New year, old me

Oh January – I really hate you. 

Today is my first day back at work – I chickened out of the first Monday of the new year and it’s as well I did as I had a migraine.  Always fun for a day off.  It was notable that there were not too many new year’s resolutions around cleanliness in my tube carriage this morning.

But of course, one of the reasons I hate January is the whole resolution business.  It feels like having my nose firmly rubbed in my own imperfections.  And that’s a lot of rubbing.  Of course, I know the elephant in the room is, well, me.  And tbh after a period of indulgence, dieting was always going to be back on the, er, menu.  It just seems more loaded this way.  Not in the way of a potato skin, you understand.

Still, I bit the bullet and dragged a skulking Scales of Doom from the dusty dimness of under the bed.  I can’t be sure exactly, but I think I put on 3 ½ lbs.  I can’t remember the last time I weighed and what with being ill for most of December, had stopped with the dieting and daily weighing some time before Christmas (a week or two I think).  Still, that 3 ½ lbs is kind of false, given that I’d put on 3lbs before that – so I guess over the festive period I put on about half a stone – and catapulted myself back out of the 2st loss.  It’s at this point I feel hopeful that it will come off equally as fast – hope which has never actually come to fruition yet.

I was actually more temperate than normal over Christmas.  I didn’t feel that desperation to eat anything I might conceivably want to eat over the next 6 months but not allow myself.  But I drank wine every day and, I think, had pudding every day so it’s none too surprising I guess.  Unsurprising but inevitably disappointing.

And the January plus re-dieting effect was exacerbated today when I put on an old coat which is really too tight.  Nothing calculated to make you feel as miserable as too-tight clothing.  I’m wearing my mac tomorrow, regardless of temperature.  What’s really annoying, coat-wise, is that I have a beautiful (tweed!) coat that P bought me in c2010 which I strongly suspect is still too small.  I daren’t try it on for the misery it will cause me once this is confirmed.  I keep telling myself that once I tip under the next stone bracket I’ll woman up and try it on.  Unfortunately that is now 11.5lbs away, rather than 5lbs away.  It could be summer by then.....  And I’m not even sure I mean summer this year.

How was your Christmas dear Reader?  I used to love Christmas – until quite recently in fact – but over the last few years, much as I’ve tried to hold on to that magical feeling, it’s ebbed away.  This year I pretty much had a panic attack over the whole thing.  It was sparked by a silly row with P (over nothing, obvs) but I realise that the pressure to have a perfect day is just too intense for me – it makes me feel really low.  It was less bad than I’d feared though – we went to my mother’s for the day.  She is the least motherly mother in the world and I had envisaged a day where I did all the work and did not even get to be in my own home, whilst having to prop her up and arbitrate spats between her and P.  But it was all fine and she actually offered and made me a sandwich, a real rarity (the offer of and provision of food, not the actual consumption of sandwiches) – and we were late and she was okay about that and didn’t start going on about the impact of the dogs of us not being there to take them out first thing (she is herself Queen of Late but somehow this gets overlooked).  I am still marvelling over that sandwich.

The fact remains that the combination of all the sadness and anxiety about Christmas, the dieting and weight thing and the (for me) inevitable January blues means I’m struggling a bit with life at the moment.  I suppose it’s lucky that life doesn’t do much in January and I can lick my wounds from my sofa and wait (or is it ‘weight’?!) for better days.