Kale Me, We Need to Talk. Diets Suck.

I breathed a lighter sigh on Friday morning than on Monday because I lost two pounds last week. Well, to be honest it was six pounds lighter than the scales read on Monday, but I think I must have inadvertently swallowed some lead with my Rice Krispies on Monday morning, because - I am delighted to say - I woke up on Wednesday and weighed myself to found that I was already 4 pounds lighter than I had thought at the beginning of the week. Phew. My clothing options are ever so slightly wider then, at the end of the week, as my waist is narrower than it was, thank goodness. Still, I intend to stick to my guns and keep up the eating plan. And that plan is soup and kale and more kale, soup, with a bit of chocolate every day to make sure I stay sane.

Yeah. A friend who tells you the truth about dieting. And makes you fart. Some friend.

After yule log + cheese + roast potatoes + beef etc.etc. consumed over Christmas it was a shock to my system to return to a sparser diet, but not as unpleasant as it could have been. I have started to make deliberately healthy choices which provide fewer additives and nutrients to fill me up. And I haven't given up the sweet things: a half Twirl and a sliver of Extremely Chocolatey Sponge Roll (henceforth to be known as ECSR) from beloved M&S are on my menu of choice.

Now you're talking. YUM.

I wonder whether what I've always suspected is true, and whether there really are more calories in foods in the USA. While I was there I ate mostly a diet of egg white omelettes from the hotel kitchen (with a low fat oil spray used instead of a ladleful of butter to cook it!) and Chicken noodle soup or a Subway flat bread 6-inch sandwich for lunch. Admittedly I did sometimes eat burgers, or half a burger if I was not that hungry, for dinner. But this wasn't an everyday thing, and yet I gained weight over my two years in the states and found it very easy to shift when back in the UK and on a diet.

It's supposed to contain fewer than 300 cals but I never lost weight on the Subway diet.

I was exceptionally unmotivated last year because my depression was so severe in December and January. By February things had improved by the introduction of medication and regular CBT sessions. And then I made myself go on a boot camp for 4 days. These four days happened to occur after the dreadful floods which deluged the UK, and getting there at all was quite the challenge.

Fun times at Bootcamp in 2014 walking and running through this.

They were also most amusing because of the presence of a task master Russian émigré cracking her whip with her skinny little arms at us fatties to "Move eet" faster on our walks through flooded fields and near-hurricane strength windy beaches in the south of England. We were fed hot water and lemon at 7.30am, followed by our 2 hour walk, then breakfast of an apple, a juice or a carrot. Lavish.

NOTE: This is 4 times the portion size of my bootcamp. We were allowed one carrot. One.

Following this was an aerobics class for 2 hours (which often made me feel a bit light headed, having consumed about 5 calories since the start of the day. No wonder I lost weight!) and then lunch. Of mostly cabbage. I have to say I would recommend this type of thing only for people who are more sedate and don't want to do much exercise. And then a spa treatment or more walking, dinner of hot cabbage, and then more exercise. And then bed. It was essentially a Starvation Stay in a nice hotel, where you didn't eat but got to spend loads of money on the experience anyway, only to spend even more in the afternoon on spa treatments to take your mind off the fact that you've only eaten an 1/8th of an Able and Cole delivery box over the last 2 days.

Oh please go away.

I've never found dieting at all easy, because I am definitely in my head too much where food is concerned. I have serious and lengthy dialogues with myself saying "If I'm not really fat then I can eat that pasta", but then... "If I am serious about losing weight I can't, even if I don't really need to." And so and so on it goes.

M&S Soups. Tasty and filling and not boring. Yes!

 I'm currently enjoying Marks and Spencer spinach and quinoa and its borlotti bean and kale soups, for the most important reason: that I can actually taste the soup! Since my head trauma my sense of smell has almost gone, and this has also somewhat affected my taste buds. However, the prevalence of kale, which I almost spelled with a capital 'K', such is its (attributed) importance in the world of today's dieters and healthy eating, is a bit off-putting after a while. Not least because I don't want to pass wind as often as I draw breath. But it is quite tasty, and combined with other foods it is nice to know one is eating something healthy. And allows me to eat the ECSR. Every day. Thank goodness for small mercies. Even if that's the only small thing in my diet.

I know, I know. But my blog, my stories. Back to my lettuce now. 

A Fat Lot of Good: January Drear and Diets

I made the catastrophic mistake of weighing myself on Monday. First day back at work and I added to that joy with a painful arm and a horrific number on the scale. And as the writer of this blog, dear reader, I choose to abstain from printing it here. Just know that I'm currently limited to a wardrobe selection of pyjama bottoms that have no elastic left in them, and a reindeer onesie I am supposed to put away after today according to Twelfth night traditions. Oh and some leggings. I am a wearer of leggings now. And giant sweaters.

Yes it's been a stellar week so far. I'm officially on a diet and I know that ahead of me I have weeks of it to come if I have a hope of shifting all the stuffing I have oh so casually stuffed myself with. And I'm delighted that the gabapentin I'm taking as well as the other pain medication and the antidepressants are such a tonic to this diet, for their potential to make people like me, who are, quite frankly, depressed enough without their help, thanks, able to help us to gain weight. It's an overused word, I know, but, frankly, and not without my classic British sarcasm: awesome. And now we add to it the fact I mentioned in my last blog: that another operation on my elbow is needed, meaning more time without being able to swim (it's not the right kind of physio) and only walking as the exercise option. Or cleaning. And let's face it, I'm not writing a blog about being a domestic goddess here. The house is tidy because I'm living mostly in bed.

So, "We get it," I hear you cry. "You're unhappy. It's January. Get over it. (Whatever the 'it' is you wanna focus on. Just get over it. Already." And okay, I should.) But really, this is the best time of year to embrace being miserable. We're all at it. I can scarcely rouse myself from my bed to turn on my laptop in the morning without my eyes moistening at the thought of work. They stayed like that all day today. Moist. Moist when I ate my Rice Krispies (being carefully calculated as part of my get-thinner-even-though-you're-on-weight-gain-meds diet by myFitnessPal). Moist as I went for my lunchtime walk listening to Hard Times (depressing month cause for depressing literature) and moist throughout the rest of the day. Moist now.

Ugh Pills. This is what mealtimes feel like.

Why is January so hard when I can hardly tolerate Christmas and find New Year's Eve stressful too? I would have thought I'd be happy to have it over with. Perhaps it's all those additives and the hangover (both booze and booze-free) from the partaking that has left me in this sorry state. But it is a pretty sorry state. Thankfully, everyone else is miserable too, or so it seems. If August is the silly season for news, January is the dreary destination for deadly dieting and depressingly downcast outlooks. People are giving up or cutting back on the booze (me too), cutting the calories (me too) and getting on the treadmill again (not me too, worse luck). I spent most of yesterday wondering how much of my medication I could forgo for the sake of my figure (I'm an idiot. My arm hurt a lot today.)

Now I'm just saying roll on April. Which is the cruellest month, but by which time I'm hoping I won't need some kind of fat sucking device for my normal jeans to fit, and my darned elbow should be screwed firmly together and actually behaving itself. (I'm giving my body my sternest teacher-like stare.)

The only odd thing I can say amidst this depression is that I can read the most sad and haunting things at my bleakest moments, because it's not the sadness or the despair which is the worst time, it's the feeling that this will never end, and since it may never end, and there's a numbness, why not try poking myself with something really tragic. At twenty one I watched The Ice Storm in such a state. It was the perfect film to get over with while so morose. Today I am going to read a new book on depression, and think about last year when I was travelling back to New York to erase my life there. Unfortunately I think the real life element of the latter is too close to actual trauma, so I will look for fictionalised versions instead. Safer. Distant.

Not an answer to the question: "What's a happy film we can watch?"

I did talk about New York though, and being lonely there while I lived there, recently, so if you want to join me in embarking on exploration of a topic that's important, though not perhaps one to get out with the Christmas crackers or happy birthday music, you can listen to me talking at about 22 minutes in about loneliness on Five Live. They put it on at 00:00 on Boxing Day. I.e. in the small hours when we were all stuffed with turkey, it was already time to stop being cheery (or fake cheery) and start being dreary.

A Life Less Lonely, Radio Five Live

What I think we need is a #joinin for January. In fact that's it: #joininjanuary. Who can come up with the most sardonic tweet for jaundiced January? I challenge you, reader, to join me and cheer me up by telling me that your tape measure doesn't go round your waist either, and that you've got your old step out from behind the wardrobe / from the greenhouse where you were using it as a shelf for pot plants. If you've managed to slice open your finger as my friend Lucy has whilst being middle class using a mandolin (it's a dangerous way to live, the middle class life) or similar, then #joininjanuary. And by the way, I'm still eating a few nice things on my diet hoping not to fall off the wagon before the pounds fall off first. So thanks, Marks and Spencer, for keeping your Extremely Chocolately Roll in stock. I may only have a sliver, but it's enough to make my eyes water. In a good way.