The Fear

Again, my apologies for missing Monday's blog.  I still don't have a computer and now I only work in the afternoons things are a bit more difficult on the updating front.  Besides, I've really not got enough to say about anything to necessitate three blog entries a week, so I may update Mondays and Fridays or I may update Wednesdays and Fridays - but there will always be a Friday blog, no matter what!

Last Friday afternoon was lovely.  I wasn't quite as sinful as I'd anticipated, though.  Although it wasn't for lack of trying.  I mean I let myself have a whole afternoon off, I was planning on filling my boots till I felt physically sick.  My intentions for a good old nosh-up were as determined as possible.

However, when we got there we learned that the gas was on the blink and they couldn't fry anything.  Farewell to my plans of chips fried in dripping and a serving of onion rings!!  I had steak with a jacket potato and a flat mushroom.  Which wasn't quite as naughty as I'd hoped for - but there was quite a lot of butter involved in the cooking, so I still gave it my best shot.  For dessert I had my first ever bowl of ice cream this year - home made honeycomb ice cream with home made caramel sauce.  Good grief.  If I could bottle an emotion and sell it, it would be the euphoria of that first spoonful of sweet, cold, creamy yummyness making its initial assault on my tastebuds.  Just fabulous.  It's funny, I didn't really eat a great deal of ice cream before I started the diet but it's the one thing I've craved above everything else.  I mean, I'd rather have a bowl of ice cream than a bottle of beer.  Which is just weird.  I need to sort my priorities out.

Speaking of booze, I've discovered something really bizarre.  I am now a lightweight.  I mean I'm really a lightweight.  Boozing was always the thing I knew I could really do quite successfully in social situations.  Last night, I'd been really good all day and so I thought I'd have a large glass of something before bed, which turned into two large glasses of something, which turned into three.  Normally that wouldn't have even made me flinch - not least of all because about 80% of the glass was filled with Pepsi Max!!!  However, I woke up this morning with an actual hangover.  On three drinks.  I'm ashamed of myself.  Who am I, and what have I done with Spev?! 

So, anyway, aside from not being able to take my drink any more - something else has happened that I hadn't bargained for.  I think that it's a pretty important thing to discuss, not just for my benefit but for the benefit of anyone else who might read this at some juncture and who also has a significant amount of weight to lose. 

When you start dieting, you only think of the end result.  You picture yourself in nice clothes, with lovely shiny hair and perfect makeup, sashaying down the street with a confident, cheeky wiggle in your walk, rather than the insecure, defeated waddle you're used to.  And it's important to do that.  It is, because if you don't really see yourself making it, you won't.  And I know I haven't made it by any stretch of the imagination, but I still have my mental image of what it might be like to be curvy rather than one continuous curve. 

Now then, when you get part way through your journey, even though you may not notice it, the fact is you will have lost weight and you will look different.  Even if you don't see it, other people do.  And believe me, this is the case.  Because I look in the mirror and I see the exact same fat ugly girl staring back at me that I saw on 1st January, but now, other people see something a bit more streamlined.  Which is great.  But the problem is, I still feel like a fat ugly girl on the inside.  Nothing has changed in the way I view myself at all. 

It's been years, in fact it might even be never, since I took any real interest in the way I look.  I've never been the pretty one, which is absolutely fine. I've never wanted to be, I couldn't take the responsibility.  My role in any social situation has always been to be the funny one.  I'm comfortable with that, I love making people laugh, I'd much rather be funny than pretty - and luckily that's exactly how it's worked out.  But nobody really needs to look at the funny one because the funny one is meant to look a bit funny.  And that's all right too. 

I'm not the biggest fan of makeup, although I'll wear it on very special occasions.  I wear super-thick Nana Mouskouri style glasses because I'm blind as a bat and I can't afford contact lenses.  I hate hairdressers, so I avoid them at all costs.  I never wear heels because I walk with a limp (I paint such a picture!) and I'm 5'8, which isn't exactly a giant, but I'm taller than the majority of all my friends - even the boys - and I feel like a great hulking mass of awkwardness at the best of times, the last thing I want to do is draw any more attention to myself.  And I'm fat - so nice clothes are out.  They just are.  I know I look a mess.  Nobody has to tell me.  But I'm fat and I'm ugly and there really isn't a great deal you can do with that.  Perhaps, deep down, the fact is I just don't think I deserve to look any better than I do.  Who knows.  That isn't really the point. 

The point is; I'm getting thinner now.  All my clothes are miles too big for me.  But I'm damned if I'm going to go through the torture of clothes shopping just yet.  I keep getting told that I need a haircut, that I need to get contact lenses again and I need to start making something of the way I look.  But I've been really quite hostile to any such suggestions and, in all honesty, have acted like a petulant child over the whole issue.  Which baffles me as much as anyone else.  Until I sat down and really thought about why I don't want to do any of these things.

I don't know how to make myself look better.  I really don't.  If someone handed me a hairdryer and a round brush and told me to make my hair look nice I genuinely wouldn't know where to start.  But how do you turn around at the age of 30 and say "Actually, you know that stuff I should've learned when I was about 14 on how to do something with the way you look?  I totally missed that."?  Shouldn't I have learned all this before?  Or is it something that normal girls just naturally know how to do?  I mean it isn't like I'm stupid, and if I really tried I'm sure I could learn.  But somehow I was always too interested in music and films and other stuff when I was younger to give clothes and hair and makeup a moment's thought.  And now I'm old and past it, I feel as though I have to face it at some point and I really feel lost and completely incapable.  And, if I'm being completely honest - making all those changes scares the living bewhatsits out of me.

I wanted to make this big step.  I wanted it, I'm making it, and I'm changing.  But I really wasn't prepared for just how scary the physical process of changing was going to be.  More than my shape is going to have to change.  There's a lot of hang-ups that I really need to stop hanging onto if I'm going to really succeed in this, no matter how comfortable I might be with them. 

Basically, I think what I'm trying to say in my usual wordy, rambly, far too honest manner is this.  There's really no point in making one big change if you aren't prepared to deal with all the other little changes you need to make as well.  So I suppose I'd best roll up my sleeves, swallow hard, adopt my game face and tackle them, too. 

Join me, if you can stand it, on Friday - when I will have stopped navel-gazing (Ha!  That's a laugh, I still can't see it!) long enough to let you know how I got on at Fat Club, and also I promise faithfully I will do my best not to spend the entire post gushing in an hysterical squeeful fangirl manner about how amazing Avengers Assemble was.  One more sleep to go!!!!!  EEEP!!!