Loss

I don’t even know where to start.  P was ill last week.  Normally he reacts very strongly to any attempt to help him by saying it’s “fussing”.  I was due to be out on Wednesday evening, but offered to cancel and go home, secure in the knowledge that he’d be appalled.  He did want me to go home although he was mostly in bed.  On Thursday he actually went to the GP – again, an almost impossible task to get him to go.  The GP sent him to hospital with suspected appendicitis.  We’ve been in hospital ever since.  I was up 41 hours before I made it home for some sleep.  I am not good at crying – I kind of choke it back, but when they admitted him to the Observation ward in Majors, I cried on my own, sat in a corridor, for 4 hours solidly, bursting a blood vessel in my eye.  They think he has cancer.  And in all likelihood has a burst appendix too.  They’ve pumped him full of antibiotics on an iv and he now feels fine.  But he has to have another scan and then we’re hoping he can come home, pending a more invasive test that should tell us one way or the other.  They clearly think he has it.

You read the stuff on the internet and it tells you briskly that half of people survive up to 10 years.  It’s just that I thought we had a lot longer than that.

I’ve barely eaten.  He was intermittently ‘nil by mouth’ and I would not have eaten or drank in front of him.  And I just didn’t feel like anything.  I’d eat nothing all day and then come home and eat a couple of pieces of toast and marmite. I lost a couple of lbs the first day.  And from MFP, I know I’m eating 600-800 calories a day.  But my hateful body has worked it out and is somehow managing to put on weight at that rate.  ¼ lb a day.  It’s inexplicable.  But I’m just too tired and too miserable to really care.

Do or diet

So, what’s new.  Not a lot with me.  Scales of Doom are trying its usual headf*ckery – I have a good loss, then, for apparently no reason, more goes back on.  Then I inch s-l-o-w-l-y back down.  Which is not as satisfying as the first time you see that number.  I tend to be in mourning all the way back down (usually limping along at ¼ of a lb at a time).  Still, I’m still doing this on my own – well, with MFP.  The effect of the band has yet to make itself known.  It’s taking a long time, but when has this ever been straightforward for me?  I’m resolutely remaining calm and sanguine.  And determined.  I mean, mostly determined with short intervals of overly dramatic flinging myself about and hissing.  But I am going down – and at some point, I’m going to get the help from the band and that will make life easier (or less hungry, anyway).

MFP has its faults – many of them equating to it really being designed for the US market (but also their determination to push bananas at me – never, NEVER) – but it’s what makes the difference for me.  I can keep a very beady eye on my calories – which I try to keep to c1000  - and certainly under 1000 – ignoring any of the calories I “earn” from exercise, and I tend to be pretty obsessive about this.  But I am interested in a new but similar app – Fine Dieting.  I read about it on the Mail(yes, I know but I have reasons).  It seems to be similar to MFP but, the thing that attracts my interest is that it works out for you as an individual at what calorie level you lose weight (or maintain it).  On the other hand, it seems to work on a weekly calorie allocation which I’m not sure would work for me – I have fears of getting to Sunday and only being able to have half a lettuce leaf or similar.  They do a 7 day trial (you pay for access to the site on a monthly basis) and I’m thinking about it.  Apparently you need a bit of time as it wants a LOT of information (although not, refreshingly enough, your bank details) – but I’m in favour of all the information.  It can only help hone everything down to you as an individual, right?  I’ll keep you posted.

In other news: I consulted the oracle on the issue of my ears.  P says they are not big.  He can be brutally honest, so I’m trying to believe him.  He pointed out that my mother’s are!  I’ve booked to have one (ear) pierced tomorrow but keep getting attacks of cowardice.  My friend had hers done at what seems to be the Rolls Royce of piercers, Maria Tash in Liberty.  I’ve found an alternative piercer that is perhaps more Volvo – but still not a Saturday girl with a piercing gun, shooting a bolt through your ear.  I don’t know why a needle sounds more scary – but apparently this is the only way to do it as it’s not a wodge of metal forcing its way through.  Will I do it?  I think so…  It’s the rolling on it in bed and it hurting that makes me have outbreaks of cowardice.  And, you know, a needle.  Also I had wanted to do it quietly and see if P noticed.  That game is up.  I think it took my friend’s husband about 36 hours – and her tying her hair up.  P didn’t notice when I had 6” of hair cut off thoug,h so I’m pretty confident it would take quite some time – and would probably be from me yelping as I turned over in bed and inadvertently lay on it.  Still, he’s supportive whereas my friend’s husband was … dismissive, I think I’d say.

Now see ‘ear

Today I heard the unmistakable noise of the lining of my skirt ripping as I sat down.  Fortunately it won’t show.  And I don’t like the skirt (although it is the first time I’ve worn it, it is an ebay cheapie, chosen because it’s warm.  It looks like I’m wearing a not-very-nice, frumpy blanket.  In a bad way).  The better fact is that I am not trying to squeeze into something too small for me, so I won’t self-flagellate ad infinitum.  Although the ripping would suggest otherwise, I grant you.  But it went on easily and seemed to fit well.  Who knows.  I’m thumbing a metaphorical nose at it.

I don’t think it’s the demise of the skirt, but I’m feeling a bit fed up today.  I’ve been trying to think why and I think there are a few reasons.  Firstly, the diet one: I’m just at the stage that any dieter will recognise where it just seems too exhausting an effort.  I just had a little jump down on the scales so I ought to be feeling motivated – but I’ve just got to that point where I am just fed up of being hungry all the time, fed up about all the things I have to turn down that I’d really like.  It’s nothing new and I know I just have to grit my teeth and continue – but I feel a bit buffeted by it.  (No, not that sort of buffet).

The other two things are appearance related.  So not wholly unallied to dieting, I guess. 

One of my best friends and I met up last week to embrace the almost certainly mid-life crisis of a helix piercing (at the top of the ear).  We went to Liberty and I have to say they were excellent (although boy, they must have severe problems getting through a metal detector).  It sounded as if it would be too difficult for me – you cannot sleep on that side, perhaps ever, but certainly for the first 6-12 months.  If you do, you risk the piercing migrating (and, as we are daily reminded, illegal migration is a bad thing).  Seriously though, I don’t need another thing to worry about.  My friend had TWO helix piercings and looks like an Elven princess.  In the course of this, I scanned my ears (mulling over other possibilities, but looking at my friend’s ear and then mine, I came to the unwelcome realisation that I have big, ugly ears.  I’d never really thought about it, although my mother, grandfather and one brother have absolute corkers (well, had, in my Grandpa’s case as he’s dead), so I’m not sure why I’m that shocked.  It felt like that would have been a little boost, especially as I read that if you place it following the angle of your cheekbones (and they’re there somewhere), it gives a face liftening and brightening effect.  That sounded very appealing, but I don’t think adorning an ugly ear is a good idea (although I will continue to wear earrings in my inexpertly, lop-sided pierced lobes, from teenage years). I feel sad that it hasn’t worked out and am pestering said friend on a daily basis, and keep looking at pictures (not all of her, that would be weird…on Pinterest).  I keep going round and round in my head about it – but coming back to the ugly lugholes point which is inescapable.

Secondly my hair.  I quite like the colour of my hair – which is kind of obvious, given that I have it dyed that colour, after all.  But it is very fine and limp.  You know when people say they have fine hair but lots of it?  I have fine hair and not lots of it. It has always been straight and fine, albeit helped a little with the former by use of straighteners.  Recently though, it has completely changed in texture though and become – not curly, not even wavy exactly, more frizzy and kinky. Changed, therefore, for the worse.  And the fact that I’m growing it and it’s at that awkward length where it hits my shoulders and flicks up and/or out and/or kinks unbecomingly.  Quite frankly, it looks dreadful.  I am trying to persist with growing it, hoping it will get beyond this stage.  I guess if it does and it still looks awful, I’ll have to have it all lopped off again. But it’s a lot of (emotional) pain for an only hypothetical gain.

And it’s still February.  But no longer January, thank goodness, which lasted at least  9 weeks.

Absent without leave

It’s been a long, long time.  In the world of immediacy that is the internet, it’s probably a millennia.  I can practically see the tumbleweed blowing across this page, and the wind whistling mournfully across the emptiness.

We’ll come on to emptiness, fyi…

So, since I’ve been gone, what have I done?  Well, first of all in dieting news (because that is what this blog is about, despite me forgetting this at times), I put on 8lbs over 3 weeks at Christmas.  I have lost that now but it was a shock.  Another shock was weaning myself off drinking more than once a week (and no, I didn’t do Dry January – like January isn’t miserable enough) and thinking that starting the day with a chocolate was acceptable.  Yes, advent calendar, I’m looking at you.  

We’ve booked two trips away – oh, and I have a new job. 

The job: I say I have one, in fact it’s only on paper at the moment.  There’s a long wait to sort out leaving here and starting there, so I won’t be there until April.  And I was offered it in December!  I am terrified.  I have never left a job without being absolutely desperate to escape before.  I won’t say my current job is perfect, but I know I am valued for my contribution, especially with the most senior people here, and that is something I cherish, frankly.  I’m not absolutely sure that at the last moment, I won’t bottle it and refuse to leave.  I practically hyperventilate when I think of it.  But it’s a long time off.  And at the moment it is just me, doing the work of three people in my bit of our wider team so I may get very disenchanted very quickly.

We’re going to the West Country after Easter – this is my birthday present to P.  He’s disappointingly unmaterialistic, which makes him very hard to buy for, but he does like a lovely meal out.  So we’re going to Cornwall, back to Fifteen (one of the best meals we’ve ever had, along with Roux at the Langham).  It’s a long way to go for dinner, but as we’re flying down to Devon, we’re also visiting the B&B in where we got engaged for a couple of nights, as well as a lovely tearoom for lunch in Morewenstow (Cornwall) and a trip to the Camel Valley vineyard.  Weather permitting, we should get two good long walks in – one in Devon and one in Cornwall.

Then we’re going to New York for Christmas.  I did not love New York the one time I went, but I had booked us into a very dodgy bit of Harlem and there were massive protests causing disruption (not about our hotel, though there should have been.  There was old, rusted agricultural implements hanging on the walls for instance.  Or they might have been torture implements, it was hard to tell…).  It will also be different as two of P’s colleagues and their families will be there at roughly the same time – we all overlap for Christmas Day and Boxing Day at least and we’ll all meet up for Christmas Day lunch.  Which is likely to be Chinese.  So it will be very different.  I’ve broken the news to my mother and she’s not impressed.  We’ve yet to tell P’s mother.

But here we are at the beginning of bleak February with Spring just a notion, far into the future, let alone any holidays.  I do hate this time of year – but at least we’re through January.  I’m well and truly back on the My Fitness Pal app, counting all my calories and consistently meeting a daily 1000-1100 allocation.  Much more than this and weight starts to go on.  I am still struggling with moderation – as long as I can count and not have life in the way, I can just about manage.  But days where I have social things, I’m still too prone to think that as I can’t count it, I may as well not count at all that day and have a more lavish lunch and/or sneaky snacks.  I don’t know why I find it so hard.  Other than my appalling lack of willpower, of course.  I am meeting up with a friend on Thursday for a midlife crisis moment (no, no toy boy or motorbike) and we’re going out for dinner afterwards – the adrenaline is likely to lead to wine, which in turn, leads to less restrictive food choices.  It’s just as well that, on the whole, I have a very quiet social life.

This is getting long, so I’ll sign off in just a moment – but I said we’d come back to emptiness.  This is a literal rather than psychological thing (I think), and oh, I’m so fed up of being so hungry.  The band has done nothing for me yet.  I’ve had four “fills” which should stop the feelings of hunger – or rather, partially quell them and I shouldn’t be able to eat large portions.  I think packing on 8lbs over Christmas shows that I haven’t reached that point.  It’s unusual to have no response at all.  Sometimes you initially have that effect after a fill and it settles down a bit.  They’re at the point where I am going to have to have some investigation to see whether I have a leaky band or a baggy pouch.  Both of these sound like something that should be on Embarrassing Bodies (admittedly, I’ve never watched it but…).  If it’s the former I suspect it’s another op.  If it’s the latter, I have to have all the fill taken out and then it de-bags… somehow….  Either way, this would not be good news.  It’s frustrating when it seems like you’re the only person this doesn’t work for.  I’d still have to calorie count – and I am fine with that (kinda) – but I’d like the help we forked out so much for.