Embracing the Loser Within

In honour of the rain-filled long weekend, I've been having a bit of a behaving badly bender: booze, bad food, and excessive slothiness.

It's been awesome. Now it's Monday and I'm shocking my system by watching Supersize Me with my breakfast. All of a sudden having garlic cheesebread as the basic staple of my meals for the last three nights is coming back to haunt me in more ways than one. I feel like rolling my way to the suburbs to see the folks before they gallavant their way on a roadtrip across this continent (no doubt exsisting on a diet rich in McFat and McBelches).

Ironically, despite doing everything I shouldn't be doing dietically for a couple days, I've taken the time to plant a kitchen garden. Yesterday was my Dirty Girl Day when I played in soil and filled several planters up with herbs, lettuces, and tomatoes. I'm salivating about the fact that in just four weeks I'll be able to have homemade salads filled with herbs and organic lettuce several times a week.

This mroning I was sitting there on the throne, as my phone rang, pondering just how godawful I feel (I've felt fine the last couple days, despite eating horribly in the evenings) and thinking about the difficult mental balancing act one must master before changing the bulges into beauty.

You need to believe you're beautiful and worth the hard work before you even get started, 'cos simply loathing yourself and not having any positivity will drive you to despair and cause you to veer dangerously from your chosen path. And people wonder why they never lose weight? Forgiving yourself's about the hardest thing we can do, and you're kidding yourself if you think otherwise. All of us cheat and go off the path, claiming that buttering this toast will hardly be the straw that breaks the camel's back, but the ones who win the battle are the ones who understand that fucking up once, twice, or three times is human, and the path to success is still within sight, even if you have to clamour through a bush or two to get there.

Tomorrow, I get back to the cycling plan to dominate my world, and see how my body holds up this time around. The last "take it up a notch" I did with exercise (enter: boxing followed by cycling 17km in 70km/hr+ winds) nearly drove me into the ground. For two weeks, until this weekend, my body's been wracked with pain. The bad kind.

There's two kinds of exercise pain -- the kind I feel right now from all the hoisting of bags of soil, abusing my hamstrings, and so forth, which is actually good and is just from using those muscles and putting 'em to work, and two, the kind of pain that comes from doing the wrong thing for one's body, the excess of inflammation, the overextending of muscles, and the continuous burning tension that results in, for me, migraines and other fun.

It's the latter kind I've been dealing with, and it's made me very anti-social and uncomfortable. At least it's ebbing away now. I was expecting it to come but I was hoping I'd escalated my exercising at a slow enough pace that I could negate any really bad effects. I was clearly wrong. Ah, it's a bitch throwing down the gauntlet when you've been a crash test dummy in as many accidents as I have been.

While my muscles may again be sore, thanks to gardening and all, the skeletal re-set button has been pushed and I'm ready for more punishment. I'm a nutbar. And, hey, I had my healthy homemade cranberry-raisin-almond bran muffins without butter this morning, something I almost never do.

Now I have to head, as I mentioned, out to the suburbs to see the Dad Unit and The Stepmother Unit before they pack their shit in their American-made gas-guzzling GM sedan and head over the Rockies, across the Plains, and far away to middle America, south of Chicago, land of the McFatties and McRoundies. Both have diabetes. Both are morbidly obese. Both are blatantly ignorant about food and its effects on us. It's sad, but all I have to do is think, "Is that where I want to be in 25 years?" and I find my motivation. Sigh.

Another motivation is cheap clothing. Here in Canada we cater less to plus-size clothing. If I lived in the States, my options would be ridiculously ample, pun fully intended. I could buy Big Girl clothing just about anywhere and wouldn't likely have to spend as much as I'd have to here in Canada. But here I am, a Canuck, with slightly smaller waists nationally, and far fewer fast food restaurants on average, and less choice to make in "normal" stores, most of whom don't cater to anything larger than old-fashioned extra large.

Me, I'm in an awkward position. I'm now at the size where I'm almost too small for "fat girl" stores, and I'm slightly too large for most "stylish" stores. I'm apparently a proud resident of NeverNeverLand. Apparently people don't come in my size. I'm the existential non-entity, it would seem -- the human equivalent to such mythological creatures as the unicorn.

As much as I want to dress better and feel better while I'm on my way to Less Me, Better Me, spending money on clothes isn't something I want to do while I have plans to lose weight. But if I keep dressing in these shit clothes, the odds are far too good that my self-esteem will continue faltering, and my diet will falter with it.

So, I'm taking $75 and buying one cute pair of pants and a cute new shirt. In 6 weeks, I'll go on a spending spree for summer items. Until then, one cute outfit will have to do. And by then I'll be eating my homegrown salads, unless the squirrels have something to say about that.

(More on my local rabid, murderous, patio-destroying squirrels another time.)