I have less than zero motivation to get this post written, which is why it is probably more important than the ones I actually want to do.
My week on the Weight Watchers wagon went really well, for as long as it was actually The Week and not The Week’s sexy older sister The Weekend, who always gets you into trouble one way or another. It usually goes to shit around Friday lunch time but I made it past dinner this time, enjoying a fat curry and even a mass cookie within my weekly limits, left with two days of standard eating and 1 extra weekly point to get through until Monday. It all could have been fine. But for the fact that I was desperately overdue a long haul sofa-bitching session with my bestie.
It all could have been fine, but for Gin.
Urch. Skip to an early Saturday morning start where someone developed the most intensely temple-throbbing dehydration head of the last five years and someone else couldn’t manage to brush their teeth without retching on the reminders of a Tanqueray too far. Skip to the kind of bone shaking, soul sucking hangover than necessitates crawling into a dark space with three packets of biscuits and listening to The Sound Of Silence on loop until you fade out of consciousness.
It isn’t the empty calories in booze that should stop dieters from drinking- it is the day after. Because I could have made amends for as much gin and slimline as you can fit into a six hour session, but I can’t catch up with the constant carbohydrate stream that was required to allow me to function through the subsequent Saturday. It started with a frankly life saving bacon sarnie, which needn’t have broken the day but along with that was a large latte too, leaving me roughly 10 points at a hazardous guess to stay within limits. This was at 10am. By the time my lunch date came around, after resisting the urge to cry and/or vomit in the hairdressers more than once, my willpower was oddly high and I opted for a simple veggie pasta plate for lunch, no cheese. Yeah, and some icecream. So that was that. Buggered. After some more retail therapy I found myself limping through M&S on the long walk back to my car just as the next sugar low hit me and after some saintly browsing and a good self-talking-to as I passed the cookie aisle, I scored myself two supergreen salads, a skinny tzatsiki, some celery hearts and a box of cherry tomatoes. Plus, my ultimate hangover want of those gross fabricated pink seafood stick things that have had no actual seafood anywhere near them, ever. I love those things, and they are pretty low in points. The additional submarine rolls and ready mixed prawn cocktail were not. Shit.
I told myself some of it was for The Mr. I told myself that there was lots of hydration in all that celery. I told myself I would be asleep before I had the chance to eat that much of it.
Shit.
It’s hard to maintain the will to stick to veg and live off your own bodyfat when your body is a toxic waste ground of gin and artificial sweeteners and you are home alone for the evening with no witnesses other than Dr Foster on catch up, and frankly she’s not one to take a moral highground as far as I’m concerned.
In a roundabout way, this is what leads me to pimp out Weight Watchers. Because today, despite eating (at a rough guess) about double what I should have eaten for the week (mostly over the last two days of the week), I have stayed exactly the same weight. No loss, no less of me or my arse but hey, no more either. In net terms, it’s like I never had any of it! So it’s fine. Sort of.
I will do better. I have to, because I am now at the age where a hangover lasts an hour for every year you have been alive and cannot be fixed with a can of redbull and liberal application of hobnobs.
BMI Today: 30.5, still half a point past the official obesity point.
How do I feel today? Like an old lady who should know better but would/will do it again.
Did I stay on points last week? Until Friday, yes. I racked up quite a few fit points too with a reasonable physio run, three shopping miles walked on Saturday and a long slow Sunday walk. Yes, I know that doesn’t make it OK.
How bad was the weekend? See entire above post. I had fish and chips for Sunday lunch too as I was still recovering and too weak to order the sad salad. I have saved this information until now in the hope that the judgier people stopped reading at the summary.
Insights: I did actually select a lot of veg and dips from a direct craving, and they did make me feel much better and I wonder if when your day to day habits are better, you actually crave healthier crap when you’re ill, even if it is self inflicted. The mere concept of my old hangover favourite of a spicy pizza and endless toblerone would have actually killed me before I made it home. In fact it is making me feel a bit queasy now.
Best Thing I Ate All Week: A supergreen salad and frekeh tahini grain salad thing from Marks & Spencer, in the late afternoon throws of my suffering. Bloody nice, and not too evil on the grand scale of diet things. Positively angelic vs the rest of the day.
See you next week, when I will be building a new kitchen. What could go wrong?!?!?!
Food. Boom. 