How I lost four stone - without trying

There is so much to say, so much that is mad and magical and sheer fecking fun!  Really. Not really. There is nothing and there is everything. There is reality and unreality. There is sorcery and alchemy and dancing and music and and and…  But I know what you want, what you really really want… (well, so many of you).  Midlifesinglemum said it yesterday:

Could we have the how to lose four stone post quite soon please. Ta

Weight loss eh?  The holy grail of Western society.  It will come of course – mechanically, chemically – at some point. Scientists will develop food that provides taste and bulk and mouth feel with zero calories.  Nanobots will scurry away fat. In the meantime, of course, you can cut it away or you can have a band or a balloon inserted that will make it nigh-on impossible to stuff yourself.   But if you don’t want to wait and you don’t want or can’t afford surgery?  

Okay, so you want to know how I lost weight, right?  Well, there’s good news and bad news.

Good news?  It was really easy.

Bad news? You probably wouldn’t want to do it. 

You really really want to know how I lost weight? How I dropped, what? About three stone in four months, or somewhere about that...(I forget, to be honest) and then another one after that. Easily. Effortlessly.
I stopped eating. 

Okay, I did eat…but not much. Because, simply put, I was eating WAY too much.

But honestly, that was it.  Calories in; calories out. 

But... but... but... but... BUT... BUT!!!…..  

It’s okay, I can hear you. J  I understand.  Cos that was me shouting but but but – for pretty well all my life.  Read back through my old blog posts if you don’t believe me.

What did my ‘buts’ used to say?  I love food! I eat barely anything and still put on weight! It’s my hormones; my metabolism; my bone structure, my ayurvedic prakruti for pity's sake!  I have to cook for other people. Other people cook for me. I take medication which makes me fat. I have a condition which makes me fat.  Etc etc etc.

Yes, there are conditions and foods that will make it harder to lose weight (and we’ll talk about that later) and there are the odd exceptions *flurry of hands waving*.  But, let’s just accept for now that if you have a lot of weight to lose (I'm not talking about the odd few pounds) the vast majority of us could lose it by eating less - if we choose?  If I've lost you here, then that's fine - there are a gazillion sites out there that will talk about hidden reasons and the fine-tuning. I went looking for a good one that would give you all the science and wotnot without charging you for the privilege but that proved tricky. Feel free to post any links in the comments... 

For those still here, shall we assume it’s mental?  That it’s our minds telling our bodies they need too much food (actually I’d say the two are pretty entangled, but let’s keep it simple right now eh?). So what do you do? 

I have no idea! 

Because I’m not you. And I’m not a diet guru, thank feck!  I can tell you what I did and I will, and - if you’re interested - you're welcome to listen.  But please, it’s what I did. It’s what I thought or didn’t think.  It is different for you. I can’t take responsibility for your body.  Nobody can.  Just you. 

I spent years making excuses for not having a slim healthy fit body. YEARS. DECADES. I blamed my mother. I blamed my childhood. I blamed my school. I blamed my job. I blamed my first father. I blamed my second father. I blamed my friends. I blamed my boss. I blamed my husband. I blamed my child. I blamed boredom. I blamed fear. I blamed magazines. I blamed TV. I blamed celebrities. I blamed my lack of will-power. I blamed..oh shit, I’m bored of listing what and whom I blamed. You get the picture.

One thing I would just say at this point.  Not losing weight takes a lot of energy. A lot. Not losing weight occupies the mind.  It can be another form of distraction. It can be a way of stopping yourself from focusing on other things that May Be Scary.  Sooo… one thing that could be interesting might be possibly, if you like, if you want, to ask yourself – If I weren’t fat, what might I think, what might I have to confront?  Or not. J

I’ll carry on with this tomorrow.  I would like to make one thing really REALLY clear. In fact, preface any comment you make on this with 'Jane, I understand this is you talking about you. You are not talking about me, and I take full responsibility for my own mind, my own body and my own health.'  

Cos this is not me being the responsible journalist or health writer or whatever. This is just me telling you about my madcap trip.  That’s all.  I am NOT saying do what I did. Let's be honest, it really isn’t the best or safest or most sensible way to lose weight. There are a million people out there who will tell you how to do that, if you want to be told.  If you really want a guru for this, then Pete Cohen ain’t bad…(hey, he even calls himself a guru! What was I saying yesterday about how I hate gurus?  J  Marek talks about it in Symphonic Bridges too of course. Obliquely of course. And you have to dig around a bit - but it is there, somewhen or other.  ;) 

If my secretary (I kept misspelling that as secretally…lol!) turns up for work, he may choose to take questions on this.  I dunno.  J  Or maybe not. 

Feeding Size Zero Mother (with no help whatsoever from Nigella Lawson)

I have been a bit down lately. Nothing warranting hugs or pictures (honestly, truly, please don't), just a low-level not-as-good-as-I-should-be. Partly it’s because I’ve had a recurrence of the reactive arthritis I developed after catching a virus in Italy three years ago. But mainly it’s because Size Zero mother is doing her level best to drive me demented. Her weird eating habits have been getting so extreme of late that Something Had To Be Done. I tried to get her meals on wheels but, faced with her incredibly long (and in many parts totally inexplicable) list of culinary pass-nots, they shrugged their shoulders and ran for the door. Supermarket read-meals are a no-go area for much the same reason. So now I am cooking for her, running up batches of food, freezing them and racing them over every so often.
This is, shall we say, challenging as the list of ingredients she is ‘allergic’ to or ‘intolerant’ of runs to, at the last count: red meat; wheat and all wheat products; dairy produce (cow); potatoes; onions; tomatoes; celery; nuts; seeds; corn; mushrooms; kidney beans; cauliflower; peas; fruit; dried fruit (apart from bananas and occasionally plums). And that’s just this week. Also, everything has to be cooked until it more or less falls apart in the pan so her teeth can cope. When I try to tell her that this severely limits what I can cook, she more or less tells me I lack imagination.
‘Have you watched Nigella?’ she asks imperiously.
Er, no Mum, I’m too busy catching up on work or cooking to watch TV. Obviously I don’t say that – I just shake my head mutely.
‘Well, she uses leeks instead of onions. She says they’re much easier.’
‘Don’t really see that, Mum. After all, what could be easier than onions? Leeks need all that cleaning to get out the gritty bits.’
‘Oh no. Absolutely not. Nigella says you can get them ready cleaned.’
‘From where? Waitrose?’
‘Oh no. Everywhere does them. Nigella says so.’
Does she really?
‘Anyway. There are positively tons of things I can eat. I love vegetables.’
‘Yes but Mum, it’s pretty hard when you don’t eat tomatoes, onions, potatoes or mushrooms – most recipes seem to use those.’
‘Well, I gave you a book with recipes I could eat.’
Er, yes. Like ratatouille for example, with spidery writing dictating: ‘No onions, use peppers not tomatoes’. Hmm, so not really ratatouille then.
‘Well, you should watch the programme, Jane. Nigella knocks up these wonderful meals in next to no time. It’s really easy. She does it with all her friends round too.’
I’m not sure who I want to murder most – mother or Nigella. Truly, it’s a nightmare.

Yesterday I had to take her to the doctor’s as she has come off all her medication and is ‘feeling weird.’ Small wonder really as most normal people a) talk to their doctor before merrily stopping taking Betablockers, Digoxin, Co-amilofruse and Prozac and b) when they do come off them, they do it slowly. Not my mother.
So did it matter that she wasn’t on the meds?
The doctor shrugged. ‘When she had her last cardiology assessment she scored 150 beats per minute for 30 seconds. Most 83-year-olds would be dead after that. So I reckon her heart is pretty strong.’
‘So you’re happy that she’s not taking anything now?’
He shrugged again and gave me a look that said, clear as day, that my mother was a total nutcase in his eyes and that he heartily wished she were not on his list, and what was he supposed to do, go round and shove the tablets down her throat personally?
‘If she can’t take the betablockers, shouldn’t she be on something else? Like calcium channel blockers, for example?’
‘Would you take them?’ He looked at Mum and she had the grace to look sheepish.

Did he agree that we needed to do something about her anxiety?
‘Absolutely.’
‘I’m taking chamomile tea,’ says mother brightly. The doctor gives me ‘the look’ again.
Could she have CBT or CAT? No, but she could see ‘Geoff’, the counsellor. OK, now this is cruel and I don’t know Geoff from Adam but immediately I had a vision of round-toed sandals and socks, baggy cords and a stripy tank-top. Still, it’s a start. If he can stop her worrying about what to do if the phone rings while she’s answering the door, or can make her realise that it’s not the end of the world if someone sees her without full make-up, then it will be a Good Thing. If he can maybe persuade her that avoiding wheat while eating cake (er, yes, the normal wheat flour type of cake thing) then I will probably marry him and have water-birth babies with him.

Anyhow, enough of all that. All part of life’s rich tapestry. But it did make me think about the long-lost homework on ‘what I do when I’m feeling down…’ otherwise known as the Mood-boosters. So here, for what they’re worth, are the things that make me feel better, no matter what.

1. Crying. Sometimes there’s nothing for it, a good bit of full-on totally feeling sorry for myself catharsis is just fabulous. It doesn’t take much to make me sob: certain pieces of music; certain memories; reading about women having a tough time in childbirth…..I’m off, wailing and heaving the shoulders and lunging at Asbo who usually wriggles away (unless it is a Really Important Cry in which case he will earn his Chappie by snuggling up and being sympathetic).
2. Alcohol. I know that it’s a depressant and not really ideal. But. But. But. When life is really crap, the sound of a glass being filled can be nectar to the soul. Gin & tonic; brandy mac; Fleurie; Crozes; Pinot grigio; something fizzy (couldn’t really give a toss if it’s posh poo or cheap cava) – all raise the spirits (and even more so if glasses are clinked with good friends – real friends).
3. A tough hard workout. It’s usually the last thing I feel like doing but I know that, if I can make myself go to the gym or do an aerobics class, after a while the combination of pounding music and sweat pushes the doldrums aside. Something to do with all those endorphins I suppose.
4. Get a massage. I love nearly every kind of bodywork going – the tougher the better. By tuning into my body, I find that my mind often lets go and stops being quite so pathetic. I have trained both Adrian and James in the fine art of the neck rub, the foot rub and a truncated form of Indian Head Massage so, if I can’t get or afford a pukka massage therapist, I’ll nag them until they have a go.
5. Read. But only if it’s a really good page-turner. The one thing I couldn’t live without would be books and if life gets really shitty, I just run away to a distant corner, curl up in a blanket and read.
6. Watch a really good film. When I lived in cities and got really low, I would take myself off to a matinee. Sitting in the dark, with a big bag of popcorn and a coffee, being transported to another world was sheer heaven. Now I have to resort to old favourites on DVD – Into the West is my all-time feelgood movie – even with Ellen Barkin’s cod Irish accent.
7. Do a bit of divination. I got my first pack of tarot cards when I was about twelve and have been doing the tarot, the runes and the I Ching ever since. I don’t do them as a fortune reading exercise really; more a way of asking advice. Is it a supernatural power or simply our higher consciousness? Don’t know and don’t really care. It works.
8. Bake. I don’t do much cooking (apart from Zero Mum’s) but there is something magical and alchemical about baking. I love the way that you plonk a sloshy pile of goo in the oven and it comes out as a cake or brownies or whatever. You get to lick the bowl (back to childhood in a second!) and eat the results. Definitely heart-warming, if not remotely healthy.
9. Make my gratitude list. This sounds a bit worthy but it really works like nothing else for me. I think of ten things that have happened that very day for which I’m grateful. Could be teeny tiny – like James slipping his hand into mine or the sharp grapefruit tang of my aromatherapy candle. I try to keep it specific as otherwise it can become a bit rote…. But somehow it puts it all in perspective. Life ain’t that bad.