The five stages of baking

I bought the ingredients for macaroons this week in the vain hope that I’d produce these lovely little things and save myself shed-loads of money (have you noticed how expensive they are to buy?) Of course I haven’t made them yet, who knows if I ever will, but it has prompted these thoughts about my rather complicated relationship to baking.

This relationship can be summed up thus: I like eating sweet things but am rather lazy and lack attention to detail. Here is a picture of my butterfly cakes:

A bit burnt, slightly misshapen, kinda small.

I have detailed what, for me, are the five stages of baking below.

The five stages of baking.

1. Hope - foolish optimism that I will be able to bake a thing that resembles the thing in the picture.
2. Dismay - this whole procedure seems to be a whole lot more complicated and drawn out than I’d envisaged.
3. Rage - why, oh why, oh why did I ever try and embark on this!
4. Despair - the kitchen is a mess, I've ruined at least one implement and there is a sticky layer on the counter that can’t be removed by some half-hearted rubbing.
5. Resignation - ah, maybe they don’t look so bad after all. O.K. so I used self raising flour instead of plain and salted butter instead of salted and there seems to be some kind of subsidence issue going on there but never mind! Anyway, I owe it to the sisterhood to be crap at baking and cooking as I don’t want to turn into some frilly-apron-bedecked Stepford wife.

I'll just leave you with a picture of the butterfly cakes my husband made:

Irritating, no...?

The holiday illness hypothesis

As surely as day follows night, a crass, insensitive and woefully misinformed opinion piece by Katie Hopkins follows an atrocity and Peter Stringfellow follows a seventeen year old girl around his nightclub, one or both of my children will get ill when there is a school holiday.

I should have known which way the wind was blowing, this time five years ago, when every one of our Easter weekend plans had to be cancelled because the baby had a virulent stomach bug. This was the start of a rather frustrating trend. I won’t bore you with all the tedious details, I’ll just give you a précis of the last two years. In non-chronological order: last Easter it was chicken pox, the last two Christmases, it’s been flu. Spring half term of last year it was the norovirus and this Easter it’s a chest infection!

The youngest was ill a couple of weeks ago but it seemed safely in advance of the holidays and she dutifully recovered. But then her older sister got ill last weekend (the rather alarming sounding) Scarlet Fever was doing the rounds at her school. I took her to the doctor on Monday and she didn't have Scarlet Fever but a vague, ill defined malaise. She’s been coughing all week and this seemed to reach an apex last night with a continuous hack that sounded like something straight out of a Dickensian workhouse. (I'm sorry if this makes me sound unsympathetic; I joke to hide the worry and pain...The temperature reading in the picture shows my other half's temp, BTW, he was monitoring this every hour when he was off sick the other day and texting me the results!)

So today, at 8 a.m on Good Friday, I duly trotted down to the walk-in centre with her. I don't know if you noticed but it was a brilliant, yellow morning.

“I wish it was raining!” Snarled my daughter.

Now, people who have never met my daughter but know me, might think that this miserablist attitude indicates that she’s a chip off the old block. The thing is - she isn't! She’s an extrovert and an enthusiast and (usually) as cheery and ebullient a 5 year old as you’d ever hope to meet. Lack of sleep, feeling run down and missing so much school, must have taken its toll (I know the feeling!)

“I don’t want to go to the doctors!” She said.

“I know.” I said. “But’s let’s just get this bit of unpleasantness out of the way and then we can have fun. We can go to the park...we can watch a D.V.D.”

“I don’t want to go to the park and I don’t want to watch a D.V.D!” She said, grumpily.

I could go on detailing our conversation but I think you get the gist.

Anyway, we saw a really lovely female doctor (I've made my peace with the fact that many doctors seem to be younger than me these days…) Daughter cheered right up and behaved exemplarily. We got given a prescription. We wasted some time in the coffee shop while we waited for the chemist to open. My daughter stung me for a smoked salmon sandwich! (Are you sure you’re going to eat this? It’s very expensive. Reader - I think you can guess how this story ended…) I had a latte and a cheese and tomato toastie (v nice!). The pharmacist told my daughter that she hoped she got better soon. And all the way home I was thinking - gawd bless the N.H.S! (I am an atheist so perhaps this is hypocritical - perhaps I should have been thinking Bevan bless the N.H.S!)

Postscript:

We almost tempted the gods (as in Greek gods - those capricious bastards) by booking a holiday this Easter. It would have involved passports, flights and everything! Thankfully our own laziness and lack of motivation prevented this.

So I've been lurking on Facebook and Twitter today, casting envious and rather resentful glances at other people’s holiday snaps. The thing is, and perhaps this is me changing a habit of a lifetime and becoming an optimist, they’ll be other sunny days! (There will be, right??)

P.P.S I am aware that when I wrote the diary of an introvert the other day that I promised to write something more exciting next time - I'm well aware that this isn't it! But I do need to keep my hand in with this blogging business so, as you may imagine, I'm rather limited as to subject matter at the moment!

Finding a Voice

I read a piece by Julie Birchill once, where she talked about writing being a way of having a proper, authoritative, grown-up voice. She felt this way because her own speaking voice, she wrote, was so breathy and childlike. Whilst I don’t particularly like my voice. (You know when you hear yourself leaving an answer machine message and you think - who the hell is that? Far too nasal and high in register) I don’t feel that it is particularly girlish or childlike. What I identified with, in the whole finding a voice thing, was that, as someone who was basically shy and found big groups of people difficult, writing was a way of expressing myself - a way of being heard. 

Are you a shy person? Does the word ‘networking’, especially when applied to a work function, fill you with dread? Do you spend too long formulating answers, only to find that in the meantime, the person asking the question has got bored and moved on? Do you have a problem with job interviews? Family functions?

Sometimes I think that in every introvert there resides a massive show-off who is just desperate to break through the restraints of convention and shout - ‘look at me, look at me - I am here!!!’ This is evidenced by the shy actors and performers you come across, giving awkward, sullen-seeming interviews, mumbling into their water and being monosyllabic. Yet, on stage and screen they give effervescent, magnetic performances. They are drawing your eye and attention to them.  They like being centre of attention in the context of a work of art, but not in their real life.

Writers are not that different. The writer wants your attention, even if they go about it in a less direct way, they still crave it. And, arguably, they also want your approval. Even the sardonic, verbal acrobat Will Self (writer) once said in an interview that, with his writing he was no different from the schoolboy, buying sweets for his friends to try and get them to like him. (If that’s really the case then write something a bit more accessible, Will! His sweets would be the equivalent of someone telling you that they had a treat for you, then chucking  a packet of Fishermen’s Friends in your lap; if you’ve never had a Fisherman’s Friend, imagine that someone has taken a ball of earwax, injected tar into it, left it out in the sun to dry then rolled it in soluble aspirin. ;) )

So here I am - have I got your attention? No, don’t scroll through your phone in the meantime. LISTEN.

Just checking.

So, if I'm so shy and reserved and such an introvert, then what am I doing drawing attention to myself by creating a page for my blog? I think I've already answered that question, haven’t I? The introvert who secretly wants to be the centre of attention (did I mention that it was my childhood ambition to become an actor?)

Not just that though. If I do have your attention then I want to tell you something - come closer...I think that I can make us both happier. No, really, I know it’s a bold claim and it sounds like something that Paul (‘I can make you thin’ - no you can’t, Paul!) McKenna might say. I think that I can make us a little bit happier by a joint endeavour to do two things. Just two things; a little start in the whole happiness game. These two things are hardly scientific breakthroughs - you will probably have heard different people saying these things at some time or another, but I want to restate them here and make an attempt to focus on them. So these two things are:

1. Stop comparing yourself to other people

Don’t worry about what they've achieved and you haven’t. Don’t worry about the things that they have in their life that appear to be missing from yours.

Just keep on swimming.

Does that sound all bullshit and touchy-feely? I don’t care.

I don’t  mean that you should let go of your aspirations and stop trying - quite the opposite, what I mean is just focus on your own goals and don’t worry about anyone else.

2) Don’t regret the things that you haven’t done.

No point looking back into the past and regretting the travelling you didn't do or the musical instrument you didn't take up - you can’t change anything about the past, all you can do is either plan to do that stuff now, or shelve it and move on.

Now, let’s do that together shall we. (Sorry if that sounds patronising) I need to take my own advice and I think that you might find it beneficial if you did too, dear reader, because, I've really become rather fond of you over the last couple of pages.

Good luck!

The Diary of an Introvert

Wednesday

Got up, had shower, failed to get published!

Or, to go into finer detail:

Morning:

Tried to explain what a period was to my daughter (after she had picked a tampon up and asked what it was). Didn’t want to traumatise her too much with talk of blood. Talked about eggs and babies, to which she replied - ‘Mummy - have you laid a egg?’ (am quoting her verbatim, she said ‘a egg’ not ‘an egg’) I laughed.

Forced self to walk to work and was glad - very glad!

I love walking - esp when it is a clear bright day like today, but, as this is the diary of an introvert, I must touch on that aspect of it, I like walking to work as it means that I don’t have to get the bus with other people!

Midday-ish

Walked into town to meet him indoors for lunch. Almost everyone I met on the way pissed me off in some way; from the grown man on a skateboard, to the lairy sixth-formers with their shouty voices, to the man in the post office who didn’t say ‘thank you’ (tosser!) Am aware that all of this makes me sound more like a misanthrope than an introvert so will blame it on my hormones (I’m allowed to do that - you’re not.)

Anyway, was massively perked up by lunch! Of course, being a bit of a foodie (or a fattie, if you’re more cruelly inclined) lunch is often one of the high points of my day. Today, me and the old man shared a ‘Cheeky sharing platter’ or somesuch, from The Cheeky Pea in Kingston. I don’t normally do other people’s advertising for them, but, 1) They are lovely and friendly in there and I like them and 2) the food is lovely and 3) Hardly anyone reads this blog.

Here is the photographic evidence - cos, like, everyone loves a picture of some food, don’t they! ;)

Evening:

Got kids ready for bed with minimal threats (get your pyjamas on now or you won’t be able to have__ in bed with you - insert name of toy here)

Home alone with the keys to the T.V controls. Husband had texted to say he was going to the pub (without the requisite 24 hours notice, am not bothered, but will store this up in the virtual tally for when I want to go to the pub on a whim).

Pyjamas, slippers, hot chocolate.

Need to make a resolution not to turn P.C on in evening unless am prepared to do anything creative on it! Need to impose a social media embargo, starting from 9pm or 21:00 hours (to pinch a gag from ‘Spaced’.) Because the news filters through in all channels and can be disruptive to sleep and equilibrium.

So, that’s it for now - banality on a plate! Will try and pitch up with something more exciting next time. Ooh, feel need to end this with a positive, life-affirming message. Crikey, what can it be???

The evenings are getting longer and lighter, aren’t they!

Au revoir, gentle reader.

International Women’s Day

If you don’t think that there is a need for International Women’s Day, let me just remind you that:

1. Women still only control 1% of the World’s wealth
2. Women only own 5% of the wealth in the U.K.
3. Although women make up 51% of the population, we comprise only 29% of MPs, 22% of professors, 15.6% senior judges.
4. The prevalence of forced marriage/Child marriage: Every day around 25,000 girls under the age of 18 are married, 1 in 7 is under the age of 15. http://www.plan-uk.org/
5. In many parts of the world, baby girls being are being murdered or abandoned because they are seen as a burden to the family.
6. The fact that F.G.M Female Genital Mutilation, still goes on! One of the many oranisations that tackles this issue: http://forwarduk.org.uk/key-issues/fgm/
7. The way that the criminal justice system treats victims of abuse and sexual assault: What was the accuser wearing? If she was wearing something that was deemed to be provocative, then she was sending out a signal about sexual availability. (Can you imagine a man being blamed for being sexually assaulted because he was wearing shorts? What about those men who remove their shirts as soon as the temperature goes over 19 degrees - are they asking to be raped?) How late was she out at night. Was she asking for it? I could write a very long essay about this, so let’s get on to masturbation.

8. If you think that we live in a more enlightened society, here in the West, I’d like you to take a minute to think about masturbation - yes, really think about it. Think about the fact that men freely admit to it but for for many women, it’s still a slightly taboo subject. Yes, there’s giggly, sniggering talk of Ann Summers Rampant Rabbits but for a large part (snigger), it is generally accepted that boys are constantly wanking but that if girls do it, there might be something wrong with them.

At school the conversation around what the (young, schoolkid) couples got up to centred around how ‘loose’ a girl was - ie what she had ‘let’ a boy do to her. There was no acknowledgement of a girl’s own sexual desire, what she herself may have wanted to do, it was all about what she had permitted the boy to do. So, her body was a bargaining tool and the liberties she allowed to be taken, determined her moral standing. The whole slag/stud dichotomy is as old as time, it’s as old as the virgin/whore split.

(If you get the feeling that I haven’t really thought this through properly, then you’d be right. I’ve just done an Internet search for books about masturbation and it came out with plenty of books for women and young girls on the subject - perhaps it's not as taboo a subject as I first thought.)

I think that it’s a really critical design flaw that a woman doesn’t actually need to have an *orgasm to get pregnant, whereas a man pretty much needs to present the goods to keep his half of the bargain.

*We are told that having an orgasm helps with conception but it is far from essential. What the hell is that about, eh!?

At the risk of sounding misandrist (man-hating!) I also think that the male anatomy, in itself, has a very basic design flaw and that everybody would be a lot happier if his member came with a little nodule at the base that stimulated the clitoris during sex. Is this the root of gender inequality, I wonder? The fact that the act needed to reproduce the human race is inherently pleasurable to a man but not necessarily to a woman? I found it both amusing and perplexing that all Christian Grey, from Fifty Shades of bollox, had to do to Ana was to tell her to come and she came! She ‘exploded’ around him. No external stimulation was needed. Thus perpetuating the *myth of the vaginal orgasm. Thanks a bunch for that, E.L James, you cynical, moronic millionaire!

*O.K so it may not be a myth exactly but rather a rare thing, on a par with a four leaf clover.

So, when you are on your tea break at work today, I’d urge you to talk about all the groundbreaking, trailblazing women; talk about Ada Lovelace, the Pankhursts, Sojourner Truth, Rosa Luxemburg, Germaine Greer, Rosa Parks, Shami Chakrabarti, Mary Beard….the list goes on and on. But, also, talk about masturbation - go on, start a conversation about it, I dare you, woman to woman. Don’t talk about diets or last night’s T.V. Start a conversation about wanking (is it still called wanking when women do it?) When did they first start doing it? Who do they think about when they do it? Do they think about anyone at all? I would start the conversation myself but I’m not at work today!

What’s that you say? You think I should bring it up at the school run?

‘Hi there, how’s it going?’

‘Freezing, isn’t it?’

‘They say it’s Spring, but…’

‘No, I haven’t signed her up for any of the after school clubs - she says she doesn’t want to do anything….’

‘Oh, can I just ask you a question? How old were you when you first started masturbating?’

I’ll just leave you with this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leHeUWjGYSA

The Missing Piece

I’ve been compelled to write about my experience of depression. Here it is below.

At the age of sixteen this thing crept up on me and it felt like someone had come along with an axe and chopped my feet away from beneath me. Then, with that same weapon, they had hacked a triangle out of my outline. That was exactly what it felt like; both that the whole world had shifted on its axis and that something vital was missing. And yet, nothing had happened - there was no *external reason for feeling like this, but I was simply floored by depression. This depression wasn’t just immense sadness, it also comprised almost constant panic, I feared that I was going mad. Nothing felt safe, the sky was going to fall in any minute, the ground was dissolving and I couldn’t get a toehold, I was slipping away with all the cascading debris.

What this actually meant was I could be sitting at a table, talking to somebody but would then tune out and see myself, as if from above, looking down at this figure - who was she? (This, apparently is dissociation - I didn’t know the word then). I had a terrible world view: everything was shit; we were all doomed, there was no kindness anywhere.  (It didn’t help that we were covering the rise of Hitler in ‘A’ level history, at the time!). A sympathetic teacher put it succinctly - ‘You are seeing the world through shit-tinted glasses’. Yes, Mr. T, you will probably never read this but yes I was!

What made it worse was that I didn’t feel that I had a right to these feelings.! What right had I to feel depressed when I had a roof over my head, enough to eat, good friends, was lucky enough to be able to pursue my education? I wasn’t a displaced victim of war, I wasn’t being raped by soldiers, I lived in a country with a welfare state.  The knowledge of this compounded my depression - how much worse to feel that I was being self-indulgent, narcissistic, solipsistic (I feel all of those things in writing this post, actually!) The point was though, it wasn't a deliberate thing, I didn’t want to feel like this, I didn’t choose it - I couldn’t ‘pull myself together’, I was unravelling.

I searched for the missing piece constantly; I looked through old photos to see if I could find it there. I had my iron levels tested - perhaps there was a physical reason for this malaise? I had just turned vegetarian, maybe I just needed iron tablets.

Suicide seemed seductive - an end to the pain, if it got that bad then perhaps I could just check out? I sat in a travel agent with some family and friends and booked a holiday for seven months into the future; wondering if I’d still be around in seven months.

The only thing that helped at the time was that I had a group of amazing friends and we went out all the time. I know that this doesn’t fit with the traditional picture of the depressed teenager, sitting alone in their room all the time, but it was how I coped. I had to keep constantly busy, always doing something, always occupied; anything that would take me away from myself. And the great thing about these friends was; I didn’t have to pretend to be ‘normal’ with them and I didn’t have to pretend to be happy. It’s not that we didn’t have any laughs - we did! We went to gigs, we went to pubs, we went to seedy little house parties (I haven’t just stolen the plot of ‘The Perks of being a Wallflower’, this was what our lives were like too - only in much smaller houses!). We reeked of joss sticks and patchouli oil, we listened to great music and talked about how shit our home town was (again, seems like it was stolen from a film). I wonder now whether these friends saved my life. If nothing else, they certainly alleviated the feeling of acute isolation. But I still needed to talk to someone about the depression - I was still desperate to locate that missing piece; it’s absence was felt every time I was on my own. I went to the doctor, hoping that she would refer me for some counselling, I came away with a prescription for diazepam and anti-depressants. I didn’t realise that diazepam was the trade name for valium but I did know that it was addictive so I ended up flushing the tablets down the toilet. For someone who often dealt (deals) with things by eating too much, getting pissed and/or stoned, this was quite a wise move. I’d like to give my sixteen year old self - look at her there with her thick eyebrows, sullen expression and love-beads, a pat on the back for this. I was self-destructive, but this was an act of self-preservation. This is no judgement on anyone who has even taken valium and certainly not (a judgement) on someone who takes anti-depressants, but they weren’t the right thing for me. The right thing for me was therapy, I wanted to talk to someone, and I finally sought it out (and could afford it) eleven years later, aged 27.

*I said that there was no external reason/cause for my depression, I discovered that there actually was, but I’m not going to talk about it here.

What I am going to talk about is what therapy has done for me. If you are the sort of person who wants to see visible, tangible results then I will give you a concrete list of the benefits.

So, there I was, 27 years of age, not actually depressed anymore but in a state of arrested development:

1. I had a long term boyfriend but was still living at home with my Mum - lovely as she is, this was not a great situation for either of us. After less than a year of therapy, I finally moved out. (and lived happily ever after in a thatched cottage by the sea….ha, ha, ha.)
2. My first job after leaving university was a part-time position in a clothes shop! I constantly undersold myself, thought that I was crap at everything and took jobs that I was overqualified for. I let other people undervalue me too - the manager at the shop used to tell me that i was lazy-minded!

O.K. so these days I am overqualified for the job that I am doing but the difference is that now I recognise this and it is actually a deliberate choice. (believe it or not, dear reader, I wanted to free up more time and headspace to write - and look at how well that turned out…)

3) When people said negative things to me, I believed them wholeheartedly.

Now, most of us get shit thrown at us in our lives and are perhaps told that we are: fat, ugly, weird, lazy-minded, useless, stupid!  The difference is that if you are coming from the point of extreme low self-esteem, perhaps even self-loathing, you are less able to shrug it off, see it for it is (THEIR problem and NOT yours; they are probably projecting their own issues onto you and lack the self-awareness to see it). If you don’t have a core feeling of self-belief or even a zen like absence of ego then you tend to internalise all the negativity. If you have good self-esteem then you can mostly just ignore it and move one.

Post therapy - I’m working on it!

4) I thought of marriage as a kind of a death!

Now my life is like living in a puffy, marshmallow cloud of a Mills n Boon novel… ;)

5) I never wanted to have kids because I thought that I would make the worst mother in the world.

Hmmm - still struggle with this a bit and feel like the worst mother but sometimes look at the children, acknowledge that perhaps it’s not all down to their brilliant Dad and maybe am not doing such a bad job after all. The point is that, as someone who is still going to counselling, at least I have someone (non-judgemental, qualified, unrelated) to talk to about it.

The sort of therapy that I go in for is long term, psychodynamic. My counsellor is a Freudian practitioner. I found her by writing to the British Association of Counselling: http://www.bacp.co.uk/

Therapy/counselling is expensive but most practitioners work on a sliding scale; where they take your salary into account and charge you accordingly. You might be able to get a referral from a sympathetic G.P. for some free counselling. This will mainly be for short term counselling, possibly for C.B.T. (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy - works for some, not all).

You also have to be receptive to it, to work at it and be prepared to feel like an open wound sometimes - buy a pair of sunglasses.

Of course there are the Samaritans:

http://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help-you?gclid=CjwKEAiAo7C2BRDgqODGq5r38DsSJAAv7dTPOajMafInRaHvlWBTXoUCalAlRQdFiwXMq7sFxosrYhoCCnHw_wcB

There is NO SHAME in seeking out counselling - if you had a sports injury, you wouldn’t see anything amiss in seeing a physiotherapist so why not see a therapist if you are feeling consistently unhappy.

Why am I writing this now? Dunno really, maybe I am feeling a bit down - I still do feel like that from time to time but it’s never as bad or as long lasting as that first time (which lasted for about a year and gradually lifted). Perhaps I just needed to see how far I had come. Publishing this does feel like an exposure but, as I writer, I think that you owe it to yourself and to your imaginary reader to be honest.

This post is kind of a paen to therapy but please don’t think that I look askance at anyone for coping by using medication - whatever works best for you! I’ve become a bit of an armchair psychologist over the years and have read that if you are an introvert (like me) then you are more likely to suffer from depression (if you suffer with anything psychological) and be more comfortable with examining your feelings. If you are an extrovert, then you may be more likely to suffer from panic attacks, be less comfortable with discussing feelings and seek an external solution.

In no particular order, here are some good books, T.V and films on the subject:

Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married by Marian Keyes - yes, a chick-lit book but with the most accurate description/depiction of depression (my experience of it, anyway!) that I have ever read.

My Mad, Fat Diary - book and T.V series, both are ace. A young woman who has spent some time in a psychiatric ward; dealing with body issues, mental illness and family strife.

Inside Out  - yes, I do mean the Disney Pixar film! How do Pixar do it? They deal with heavyweight themes with more sensitivity and alacrity than most adult films.

How to be Happy: Lessons from Making Slough Happy By Liz Hoggard. It only really scratches the surface but it’s a start.

Families and how to survive them - by John Cleese and Robin Skynner

Anyway, I don’t know about you but I’m exhausted now! Well done if you persevered with this until the bitter end. Go away and reward yourself with a hot drink, give yourself a hug and be reassured that you are not alone.

The Weighty Issue: Part Two. Goal Weight nearly reached

I hesitated before posting this. It all seems a bit narcissistic (but then again, this is a Blog, what do you expect?) But it’s all a bit

“Look at me, look at me! - I’ve lost weight!!”

(But, honestly; have you seen me? I have lost weight! ;)).

I’m not skinny now and I don’t have this toned, buff body but I am now comfortably within the ‘healthy’ range of the BMI charts, which was my goal. If you want facts and figures then I’ve lost nearly two stone since January.

Why am I writing about it? Is it that important in the great scheme of things? Probably not, particularly as I detest body fascism (or fascism of any kind, for that matter). I really don’t like the way in which your worth, especially if you are female, is tied up with how much space you take up or how much flesh oozes over the top of your jeans. But weight isn’t just about aesthetics, is it, it is also about health. According to NICE In 2007, the direct cost of obesity to the NHS was £2.3 billion and the direct cost of being overweight, but not obese, was £1.9 billion (Foresight tackling obesities: Future choices).

A more recent estimate of the direct cost to the NHS in 2006/07 of people being overweight and obese was £5.1 billion.

So I thought I would share how I reduced my weight, and a couple of the positive side effects of being more active, just in case anyone else was interested in doing the same thing.

People are a bit brutal about the whole weight thing aren’t they? They say; it’s just calories in vs calories out, as if any of us who are overweight are just plain stupid. Move a bit more, eat a bit less, they say, but again, it is getting the motivation to do this and doing it in such a way that doesn’t feel as if you are going to be living the rest of life as some kind of ascetic; wearing hair shirts, drinking tepid water and eating nothing but raw kale. In the past I have just given up on the whole attempting to reduce my weight thing, citing the ‘you only live once and I want to enjoy my life’ ethos as an excuse for abandoning the diet. (A quick word about the word diet here, I hate it and avoid it at all costs. I do believe that traditional ‘dieting’ makes you fat and as soon as you tell yourself that you are on a diet, you will unconsciously try to sabotage yourself as an act of rebellion...Or, is that just me?)

You may think that I’m being disingenuous here and that there is no way to lose weight without being on a ‘diet’. And, yes, I have lost weight partly through eating less, but I don’t consider what I did and am still doing to be a diet, not in the traditional sense. I ate/still eat the same food, just less of it. I do try and stick to a daily calorie limit and I do eat relatively healthily but I also have the odd bit of chocolate and glass or two of wine (two of my favourite things in the world), just probably less than I used to. And if I eat toast, I’ll have one slice instead of two (but I do have butter on it - meticulously weighed out). So that whole - ‘eat a bit less, move a bit more thing’ can be ever so slightly expanded upon in my case in that:

1. I did and still do lots and lots of walking
2. I did and still do Calorie counting

Firstly, the walking:

Walking is brilliant: it’s free, you don’t get (terribly) sweaty and you don’t need any fancy equipment. It’s good if you can monitor how much you are doing. I got myself a Fitbit tracker* and aim to do 10,000 steps a day. I usually meet my goal; even if it means stomping around our tiny living room for half an hour, avoiding perilously placed toys and children’s hands as I go. Whether you are hiking around the lakes, walking along a dual carriageway or moving from living room to kitchen and back again in an endless loop (like a caged polar bear) you are still moving and it still counts (despite the fact that my husband says it’s cheating). You know those patronising magazine articles, where they tell you that perhaps you should try and make small changes and get off a bus stop earlier to build more exercise in your life, I think that it would be more realistic if they told you to get off four stops earlier, or skip a bus journey all together.

*other fitness trackers are available.

The calorie counting:

I used and still use an online calorie counting ap (I’m sure you know the one I mean but I won’t do their advertising for them). The great thing about the fitness tracker is that it syncs in with the calorie diary thingy and tells you how many calories you’ve earned through exercise. So you know exactly how many calories you can eat. This panders to the anally retentive part of me that loves to be in control and know exactly what I’m dealing with, it’s far more accurate than thinking - oh yeah, I walked to the shops, how long did it take? Was it fast or slow pace? And trying to add it manually to the food diary. You might think that this calorie counting spoils your enjoyment of food but I have found that, for the most part, it is helpful to know that you can happily dig into that jacket potato with gay abandon and know that you still have enough calories left for your dinner later on in the day. I’m not saying that I never feel hungry but then being hungry isn’t so scary and helps enhance your enjoyment of your next meal. (I’m fully aware that I sound rather sanctimonious here, so sorry, but our society is geared towards us eating and consuming constantly and never experiencing hunger which is very unhealthy!)

So anyway, this combination worked for me; try it, don’t try it, it’s up to you. We all know that exercise is good for us. My other half wears the fitness tracker too and his blood pressure has gone down since he’s been using it. I find that I sleep better and find it easier to destress. So, just as weight is not just about appearance, exercise isn’t just about losing weight. (Again, apologies for the sanctimony, bit hard to write about weight loss without it.)

Now that I’ve lost weight, can I now bear seeing photographs of me and do I now feel happier and more confident in my own skin? No! Now my insecurities have found myriad other channels, but that’s another issue, right, just focus on the partner’s lowered blood pressure and my better sleep!

NOTE: I am very well aware though that this weight loss is only significant if I can maintain it, so come back and see me this time next year, where, hopefully I won’t be looking like the librarian from the Blade films.‘bye…