Today I had to leave home early on a Saturday morning because during the week a stone was ejected by a moving vehicle against my windshield, and the insurance company was flexible enough to provide the service while my husband takes care of our children.
To all single persons out there, the previous paragraph may sound like a nightmare, but trust me, to moms and dads with young children it is a very lucky scenario. Saturday mornings are no longer a time to sleep late, but to do all those things you can’t do during your weekdays because life gets in the way.
So, I left my car at the shop, came to a restaurant with a very sturdy Wi-Fi service – I literally chose this restaurant because of that, I couldn’t care less for their food – and I am watching the Secret vs. VP match while doing some personal stuff that hadn’t been able to do, like ‘designing’ an invitation for my birthday party next week or writing this blog entry.
My husband asked me how I was doing while waiting, and I told him where I was and what I was doing. As I am eternally dieting – you know, what some people simply call ‘lifestyle’ – I told him I had chosen to have the Light Breakfast offered by the restaurant and said something like “since I am going to be waiting here for three hours, I consider these are the best invested 450 calories I have eaten in exchange for free Wi-Fi.”
Life is different when you have been fat for a while and when you have had to watch your weight your whole life. I mean, when you are thin, you don’t even think about it. When you are fat and you don’t give a crap – as I didn’t give a crap for almost 20 years – you don’t think about it either. But when you make a conscious decision to give a crap – a real crap, that is, not a pretend crap like most dieters do – then everything that is laid before you has a small imaginary tag describing how many calories, grams of carbs, fat and sodium each morsel has.
It might seem exhausting – I know when I was not aware of my decisions it seemed exhausting to me – but it is pure arithmetic once you think about it: just know what is going in and try to improve what is going out. It’s about the balance (or imbalance) of what you eat and what you use.
Change is happening quite slowly in my case, but something I tend to repeat myself and I constantly tell my husband, is that this is not a sprint but a marathon. It’s not like I need to lose 5 kilos and maybe a strict one-month diet could help. If I did that, I would in fact exhaust my patience and my frustration threshold and I would be back to repeating myself “oh, I was right, there is no hope for me, nothing will ever work in my case” as soon as I bit the first piece of cake thinking I have ruined my every chance of redemption because I caved to temptation.
Life is full of obstacles and I have overcome many of those, and perhaps that’s why losing weight has been for many years such a frustrating experience for me. I have wanted to understand losing weight as a ‘mechanical’ exercise, something that is merely ‘stop eating and burn a bunch of calories’, and in essence, that is the gist of it, but let’s face it, you cannot ignore the mental portion of it if you want to be successful. So, here I am, sitting before a basket of bread, knowing I cannot touch it if I want to have something nice for lunch or dinner, because if I misbehave I will force myself to have an apple and a cup of tea for dinner because that’s all I can afford with my daily budget of calories, because that’s what every normal person should do and have some freaking self-control.
Living life in terms of calories is not truly that bad once you see the results. I remind myself last year I weighted 113 kilos after my baby boy was born, and I haven’t been over 100 for more than three months now. I’ll just keep working and hopefully I will be able to say something like this but with 90 kilos in a couple of months, getting me closer to my target weight and to not thinking of numbers and food anymore, but just knowing balance and self-restraint should be part of my life if I don’t want to get a heart attack before I get to be 41.
Shoutout to everyone out there constantly striving to achieve a better version of yourselves! Let’s not give up!
