, time was going to reverse too), pert of buttock and svelte of thigh. If I saw fellow cycling chubsters, I told myself that they’d just started – like me – and in a couple of months they (and me) would be transformed. Reader, it never happened.

I am not the only one to believe in this fairy story – it appears that the manufacturers of cycling wear also believe that only the slender cycle. I tugged on a new pair of cycling knickers today (basically cycling shorts to wear under less gruesome clothing) – I had to wrench them over my arse whereupon they formed tourniquets around my thighs. Which might be useful if I spontaneously developed serious wounds in my legs, I suppose, but are otherwise rather uncomfortable. At an XL, they’re the largest. You’d think they’d want to encourage the stout to get on their bikes, wouldn’t you?

I will say that I was pretty damn good over the weekend. My gremlins in my head were going bonkers, trying to get me to eat all sorts of illicit goodies on the basis that I “may as well” since I was going to be eating some things off-diet. I didn’t give in to them except for some bread in the restaurant on Sunday lunchtime when I was starving (only carbs apart from a pudding chosen for relative purity). I don’t think I did too badly. Scales of Doom may choose to differ...