The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl

The Weary Squirrel

I'm back from me holidays! We attempted to balance all the whisky, cooked Scottish breakfasts and Cadbury Top Deck with lots of walking - to big rocks, steep steps and a pair of Munros.

Mysterious Jenny on Ben Lawers.

I'm pleased to report that Ben Lawers and Beinn Ghlas were my least whiny hills ever. Partially because they were touristy fellas, side by side with non-scary paths. But also because my mate Jenny was there and I didn't want to look like a wuss. So there was only one obscene gesture and a wee bit of stick waving!

We need to start a lobby group to bring this to the UK.

. . .

It's been awhile between entries - sorry you had to look at my boofy cheeks for so long. No matter where I've been on the scales, I've always had chubby cheeks that grandmothers love to squeeze. Gareth once said they were like "little cushions". That a weary squirrel might rest upon!

. . .

A year ago this week I was dancing in the streets after handing in my manuscript. "La la la!" I said, "I AM DONE WITH THIS WEIGHT LOSS SHIT and I am never going to think of it again!"

Then I ate a packet of Marks & Spencer choc-coated strawberries.

Of course I remembered the next day that you are never done, sucker. Ever since then it has been a challenge - no, let's not downplay it - it's been a constant, shitty struggle to get the balance right. I so badly want to stay healthy without needing to be a slave to scales and calories, but I have to bear in mind the brutal reality that when it comes to food, I got issues. I can't pretend that I don't need to think about it.

It's like my peanut butter fork. I keep a jar of PB in my desk at work and I like to spread a wee bit on spelt crackers. For the past couple of months I've being doing this with a plastic fork. Part of my brain screams, "This isn't working! This ain't the tool for the job!" and the other part of my brain says, "Oh shuddup. Sure it's messy and the cracker is cracking up all over the keyboard but it sort of does the trick, right?"

Likewise I've been letting everything get chaotic. I cram more and more into the day, not sleeping properly, eating too much, feeling like crap but telling myself I'm still good! I'm still good, just because my guts have not yet exploded out of my jeans. I keep diggin' and diggin' with my plastic fork. 

Last Wednesday on the Isle of Skye, we hauled our arses up to the Old Man of Storr. There was a polite sign near the big rock that said, You are advised not to go beyond this point. There's no better sign than an actual SIGN!

Dr G laughs in the face of danger.

Hmm hmm hmm. I really need to stop and get my priorities in order, before I burn out and bloat up. And/or become an annoying wanker who claims to be too busy to peel an orange.

. . .

Ooh I gotta write about the Moonwalk! Next time Gadget. Next time. Hope you're all doing well!

Heading up to the Old Man of Storr.

71 June

I walked the Walk! But I'll have to wait to talk the Walk until later in the week when we get back from our wee jaunt in the Highlands. The Walk took me EIGHT HOURS so as you can imagine I have a lot of Walk to talk about.

But I've run out of time; its 1.23 AM and I just finished going over 409 pages of proofs for the US edition of Dietgirl. I read the cover note last week in a zombified state and thought it said, "complete by 71 June". Plenty of time, nae bother! But of course there is no such date. It was actually 17 June, which is today. Now my eyeballs feel like they're about to explode which nicely parallels the feeling in my calves!

I better scoot to bed. Until next time, here is a picture from the Start line, just before midnight. Already looking tired, but behold the joy and innocence!

(We are all wearing plastic coat thingies because it was SO bloody cold)

And here is the complete opposite of joy at 4.21 AM . The orange was very tasty, however.

I wanted to say a huge thank you for all your kind comments and Moonwalk wishes! And also a big woohoo to those who climbed aboard the 100 PushUps challenge. I did the Initial Test and managed just three trembling reps. The only way is up.

Twas The Night Before Moonwalk

1 day to go

This time tomorrow night I'll be waiting for the stroke of midnight, my cue to start Moonwalking along with 11,999 other bra-wearing folk. Shit! Shit! Shit a brick! I mean, woohoo!

We had a bra decorating party last Saturday - Dirty Dancing, Chinese food and a sea of sequins, fluff and taffetta. There was booze galore but nobody drank much as our hands were too busy with scissors and needles and glue. Conversation was minimal; just random bursts of song and swearing when thumbs were stabbed.

I tried to channel all the skillz learned for my Brownie sewing badge circa 1986. Thankfully Claire had earlier dyed all our bras a lovely shade of fuschia pink, so mine looked pretty cool already as the lacy bits stayed white. It took me three hours just to sew one bit of frill along the bottom and a squiggle of silver across each boob. Check out them highly accurate stiches. Brown Owl would be proud!

Here is the finished product, nestled lovingly against Gareth's engineering textbook. Some serious engineering going on in that bra,too.

Since Saturday I've been in state of Wardrobe Panic. I'd been so focused on walking the 26.2 miles that I totally ignored the do-it-in-your-bra bit. During training I wore a long-sleeved top with my boob-crushing grubby ye olde Enell sports bra underneath. The bra above was supplied by the Moonwalk folk and Einstein here didn't bother trying it on until Sunday night and discovered that it isn't supportive enough to tame my girls.

Well, DERR! That's Australian for DUH, btw. Why the hell would a frilly bra be suitable for an 8 hour walk? Of course I panicked for a couple more days until it was too late to order a different bra online or go shopping in Edinburgh. I've come up with an eleventh hour solution with a second bra and a large pot of Vaseline but really, I am tempted just to wear it as a hat:

I reserve the right to keep this photo small
due to current state o' haggardness.

I feel like a twit writing this, but I had a total Fat Girl Freakout on Sunday. When I signed up late last year, I thought the Moonwalking in your bra was such a fab way to raise money for breast cancer research and I was pretty cool with my body these days so bring it ON. But the wave of panic started on Saturday night - looking at my bra, looking at my colleagues, comparing my body to theirs, feeling larger and wobblier by the minute.

The panic grew overnight then on Sunday afternoon in the shower, I just started bawling my eyes out. I felt so sick to my stomach, the thought of my bare arms and bare belly out for all the world to see. For my work colleagues to see. I felt like a fraud; like I'd been disguising myself as a Normal Person just like them and now they were going to find out I was a wobbly-armed mess.

I thought about how there was something noble about a scar from a surgery or a stretch mark from bearing a child, but what if your impefections are just your own bloody fault; the result of too much chocolate and chips and whatnot? For those ten minutes under the shower I felt ashamed and angry, thoughts racing through my head that had not surfaced for many years.

After I had my good old cry I towelled off, got dressed and tried the pink bra on again. I took photos from a bazillion different angles and just looked at them on the computer for ages. I calmed down after that. You'll be alright, ya dork.

90% of the time I live and breathe that bit of my silly book where I go on about embracing all my lumps and bumps. But I guess embracing said lumps in everyday life is different from having to parade them around town all night long. Like I said, I feel like a goose even writing about the Freakout, but I like to be honest; not just with you but with myself. This feeling-good-in-your-own-skin thing isn't always smooth sailing. I still have my little moments but thankfully they're fleeting these days.

Really, I can't wait to get out there tomorrow with my mates in my beloved Edinburgh. The big night is finally here and I think it's going to be a hoot.

One Hundred Push-Ups

Who's up for a new challenge? Andrew is taking on One Hundred Push-Ups. It looks to be the Couch to 5k of the push-up world, a six-week program designed to gradually build your strength for the mother of all moves. From the website:

"If you’re serious about increasing your strength, follow this six week training program and you’ll soon be on your way to completing 100 consecutive push ups! Think there’s no way you could do this? I think you can! All you need is a good plan, plenty of discipline and about 30 minutes a week to achieve this goal!"

Holy exclamation mark, Batman!

I like how they say "on your way" to completing 100 consecutive push ups, because right now my efforts are rather weak and wobbly and I'd be happy to work up to 20. We do a lot of push-ups in my kickboxing class but there's only so much you can progress with one class a week. I like the idea of a real concerted effort to improve - not only the quantity but the quality of the reps.

It's also a convenient wee challenge - I can do push ups anywhere, and unlike this stinking Moonwalk it's not going to take over my life. Or puff up my hands.

So I'm in, baby! I'm going to take the initial push up test tonight then start next Tuesday 17th, giving myself a couple of days to rejoin the living après-Moonwalk.

Anyone else fancy it? It'll be tops. And there's nothing quite like knocking out a few push ups to make you feel smug, strong and sexy.

Further reading on the joys of push-ups for young and old, large and small:

• New York Times - An Enduring Measure of Fitness: The Push Up
• Fitness Fixation - More Determined Than Ever
• Stumptuous - Mistressing The PushUp

(Proper entry re Moonwalk later today!)

Chocolate Therapy

My mother is usually the calm and organised type but I enjoy the rare moments of panic, because she sort of throws her hands in the air and shrieks, "Shit! Shit! Shit a brick!"

I am having a Shit Shit Shit A Brick kind of week. Not only is the Moonwalk on Saturday, my pal Jenny arrives from Australia. Then Rhiannon arrives next Tuesday and we're going on a mini road trip. I can't wait to see which version of a Scottish summer we encounter - pouring rain or mauled by midges?

The flat is almost finished - no couch or carpet but the painting is done and Dr G put down a sexy new kitchen floor. There is the small issue of complete lack of things upon which guests can sleep. No food in the cupboards no accommodation booked no clean clothes no sleep no mercy at work no idea what to do about my stupid Moonwalk Bra of Doom etc etc but we're totally calm and cool, really now.

Things may get a little haphazard around here for the next couple of weeks but rest assured I'm planning to answer your burning questions such as, "How do I stay on the wagon?" Hopefully by then I'll have figured out the answer for myself!

. . .

Aside from boundless support and inspiration, one of the very best things about blogging is International Parcel Swaps. Like old school pen pals, but TASTY! Earlier this year Gracie in Alabama was pining for Tunnocks Tea Cakes so I sent her some sickly Scottish treats and she sent me a bulging box of American candy, complete with bottles of ale for Dr G !

More recently Amanda, an Australian expat in The Netherlands, expressed her longing for Tetley tea so I pounced on the opportunity. I exchanged 240 Tetley tea bags for THREE boxes of my favourite Droste cocoa!

I first fell in love with Droste for aesthetic reasons on a trip to Amsterdam - the chick on the cocoa box is holding another cocoa box with a chick on it who is holding another cocoa box with a chick on it who is holding another cocoa box with a chick on it! And so on. This is known as the Droste effect and can keep the simple-minded amused for hours! Just imagine my eyeballs spinning round now that I have THREE!

When I first started lard-busting I was hooked on low-fat sugar-free just-add-water hot chocolate sachets, the ones with 275 unpronounceable ingredients. A colleague used to scream at me in the tearoom, "THEY GIVE YOU CANCER!" but I guzzled on defiantly! Then one day I admitted that I didn't really like the taste so switched to old fashioned cocoa and real sugar. Gasp!

But as they say so persuasively on the Green & Blacks website, one teaspoon of cocoa is only 12 calories. I have three, but that's still only 36. A teaspoon of sugar is 15 calories. Cup of semi-skimmed milk, 115 calories. So 166 calories in total.

I also make it on the stove now, after adding up all the time I'd wasted mopping up the microwave. I liked it served it in a Starbucks mug that I got for free at the Society of Authors conference because it's so thick and cuddly.

(Many authors removed the mugs from their goody bags, as if loathe to sully their authorly lips with merchandise from a corporate behemoth. "DUDES ARE YOU CRAZY", I wanted to say as I swiped an extra one, "They just told us that the average British author earns less than £5,000 per year and you're turning down a free mug? Flog it on eBay for 10p or use it as a begging bowl!" )

So yes, 166 calories is more calories than the old diet sachets but the whole cocoa ritual tastes and feels  more satisfying. Thank you Amanda for enabling the habit! I will think of you while I sip away and watch the mighty Dutch footballers at the Euros.

I'm really quite delirious today; apologies for loopy nature of this entry. Take care, dear comrades!

Moonwalk Training - 20 Miles

2 weeks to go

Twenty mile haiku
Known in metric as
thirty-two kays. But to all,
a bloody long way

Route
10 miles out on the cycle track then ten miles back. I didn't count the half-mile walk from home to the path this time, since I struggled with the maths last week.

Weather Report
HOT! HOT! HOT!
Well, alright. It wasn't hot. It was about 20 degrees (68F). Stop laughing, my fellow Australians. Do I mock when you put on scarves coz it's 12 degrees? Seriously, I'm pathetic in the sun these days and deserve to have my Oz passport revoked. Just try to understand what an alarming sensation it is to see this weird pale blue stuff above your head. 20 degrees can feel positively balmy, especially if you're walking all day long. The epidermis sizzles in shock and you start muttering, Walk faster! Faster! Before the skin cancer gets you!

So that is what I did. I banged out mile after mile, glopping on more sunscreen every hour and weeping stingy sunscreeny tears. The bike path was 70-30 split of sun and shade, so it was like interval training - charging through the sunny parts then easing off in the less treacherous shady bits.

The first ten miles were okay. I sipped water regularly and felt pretty good. Hot and sweaty, but good. My feet ached in the usual tired-but-not-too-hurty way. I stopped to take a picture of this delightfully retro scarecrow.

I say old chap! Get the devil away from my cabbages!

Puffed
I've heard about the phenomenon of swollen hands during long walks and finally experienced it myself on Saturday. This was mile 11 when I had to loosen my heart rate monitor by two notches because my wrists had ballooned.

Losing the plot
Maybe my fatigued brain is failing me as I'm writing this five days after the event, but I don't think the 20 miler was all that bad until the last four. I was hardly jumping for joy but I had some great podcasts and almost tuned out the fact that I was in motion. Plus, I was worming out of painting the living room. Poor Gareth was slaving over the skirting boards while I strolled along, eating Mars Bars.

But something pinged in my brain when I saw 4 miles spray painted on the cycle path. It hit me that I'd been walking for four long hours and had at least another hour to go. My body hurt and I was all woe and melodrama. This is the longest training walk ever. In fact, this is the longest walk I've ever done in my life. BOO!

And I was thirsty. I'd drunk plenty of water already but very specifically wanted a glass of orange and passionfruit juice from a cafe back in Australia. And I was hungry, but all I had left was a wilted peanut butter sandwich.

I got strangely weepy at the 3 mile mark. How was it that a couple hours early I was all, "Yay! Only 11 miles to go!" and now three puny miles seemed like walking to Jupiter?

Then at 2 miles my shoulders were agony (wtf!?) and I tragically ran out of podcasts. Nooo! I dispensed my emergency cheery-up tunes, The Best of Blur. There's No Other Way! Damon sang. No shit. The jaunty tunes felt like mosquitoes spitting in my ears but at least got me moving and thinking, lets get this miserable stinker done.

Everything hurt for the last mile but I stayed ahead of the beat in Girls and Boys. It was the quickest one, just under 14 minutes, as I adopted an Olympic walker style - arms pumping, nostrils flaring, generally looking like I had a stick up my butt.

Aftermath
My legs turned to lead as soon as I finished. It took 11 minutes to limp that extra half-mile home. I nearly called Gareth to pick me up but I think my fingers would have been to swollen to press the right buttons.

When I got home all I could do was slump in my chair, whinge incoherently and wait for my hands to deflate. My normally too-big wedding band was stuck fast.

I am so glad that's over. Now there's just over a week til the big night. And then after that I shall avoid all forms of walking as much as possible. Rickshaws all the way.

Pace
20 miles (32 km) in 04:56:52. Average pace 14:50 (4.04 mph)

What I Eat

Recently my gurning ginger mug appeared in the Washington Post, along with Deborah of Drop The Fork and Gerry of Disease Proof. Gerry contacted us afterwards asked if we'd fancy tracking our food and exercise for a week, to show what three different weight loss maintainers put away.

I hesitated before accepting his invitation. "What do you eat on a typical day?" is one of my most frequent of FAQs but it's always made me feel a little uncomfortable, because I don't really have a typical day and I'd hate for anyone to think it was any sort of blueprint for health. It all depends on what's in the cupboard, cravings du jour, level of fatigue/crankiness, etc.

I also know what I used to be like - trawling blogs and old copies of Slimming magazine for What Successful Losers Eat, seeking patterns and clues; as if searching for the Da Vinci Menu Plan that would unlock all the diet secrets of the universe. I can imagine me analysing my journal:

ME OF 2001:   She ate all that food?! And salmon two nights in a row? Chinese takeaway!? White basmati rice?

ME OF 2008:  [defensive screech] We'd run out of brown rice! I was desperate! The takeaway was Gareth's idea!*

[Cat fight]

(* Last Thursday night after measuring a couch at Steve's house [long story]  Gareth said unto me, "You know how you wrote that blog entry about being tired and hungry and convincing each other to eat dodgy dinners?" then I said, "Chinese takeaway. Woohoo!")

I'd hoped to be healthy and holy all week long, especially knowing there's at least two nutritionists reading this blog. But the end result was more realistic, honest and typical of how I eat -- mostly because I kept forgetting I'd be broadcasting my food intake until  after I'd wedged the spring roll/carrot cake into my mouth.

(I also kept forgetting to photograph my meals until it was too late. My sole contribution was a plate of lentil and tomato goo. Sorry for letting the team down, Gerry!)

So what can you tell from a week's worth of food? It's a snapshot in time. You can't see that the day before we started journaling, I walked up a big hill then scoffed fish, chips and mushy peas afterwards. You can't see that the day after we finished, I was lazy and ate a dozen shriveled almonds for brekkie.

However, it's a reasonable picture of how eat so I can feel:

• satisfied
• not enslaved to the stove
• fueled for exercise
• confident that I'll keep fitting into my clothes
• Balanced and SANE!

Other highly scientific conclusions from this experiment:

• There is tea running through my veins instead of blood
• If not tea, then plain yogurt
• Some days I am a beacon of virtue, some days I'm the opposite
• I eat a helluva lot of beans and lentils
• I am not bothered by repetition in my diet
• I am not bothered by repetition in my diet
• I! Love! Chocolate!

You can check out all three food journals on Disease Proof.

Moonwalk Training - 16 Miles Revisited

3 weeks to go. Arrgh!

Fuel

• Porridge and
• Toast
• Cuppa
• Litre of water
• An overwhelming desire to Just Get The Bastard Done ASAP so I could get on with the rest of my thrill-a-minute weekend, ie. paint the living room while listening to the cricket like a middle-aged middle-class fart. Zzzzz.

Route
Continuing the Just Get The Bastard Done theme, I chose the most straightforward route possible. There is a cycle track half a mile from our flat. It's the outdoor equivalent of a treadmill - dull and straight and predictable. There's markers every half mile and every kilometre. So I planned to walk down, crank out 7.5 miles, turn around, 7.5 miles back, plus the half mile back home for a total of 16.

But what I thought would be a chore turned out quite pleasant. I'd never gone further than four miles on the track before, so didn't realise after that it gets all green and leafy and serene...

And more importantly, plenty of places to hide if you're bursting on a pee.

Then it opens out into quiet fields with swaying crops. No car fumes, no traffic lights, no noise... just the occasional bit of motivational graffiti!

Mathematically Challenged
I was really firing along, counting down the half miles. Vun! Vun-Point-Five Miles! Two! Two-Point-Five Miles! AH HA HA! Then the half-mile markers just stopped at mile five for no good reason.

I switched to the kilometre markers. My arithmetic sucks at the best of times, let alone while walking like a demon. But thanks to the restorative powers of a Half A Snickers Bar, I worked out that 7.5 miles is 12-point-something kilometres. So I turned around at 12.

Then I needed to figure out how fast to walk a kilometre in order maintain a 15 minute mile pace. FAIL! I had to call Dr G for that one.

Give That Girl A Kicking
Right at the end I saw two Moonwalkers In Training in their official sexy pink tartan caps. They'd only just started; their water bottles were full and expressions were grim. So I don't know what part of my fatigued brain thought it would be a great idea to yell out, "I'm nearly finished!"

Once off the cycle track I headed for home, hobbling around a few extra blocks in case my calculations were crap. Luckily I did, as turns out 12 kilometres is only 7.45645431 miles so overall I would have been 0.0870914 miles short of the 16 miles. And we can't have that while training for a non-competitive charity event, CAN WE?!

Pain Report

• Right shin - excruciating for last five miles
• Feet - on fire for last hour
• Ears - random small child on tricycle accompanied me for a mile with her REALLY SQUEAKY WHEELS. My womb is so conflicted: one minute I'm all well aren't you a DELIGHT and the next I wanted to slash her pink plastic tyres.

Pace
16.1 miles (25.91km) in 04:01:00. Average pace 14:58 (4.01 mph)

That's more than 20 minutes faster than the previous 16 miler. I put that down to an obscenely huge breakfast and such unfathomable love for painting walls that you want to walk your arse back to the brush as swiftly as possible.

So I felt all speedy, smug and Sporty Spice... until I found out all my team members had done their walks even quicker. Bastards! I know it's not a race, I know it's just for charidee; I know they're not going to leave me behind on the night. But after all these years of sweat and toil I'm still stuck with my high school title of Slowest In The Group? I gotta find me some less speedy comrades. Hehe.

Inbox Update

Just a wee update on the email situation after the Mini Meltdown of March, when I was running round like a headless chook trying to fit in flat painting, book pimping, Moonwalking, bathing, etc.

I'm still bumbling along and still behind with emails. But progress has been made and I'm well down to double digits. As for the flat, there's just one more stinky little room to go. The whole operation would run more efficiently if I could write and paint at the same time. Or if I had a butler. "JEEVES! Take down this note!"

Thanks a bazillion to everyone who has taken the time to write and/or send photos for the Dietgirl Reader Gallery, you rawk! The Gallery is up to date now - in addition to the cat and assorted humans, we have a literate dog in our ranks! I'm crossing my fingers for a budgie or donkey next.

Going Solo

Do you think it's easier to stick with healthy eating when you're on your own, or with a partner?

(or sibling, housemate, etc)

I have pondered this one many times, especially since shacking up with the Scotsman. There are advantages and disadvantages with both...

Group Effort
Pros

• Somebody to share the cooking and cleaning
  I tend to do most of the cooking and Dr G does the cleaning up. It works for us - he chops vegetables too slowly for my liking; I leave too many "bits" on the dishes for his liking.
• Not wanting to look like a greedy lard arse
  Gareth doesn't pass judgement on what I eat, but I still feel less inclined to scarf down a third chocolate biscuit if there's other people around.

Cons

• Persuasion
  Despite my diligent menu planning, if either of us is tired or grumpy it can take very little cajoling to ditch the Plan and have cheese on toast or a takeaway.
• I'll have what he's having
  Gareth likes a quiet beer and a bag of crisps some evenings, and even though I'm not a beer and crisp person, I feel compelled to eat something just because he is. So there.
  
• Man Portions
  I still struggle with a childish sense of, "But but but! His slice of cake is bigger than MINE!" My body simply does not need as much food as Gareth's, but I still resent the fact and find it difficult not to dish up the same portions for myself.

Solo Efforts

Pros

• Simplicity
  I eat very simply when I'm on my own. Poached egg on toast. Fish or veggie burger with salad. I'll make a pot of soup and eat it four nights in a row. Mostly because I'm too lazy to make a mess of the kitchen! But also when Dr G is in the house I feel like I should make the meal more exciting and less snacky, despite him being a lot less bothered about what we eat for dinner than I am.
• Easy routines
  Gareth has been working away for a few days and as usual I've slipped into healthy little robot mode - packing my lunch the night before, organising my breakfast, cooking dinners for later in the week, doing all my planned exercise. When he's here, I can easily use him as an excuse. I often go looking for distractions - yapping away when I get home from work, asking him does he want a cuppa instead of doing my weights DVD... next thing it's 8PM and we can't be arsed cooking dinner.

Cons

• No witnesses
  There are times when I still wrestle with the old "Quick! Eat while noone's looking" mentality. As I said earlier, Gareth doesn't give a rats' what I eat, but there is something about being home alone that makes me look at the Hillwalking Snickers bars in the fridge that I can normally ignore and the wheels start turning... How many were there the other day? Would he notice if I ate one? Would I have time to replace it?!

Coming Down The Mountain

I bagged my second Munro yesterday! I was due to do another 16 miler for the Moonwalk but could not face plodding around the suburbia for hours. You know Moonwalk Fatigue has set in when you'd rather plod up a hill for hours instead.

3,231 feet of pure pleasure.

Our target was Ben Vorlich. There are two Ben Vorlichs in Scotland - we did the one near Loch Earn, known as The Easy Ben Vorlich. Lots of people scurry up the nearby Stuc a' Chroin afterwards to make a proper day of it, but one munro was day enough for me.

After all my Moonwalking, I'd forgotten what a hard and painful slog the hills are. Instead of chirpy podcasts the only soundtrack was the constant clobber of my heart and the slobber of my breath. I didn't need a heart rate monitor to know this was maximum exertion, baby!

But I felt pretty decent, and much faster than the first one nine months ago. It was actually enjoyable! Much of that was down to cooler weather and not being riddled with hay fever but some of it can be attributed to increased fitness. Yet still I was overtaken by:

• an old man with a limp
• an arthritic Labrador
• two small children
• petite lady with golfball perm and lurid tartan trousers who was at least seventy years old.

And a nutty dalmatian.

Ben Vorlich the Easy was also recommended by reader South American Slimmer last year, who said it was a good beginners munro with a clear path all the way to the top. If you're out there SAS, thank you from me and my Calves o' Fire!

The path was nice because you could always see how far you had to go. But it also sucked because you could always see how far you had to go.

Amazingly, I had a grand total of ZERO Whine Breaks on this walk. I blame the BBC - on Friday I watched a show called Beyond Boundaries: Across The Andes, in which teenagers with all sorts of disabilities trekked across Ecuador in treacherous conditions. They totally ruined my appetite for incessant complaining, what with all their inspiring toughness. 

Here's Doctor G giving a bewildered thumbs up, as it is the first time he's got so close to the top of a hill without being whacked by one of my walking poles.

"Wow!" he said when I finally reached the top, "You didn't threaten me with violence once!"

This is the pose I pulled when he said, "Look triumphant!" Part Edmund Hillary, part cheesy menswear catalogue.

Windswept with severe case of Beanie Hair.

Two munros down, 282 to go? I don't think so. I love the smugness and serenity of roaming the hills but have no desire to go beyond the novice ones. Going up is okay but I'm still not a fan of the descent. I had a minor freakout as we headed back down Ben Vorlich - it wasn't that steep but the loose rocks made me want to vomit and demand a helicopter rescue. It's completely irrational and I know I should trust gravity but... wah!

MULTIMEDIA BONUS: Gareth has reconstructed my tentative Coming Down The Mountain technique for your viewing pleasure.

Diary of a Deranged Dieter

It's easy to look at the Before and After photos and forget about all the wackiness that happened in between. But whenever I need reminding I look at my trusty Diet Diary of August 2004. Holy analogue angst, Batman.

I'd had a brainwave to keep a paper diary of my food-related thoughts and become more conscious of my scoffing. First I wrote down what I'd eaten, then I analysed my daily performance.

2004 was a transition year in the lard-busting process - sometimes I was too busy travelling and swooning over Dr G to care about my weight, but other times I was hitting new heights of scale obsession. It annoyed me that that my social life was slowing down my shrinkage. 

I was convinced the paper diary would be my saviour; The Very Thing to sort myself out Once And For All! It lasted all of two weeks. But it is bloody hilarious to read now; such desperation and bossiness. 26 going on 13. That's the beauty of diaries though - they're the perfect dumping ground for extremes of emotion.

It's a relief to see how my relationship with food and my body has finally mellowed and balanced out. It's sobering to remember how difficult it was to get there.

WARNING: ANGST AHEAD!
Not to mention shitty handwriting.

Exhibit A: Mantras
Don't remember actually chanting out loud, but evidently I was using envy and the snugness of my Enell sports bra as motivation. My sister was on a health kick at the time and I was spewingly jealous.

Mantras
- Would Rhiannon be eating that?
- think of yr jeans & yr sports bra

Exhibit B: The Twix
Why the hell was I angry at a supermarket!?

Bought Twix & scoffed even tho didn't really want
- was angry coz of supermarket!

Exhibit C: Hot Love
My job at the time was a hotbed of dietary temptation. Every morning the Hot Roll Man arrived with hot rolls and fresh scones and every morning I'd struggle to resist his siren call.

Carb craving. Hard to watch ppl eating scones, choccies, bacon rolls.
But I want to be smaller than I want that shite.

Exhibit D: A small victory

** RESISTED WORKPLACE CHOC! YAY ME! **

Exhibit E: Message from above?

Was going to have SCONE but they were sold out
IS THIS A SIGN?

Exhibit F: Longing
I was so obsessed with getting under 90 kilos, and felt like my lardy issues were a dirty secret.

I want to be an 80s girl.
I want to stop secret eating.
I want to be honest w/ G about my issues.

(I'm much more honest with Dr G these days. One of his nicknames for me is "Issues" Reid. Hehe.)

Exhibit G: Great Expectations
This was the last entry in the diary. I didn't realise how early on I'd pondered the Book Thing. And Gareth would have had a coronary had he known how early on I'd pondered the Marriage Thing!

What Do I Want?
- to be able to wear better clothes
- to write a book about my experiences
- to be able to wear something ultra foxy for possible VERY SPECIAL OCCASIONS!!

Moonwalk Training - 16 Miles

5 weeks to go

I was due a crappy training walk; things had been going far too smoothly!

Despite being well-fed and watered, my legs felt weak from mile three. The weather was strange too, humid and sticky like Sydney. Normally I just let my mind wander with the music and almost forget that I'm in motion, but on Saturday I was conscious of every step. I wanted to throw rocks at the runners who breezed past me, with their infuriating ability to run therefore covering distances in far shorter times.

I had to give up my usual obsession with Making Good Time and just plod. At mile eleven my calves seized up, it felt like I had tennis balls trapped under the skin. FLAMING tennis balls. With metal spikes. Mile twelve I considered taking a bus. Mile thirteen saw thunder and lightning. Then it poured rain for the last two. I thought about crawling on my hands and knees. When I finally got home I gingerly lowered myself onto the couch and did not move for three hours. Job done!

Another Case for the Time-Traveling Fat Detective
More fodder for my forthcoming blockbuster novels - The Mysterious Case of the Abandoned Lipstick. It was broken and floating in a puddle - L'Oreal Colour Riche in a pale, aloof shade. Probably fell from the handbag of a leggy blonde as she was stuffed into a dark Mercedes. Or some litterbug that needs a smack in the chops.

Pace
Urgh. 16 miles (25.75km) in 04:20:46. Average pace 16:16 (3.38 mph)

Observation
If you decide to empty your bladder in a deserted bit of wilderness, for goodness' sake check for nettles before you crouch down.

Not At All Half-Assed Interview with Jennette Fulda

In a crowded session at last year's BlogHer conference in Chicago, I sat next to Jennette Fulda, the famous PastaQueen. I couldn't focus on the panelists or the bizarre audience questions ("I've been blogging for a whole month. Why don't I have any readers? Where is my money?") as I was too busy marveling at how surreal the moment was. Just a few years earlier, the two of us would have taken up twice as much space.

I stole a sideways glance and noticed she had her legs crossed, too. Did she do that without thinking now? Or did she still feel a flutter of awe that such a simple movement was now possible?

I had a million questions for Jennette. Because how often do you meet another person who has lost half their body weight? Who also blogged and wrote a book about the process? Who also is a Scorpio? (hehe)

Jennette's book Half-Assed: A Weight Loss Memoir has just hit the shelves. It's an cracking read, beautifully written and brimming with Jennette's trademark wit. I developed a sore neck from nodding, relating so much to her experiences. But I also appreciated the differences - Jennette has an incredibly calm, level-headed and rational approach to life that I only wish I could relate to :)

Dietgirl is today's stop on Jennette's Blog Tour, so I finally got ask her a few nosy questions. Read on for the answers.

Hot Carb on Carb Action!

Not the best timing after a post about healthy food, but I have secured photographic proof of the wonder that is the great British chip butty for those of you who were curious.

(more hot greasy action over at WNP!)

I've also added a new page tentatively titled Useful Stuff. Basically I'm attempting to compile all the rockin' health and fitness websites and resources that have helped me over the years, so when people ask me about that sort of thing I can point to this page instead of drooling helplessly!

Make It Easy

The most excellent Kathryn Elliot at Limes & Lycopene confessed her hatred of stir-fries in an entry called, Do small impediments stop you from eating well?

"Don’t get me wrong stir-fries are a great meal and I love eating them. They’re quick, easy and healthy ... Plus we always have tofu and vegetables in the house, which are perfect stir-fry fodder. Our mid-week meals would be better and easier to prepare if I made more stir-fries.

Instead I hate and avoid cooking them.

There are lots of reasons for this.  I don’t think I cook them very well, we often run out of necessary condiments etc, etc.

But the real reason I don’t cook stir-fries is . . . I can’t stand cleaning the wok."

Rather than kidding herself that there would come a miraculous sunny day when wok cleaning suddenly appealed, she devised a different strategy - she steams her veg and grills her tofu then throws over a quick dressing.

I agree that it's often the small, seemingly trivial things that lead to less healthy choices. Kathryn gave examples like skipping brekkie because you didn't have milk in the house; raiding the vending machine because you forgot your afternoon snack.

Personally I've found eating well becomes easier if you're truly realistic. What fits into your life? What are your likes and dislikes? What can you manage without wanting to stab yourself with a fork? Some people wouldn't mind washing a wok but for others it could mean, Screw this! I'm dialling a pizza. (Not that Kathryn would do that, mind; being an ace nutritionist and all!)

I love food and I love cooking. In my fantasy life, I slave over complicated casseroles and ponce off to the farmers market to stroke the organic spinach. But in reality? I'm lazy, busy and irritable. And hungry. There's no point pretending otherwise; you just have to work around it.

So I have a list of about 20 easy meals in the back of my notebook. There's old Weight Watchers recipes, food blog recipes, soups, salads; things I swiped from Ready Steady Cook. Half of them aren't meals so much as assembling things. I use the list to plan our meals before doing the weekly online grocery shop. I take into account the Level of Busyness - what will I have time and energy to cook? What could I be arsed to peel or steam after work or kickboxing?

I chuck the notebook at Gareth and ask for his opinion. He says, I don't mind! You're in charge of Foods. I say, Just look at the damn LIST would you.

We debate for five minutes: Yep. Nope. Bored of that. Aye. Nope. Too hard. That one's good. Too much chopping. Too many utensils. Can't we just have CHIPS for dinner? No. Oh.

Right now, with the Kitchen of Chaos, it's about minimum effort. For example, in the past I've made falafels from scratch, blitzing chickpeas and herbs and whatnot. Currently the very thought of messy food processor and messy chickpea hands and messy frying pan makes me want to stick my head in the oven. So this week I bought ready-made, non-dodgy falafel that take ten minutes in the oven. Last night while they baked I slapped hummus, salad leaves, cucumber, cherry tomatoes and grated carrot on a wholemeal wrap. Then I plonked on the wee falafel... squeeze o' lemon... dinner in 15 minutes. Rock n roll.

In summary: Online shopping, a daggy old list and a strong sense of reality make it easier for me to do the healthy thing. It took a lot of time and effort to find my groove, and sometimes I still fall out of it. But when I screw I just return to the basic formula and soon enough we're rattling along again.

I realise this topic won't be particularly earth shattering for some, but I know from experience that eating healthy can feel like a royal palaver and totally overwhelming. Do you have any crafty strategies for eating well? Let's hear 'em!

UPDATE: Many people have requested a copy of The List - you can find it here.

Moonwalk Training - 14 Miles

6 weeks to go

An important part of my training has been numerical ignorance. As a metric Australian, I had no real concept of a mile. It was meaningless to me as a unit of measurement. So last year I signed up with great enthusiasm, unable to fathom 26.2 miles. 26.2 units of something didn't sound bad at all.

It's like when I first came to Scotland in 2003 and couldn't comprehend the pound. "£3 for a sandwich?" I'd say, "Sold!"

But of course the danger comes when you do the conversion. "Eight dollars for a shithouse mayo-drenched sandwich!? HIGHWAY ROBBERY!" (the exchange rate was particularly rubbish at the time).

Likewise, it occurred to me recently that 26.2 miles is actually 42 kilometres. I know how far 42 kilometres is. I can relate that distance to places that I know. Suddenly the Moonwalk went from being a casual walk in the dark to: a bloody long way.

"That's like walking from Cowra to Canowindra and back!" I spluttered to Gareth. "Why would anyone want to do that?"

"From where to where?"

The next day I was telling my Aussie friend Jenny about the Moonwalk on the phone.

"42 kilometres?" she said, "That's like Cowra to Canowindra and back!"

Back to the training
Saturday's walk was 14 miles and it just about took the first mile to calculate that 14 miles was 22.5 kilometres. Man. That's soooo many numbers.

But the sky was gloomy and threatening so I trudged on regardless, trying to forget that I was walking to Canowindra.

Scenery
It was a long and lonely walk; I hardly saw a soul all afternoon. Just lots of rabbits and bees. Bees are so huge in this country. Australian bees, or at least the ones I've been stung by, are lean and mean. The British bees are round and furry. Like cockroaches wearing bee suits.

Soundtrack
Podcast-o-rama. Inspired by this list on Textism, I listened to The Bugle (with The Daily Show's John Oliver), This American Life, and Stephen Fry banging on about Oscar Wilde. All those intelligent folks made for a very smug and soothing walking experience.

Pain Report
The soles of my feet started to hurt around mile 10, and both knees were aching by mile 11. It wasn't an injured kind of pain, just the ache of fatigue and cannae-be-arsed-ness. I thought I'd collapse once I got back home, but I felt revitalised enough after a bottle of water to give the kitchen another coat of paint before dinner.

Pace
14.03 miles in 03:37:28. Average pace 15:30 (3.87 mph)

Tangent
All this walking makes me HUNGRY. I wouldn't advise getting into this sort of caper if you think it'll make you lose weight. In April I walked 78 miles, plus weekly kickboxing and Spinning and twice-weekly weight training. In between? I ate. And ate and ate and ate.

Somehow it all balanced as my weight stayed the same and my flesh is still safely contained by my jeans. But I wonder how I'd have reacted to all this training a couple of years ago, when I was still gung-ho about weight loss and scale numbers. Right now my motivation is to get fitter and stronger so I'm willing to listen to my body if it says, "GIMME FOOD!" But back then I think the raging appetite and weight fluctuations would have truly messed with my head.

Feats of Strength and Stupidity

I've been feeling kinda strong and feisty lately with all my kickboxing and weight training, and last night I gave Gareth a stunning demonstration. He was checking the kitchen floor for loose tiles and asked if I could help him move the washing machine. Two minute job, nae bother.

Separate laundries, a.k.a. utility rooms, are not common on the tiny isles of Britain. At least not in our sector of the housing market. So the washing machine is usually in the kitchen, wedged under the counter.

Ours machine is clunky and heavy so shifting it is a two man job. But I wanted to prove my brute strength and usefulness so I started dragging it out myself.

"Whoa!" said Dr G, "Nice one, She-Ra!"

I beamed.

"Can you just move it a little bit more to the right?"

I tugged with a Monica Seles urrrghhhh. There was a CRACK. Then a whoooosh. Then Gareth was almost knocked off his feet by the mighty jet of water that shot straight into his belly.

"You broke the hose! Turnitoff turnitoff turnitoff!"

"What? How? Where!?" I helpfully threw my hands in the air.

The severed hose writhed and the water spewed, rapidly flooding our stupid little kitchen. Gareth fought his way to the cupboard under the sink. Washing powder, garbage bags, shoe polish and sponges plopped into the water as he dug around for the switch.

Finally there was silence.

"I'll get a towel," I said.

"This has done nothing to improve your reputation for having No Practical Skills."

"This wouldn't have happened if we lived in a civilised country where laundries are not just for a privileged few!"

So apparently the hose is attached to the washing machine with a screwy-in-thingy and the screwy-in-thingy snapped right in half. Hopefully I can track down a new hose soon as it would be nice to wash the 27 towels it took to soak up the chaos.

"What were you trying to do there?" Gareth was laughing, despite being soaked to the bone, "You're always so violent. No more kickboxing for you!"

It seems funny now but last night it felt like the straw that soaked the camel's back. I  wanted to throw myself into the puddle and thrash like a toddler. This Fixing Up The Flat bollocks is getting old. Why does Two Minute Job task turn into an ordeal? Why can't we just live in a dorm with a futon and a cardboard box?

I think Dr G has had enough too, going by his expression when he sat down on the couch last night and stretched his feet out under the coffee table, only to smash his toes against the microwave I'd neatly stowed there. Mess! Destruction! Trip hazards! Floods! Enough!

And what the hell does this have to do with weight loss, you may ask. Well. Perhaps we could fashion yet another weight loss analogy. Weight loss is like moving a washing machine because... people will tell you that it'll be be quick and easy and painless but the reality can be very very messy and make you very very cranky.

Moonwalk Training - 12 Miles

7 weeks to go

Preparation
Less shoddy! I woke up in Glasgow totally parched after the previous night of rock. But I ate a huge hotel breakfast, got the bus home then guzzled water for a few hours. When I finally set out at 4PM I felt good and ready.

Route
The new route avoided boring housing estates and instead stomped past pretty villages and beautiful but stinky canola crops. I printed out a map with mile markers and road names and promptly left it next to the computer. But at least I brought water this time! Maybe too much water. Thankfully the route contained a nice bit of wilderness for an emergency pit stop.

Soundtrack

• Led Zeppelin I
• New Goldfrapp album
• Various podcasts
• Mewing of a mangy cat that followed me for ten minutes
• Rhiannon. I felt a bit lonely at 01:25 so called to say hello and we ended up yapping til 02.15! Well she talked the most; I didn't want to an obnoxious al fresco phone yapper, destroying the Sunday arvo serenity for any passers-by. I was busy with my huffing and puffing anyway.

Deep Topics Pondered
Vitamins. How come we have vitamin A, multiple vitamin B's, vitamin C, D and E then there's that huge leap down to vitamin K? What happened to vitamin J? And vitamin G has a nice ring to it too. When I get home, must look up history of vitamins.

The Mysterious Case of the Abandoned Shoe. I paused to snap a photo of a pair of black high heels that were tangled into some bushes near the train station.

I've been pondering new writing projects, and Gareth suggested I pen a series called The Time Travelling Fat Detective. His logic: everyone loves time travel (witness the success of Dr Who). And everyone loves chick detectives (witness the success of the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency). And they say to write about what you know, and I have been known to write about fat. Thus he reckons I could rake in the dough with The Time Travelling Fat Detective. So I pondered the shoes for a couple of miles. Murdered lady of the night? Kidnapped heiress? Most likely, lass with sore feet paused to have a spew on her way home from the pub. But where's the suspense in that!?

Pain Report
My knee and hamstring were so much better this time round. Everything felt better overall. By the end my legs were tired but I wasn't staggering and on the verge of howling like last time. Who'd have thought being properly hydrated and fueled would make such a difference? Ho ho ho.

Pace
Pretty good by my standards! I walked the 12 miles in 03:04:45, which is a 15:22 pace.

Moonwalk Mood-o-Meter
Much more optimistic now that I've got a decent long walk under my belt.

Recipe Corner: Vegetarian Curry

I've been making a list of questions that keep coming up in comments and emails. Not only for the love of a good list, but so I can finally do that FAQ and be a wee bit more helpful to the folks out there.

One question that has popped up a lot is: Could I get the recipe for the veggie curry you cooked for Gareth in the book?

Oh yes. Forget flowers and chocs, there is no better gift to give your new vegetarian love interest than the Gift of Fragrance.

The recipe mentioned in the book is this Spiced Dahl Soup from BBC Good Homes magazine, February 2004 (click on the pic to enlarge). In February 2004 I was living in a sharehouse with six other chicks so I figure the purchase was desperate escapism.

It's an easy recipe and the ingredients are dead cheap. I didn't have a food processor at the time to make the paste so I just chopped and chopped til I couldn't chop no more. I also used yogurt instead of crème fraîche for the garnish thingy.

I've got a few more easy curry recipes/links to share but I'm about to nick off to Glasgow to see Mogwai et al at the Triptych Festival, WOOHOO! But the recipe says "One to cook on lazy Sundays" and tomorrow is Sunday so I scanned it in case anyone is looking to lazify their Sunday!

Moonwalk Training - 10 Miles

8 weeks to go

Saturday's 10 mile walk was a bit of a shambles. I had an appointment in Edinburgh early that afternoon so calculated I'd need to start walking by 8AM at the latest. I got everything ready on Friday night - iPod loaded, route mapped, clothes laid out; favourite socks nestled into shoes to prevent the usual outraged cries of where the hell are my Good Socks.

Gareth was also leaving early to go hillwalking with Steve, so he got his stuff ready too. His preparations didn't go far enough if you ask me. I suggested he place his thermos and piecebox on the kitchen counter ready for morning (piece is a Scots word for sandwich, how educational is this blog!?) I even volunteered to pre-slice the cheese for his cheese'n' pickle pieces so all he'd need to do was slip them between the bread. No faffing with knives and chopping boards. But he declined the offer!

Alas, all the prep in the world can't account for laziness. The alarm went off at 6.30AM which I'd figured would accommodate getting dressed, making and eating of porridge and sufficient hydration and digestion before the 8AM kick off (step off?). Instead I hit snooze, over and over again, muttering to Gareth, "Geddup. Time to geddup" and him muttering back "I know, I knooow".

Finally at 8.05AM I goddup, precious schedule destroyed.

"8.05!?" said Gareth, "I gotta make my pieces!"

"You should've pre-sliced your cheese!"

I dressed, had my cuppa and porridge and raced out the door at 8.45 - forgetting my knee support and heart rate monitor and water bottle.

I blitzed the first 4.5 miles, despite the strong winds. At the loch, I saw an elderly man on a scooter, tossing breadcrumbs and being chased very slowly by a herd of ducks. At the boring housing estate, I saw 900 bazillion identical boring houses.

And then I got LOST.

I'd written down all the street names, but didn't realise there were two adjacent roads with almost identical names. If there are any town planners out there, WHY DO YOU THIS? Why do you put Moron Street next to Moron Way across from Moron Crescent? Why not have completely unrelated names... Moron Street then Banana Avenue?

So I went down the wrong bloody road and found myself at the motorway entrance - next stop Edinburgh. What the hell!? I was too cranky to go back; I couldn't face walking past all those boring houses again. I turned down another road heading back towards town.

I ended up back at the Boring House junction and truly wanted to kick something. My pace was ruined and I had no idea how many miles I'd done.

In the end I repeated the first part of the route, up the hill and back past the loch again. I figured with my average speed I'd need to do between 02:30 and 02:45 to make sure I covered the distance.

At the two hour mark my hamstring started to ache and it occurred to me I didn't have my water. My legs just got heavier and heavier after that. But I was determined to get in the miles, so finished with a shuffling lap of the local park then limped home and sat on the couch for half an hour like a stunned mullet.

For the first time I worried about my ability to finish the Moonwalk. If I was completely shagged by just 10 tiny miles, how the hell would I do 26.2?

(Incidentally Gareth and Steve returned that evening having walked 18 21 miles*, including 3300 feet up a MOUNTAIN, the smug gits)

* thanks for the correction, G.

But I still have eight weeks. Let's not panic. I should get there if I keep training consistently and heed Saturday's lessons:

• Take water bottle.
• Read street signs properly.
• Obey the alarm clock.
• Pre-slice all cheeses.

Steamy Windows

Last night I...

• ... sneaked off to Anstruther with Gareth for fish and chips by the sea. It was a clear, sunny evening and we were stressed oot our skulls so decided that LARD WAS THE ANSWER. By the time we queued for the goods it was freezing outside, so we ate in the car (fish and chips me, chip butties for him) and the windows got all steamed up. This is the kind of steamy window action enjoyed by the dull and married.
• ... finished listening to The Time Traveler's Wife! Argh! I was supposed to save it for walks only, but I got hooked and gorged on the whole thing. Do you see a pattern here!?
  I'll have to get to the library because audiobooks aren't cheap. Did you know the movie version comes out later this year, starring Australia's Eric Bana as the time travellin' fella? Mrrrowr.
• ... cleaned the oven. The oven had not been cleaned for seven years. Imagine the carnage.
• ... did a rocking interview with an Irish radio station called i102104. I was on the iTalk show with Chris Greene and Mary McGill. I didn't think you could listen online because the website link on Mary's email didn't work, and it didn't occur to me to ask or bloody Google it myself until after the fact. Tis a pity because it was lots of fun, as it always seems to be with the lovely, lovely Irish folk. I think I was a bit wacky from the fish and chips because when they asked me how and when my weight issues started, I blurted that when I was a child I, "turned to chocolate because I was too young for crack". OH dear.

Tonight Dr G and I are cleaning the kitchen in readiness for painting, so this is the shoddy entry you get instead of the Proper One I've been trying to finish for two weeks. But summer is coming and we are desperate to finish fixing up the flat. We are so bloody bored of fixing up the flat. It's been chaos since last September when we kicked off with the wallpaper stripping. You cannot move for tripping over paint pots and tile cutters and mountain bikes. The kitchen is the biggest pain in the arse - right now the fridge is in the hallway, the microwave is in the bathroom and the spaghetti jar is on top of the telly. An organised kitchen is the most sacred, fundamental element of my health and well-being routine so I'm feeling rather edgy at the moment.

Moonwalk Training - 8 Miles

9 Weeks to go

I spent so much of Saturday pissfarting around with my bloody heart rate monitor and trying to choose an audiobook that I had to walk on Sunday instead.

Audiobook Report
You people are geniuses! The eight miles really flew by with a book in my ears. I ended up with The Time Traveler's Wife.

Heart Rate Monitor Report
Perhaps I did my own bit of time travelling as apparently my heart just stopped beating for about ten minutes. And then at one point when I was huffing up a hill, it had allegedly slowed to my resting rate. !!?! But for most of the 02:04:59, the monitor reflected the level of exertion I felt at the time. When I was getting a bit too involved with the book I'd hear that faint BEEEEEEEEP and looked down to see the rate had slackened off so I'd pick up the pace again.

My HRM has a fitness test feature which I'm sure I will become obsessed with. Gareth doesn't call me "Statso" for nothing. The test is "based on gender, age, height, body weight, level of physical activity, heart rate and heart rate variability at rest". You put on the HRM then lay very quiet and still for five minutes until it spits a number at you that is apparently comparable to VO2 max. Anyway, the numbers are spread across a range - from Very Poor > Poor > Fair > Moderate > Good > Very Good > Elite. I was smack bang in the middle of the Moderate range. Well! Hmmph. I guess it's about time I aimed higher; it's easy to just compare yourself to older versions and say, "I'm an athlete! I used to get puffed walking to the fridge!"

Walking Report
The walk itself felt good, I kept up a nice pace. Not sure if this is due to athletic prowess or that I was desperate to get home in time for the MotoGP.

It's only eight weeks til the Moonwalk now and I'm a little nervous about the increasing mileages. My fitness level seems good but I get this annoying tightness in my right hamstring and glute - the same leg as my old dodgy knee. It's been three years since the knee injury and while the knee itself only gets a little achy at the end of the walk, the hamstring and glute thing is pretty much constant. My right leg is still so much weaker than the left. Must work on that.

NEW! EXCITING! Dietgirl Reader Gallery
This weekend I finally finished my wee gallery of People Reading Dietgirl from around the world. I'd spotted photos here and there, and the bombshells (plus one cat) allowed me to gather them in one place. I must have gawked at the page fifty times now; there's something quite thrilling about putting names to faces. Just seeing the blinds on Laura's window or Nelly's couch reminds me again that this little world we've created is so real... the blogs, the comments; the ideas on what to have for lunch. Exxxxxxxxcellent :)

Full of Lassies

Today was a bit of a bastard day at work, I have to say. I got in at 8AM with the hope of getting a large mother of a task done by the time everyone else arrived, but it ended up taking me until FIVE PEE EM. Magically that was when Gareth called to say he was off to the shops for a beer and a bag o' crisps, and did I require any Friday night supplies of a brown and cocoa-ish nature? I gratefully ordered the usual small bar of G&B's.

"The chocolate aisle was full of lassies," he reported when I got home. "All these lassies in business suits, staring up at the chocolates and looking completely knackered."

MY PEOPLE!

. . .

My heart is thundering in anticipation of tomorrow's eight miler - hopefully it will be the first outing of the heart rate monitor! If I can figure out which buttons to press.

I'd initially ordered a men's HRM because I thought the lady one would look too lost and dainty on my wrist. Plus the bloke colours were better. Maybe I've got a bit of Forearm Dysmorphia, you know that well-known condition. It arrived last week and it looked huge and bloody ridiculous. I knew it would bug the crap out of me so I sent it back and ordered the poncy pastel lady model instead.

So far I've managed set the date and time and enter my weight and height! The next step is to read the manual. I haven't tried on the chest strap thingy yet. There was an automatic nervous flutter when I took it out of the box, wondering if it would fit around me. Will that feeling ever go away!?

Thanks a bazillion for all your comments on the last entry; I really liked your suggestions to spice up the long walks with audio books. Heard any good ones lately? What's appropriate for a couple hours of exercise? Crime and Punishment?

Hope you have a good weekend comrades. I'll be tuning into the London Marathon on Sunday to have a vicarious blub at all that sweat and personal triumph! Good luck YP and anyone else out there!

Flakes and Flaming Cheeks

Tonight I was typing away like a demon when suddenly! We had a power cut. I lost my blog entry.

I passed the time by opening up a bunch of those sample sachets you get in magazines. First there was a Body Sculpting Lotion which I slapped on my chest then waited for the magic to happen. Beneath the candlelight it all looked quite promising but now with the lights back on I can report... it's a dud! Boo!

Next up was the Anti Wrinkle Day Cream which I daringly applied at 10PM. MISTAKE! Pain! Flames! What do they put in that stuff? If by Anti Wrinkle they mean Erode An Entire Layer Of Epidermis well then, they have succeeded here.

Anyway after all that excitement I'm having trouble remembering what I was writing about before.

I would have mentioned our BORING walk today. I am not entirely loving the Moonwalk training, I have to confess. This is despite the sparkling company I've had on my walks. It's not so much my body that's the problem but my tiny little brain. I like my exercise in short, sharp bursts of sweat and adrenaline and discomfort and possibly violence, e.g. Spinning or kickboxing. Anything longer than an hour and the mind wanders. This doesn't happen so much with the hill walking because you are too busy thinking about forthcoming sandwiches and/or how much PAIN you are in. But with the Moonwalk, you're training to walk 26.2 miles of a flat-ish course through the streets of Edinburgh, so you need to train on the same kind of urban terrain.

Gareth came along this afternoon and after half a mile of boring cycle path he said, "Whoa, this is boring isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Why did you make me come on such a boring walk?"

"I didn't! I specifically told you I was going on a Boring Walk. You invited yourself!"

"Oh! Is that how it is?"

So we ambled along for six miles arguing about who was the most bored, punching each other on the arm at half-mile intervals because there was nothing better to do. But we kept up a good pace and the air was crisp and bracing after this morning's snowfall (which had melted after ten minutes). It's only ten weeks until the Moonwalk so I shall load some funky tunes on the ol iPod and PLOD ON, baby!

I would also have mentioned how I am beginning to claw my way out of the health/fitness rut I've been in for about... six or seven months now. It has been quite a process. A few weeks ago I had that panicky feeling where it feels like you'll never find that place again where you DON'T think about chocolate every seven seconds. Coincidentally I've had a lot of emails lately of a "Help, I've screwed up royally and fear I'm doomed forever" nature - is there something in the air? So I'll yak more about this in the next entry.

I feel like I've got my focus back now, but two weeks ago I could barely function for thoughts of chocolate. I was making a deliciously healthy curry and gathering all the spices in a wee dish and all I could do was stare at the cinnamon stick with a ridiculous conversation raging in my head:

OH MY that cinnamon stick looks just like a FLAKE. Why must it be a cinnamon stick? Why can't it be a Flake? I could bite into that right now. Even though I don't like Flakes. Except I wouldn't eat it, on principle! Because I can't bloody stand that new Flake ad with Joss Stone in it, muttering away to herself and brushing crumbs off her boobs. Stupid Flake ad.

Pleasures of the Flesh

Gareth is working up yonder in the Shetland Islands tonight so I took the opportunity to eat animals for dinner.

Dr G's not a militant vegetarian; it doesn't bother him if I eat meat. I could wear a steak for a hat and play drums on his lovely bald head with chicken legs and he wouldn't freak out at all. But I too lead the vegetarian life most of the time coz I'm lazy and find it much quicker to make veggie food now. I still love me some flesh, but it's more of a sometimes food. I kind of play it by ear - every week or so my body suddenly screams, "I NEED FISH!" so I'll eat some. And then every month or two, out of the blue, I find myself daydreaming about bacon. And/or burgers.

Thus when Dr G got the call to Shetland I said, "Yessss! Flesh night. I mean... dang, you're going?"

I went hunting in my lunch hour today, pacing between the butcher and the supermarkets over and over, unable to decide. So many animals! So many parts! How do I cook 'em? Could I be arsed chopping 'em up? It suddenly seemed like an awful lot of work and dirty dishes. In the end I bought two lamb burgers stuffed with feta. I put them in the oven along with a potato hacked into wedges. Then I made a wee salad with tomato and peppers and cucumber and oregano; in other words Greek salad without the really good bits. I plonked the salad and the wedges and a burger on a deathbed of baby spinach. You know the kind of spinach, where you spend five minutes picking out the mush and convincing yourself the rest is edible.

The verdict: Very tasty. Very filling. And strange! Flesh has so much more going on than a bean, I have to say. I enjoyed the texture. I'd also forgotten how meat has juices. Beans don't ooze! Flesh seems to hang around in your mouth for longer. It keeps talking to you, whereas the beans sort of whoosh on down.

But looking at that mucky oven tray, I think meat shall remain a sometimes food. Beans are much tidier specimens. And they don't give me the weighed down feeling I have right now, five hours later. Maybe it's the wee ghost of a lamb sitting in my stomach... Whyyy? Why did you do this to me?

Hush little lamb! I'm still going to eat your leftover brother for lunch tomorrow.

There's No Place Like Home(s)

On Friday it was five years since I moved to Scotland. Half a decade?! I cannae believe it, hen.

I'm elligible for proper British citizenship now. That costs £655, so I ordered a heart rate monitor instead. You people were very persuasive! Thank you for your comments. As an celebratory experiment I will wear my HRM while eating a deep-fried pizza and see if it has any immediate effect on my ticker.

Yesterday I went walking with Gareth and our mate Steve in the Lomond Hills. We did a 14km loop, featuring steep bits, flat bits, sheep poo, snow, mud, heather and gravel. My dodgy knee hurt a little, no doubt since it had been so long since I'd been in the hills. There was one steep bit where I did my freak-out-and-freeze-with-fear thing, but I took a deep breath and maintained a neutral expression as I slid down the rocks on my arse. Couldn't have Steve thinking I was a wuss!

Yesterday I learned that it sucks being the slowest person in a walking party. Steve is freakishly fit, compared to me anyway. After four hours we'd reached the final little hill. My face was red, my legs were lead; I was drooling. I slumped over my walking stick as Steve strolled casually, shoulders relaxed and hands in pockets. At least Gareth had the decency to look a bit sweaty!

Also, if you're slowest - you never get a chance to catch your breath. The lads would stand at the top of each hill, politely admiring the scenery while they waited for me to haul myself up. Then once I'd caught them, they'd set off again! So I'd go too, thus never really getting a rest.

Overall it was a good walk with good company. I used to hate exercising with people - even a crowded Body Pump class felt solo, coz I'd zone out beneath my barbell. But these days, aside from weights at home, all my exercise is social. At kickboxing, you gotta look people in the eye before you whack 'em. Then there's the lunchtime walks with my work pals. I seem to push myself harder than if I was alone, as I don't want to look like a slacker or get left behind.

Ahh, humans. They're like heart rate monitors on legs, really. I didn't need to buy that contraption at all.

Anyway, Scotland. It's a great place to be! I've moaned about the weather over the years but it's really a pretty mild climate, if you can get past the rain and dark bits. I remember people warned me I'd "stack it on in Scotland" with all the lager and greasy stuff but in many ways it's easier to be healthy over here. I've become more outdoorsy that I ever thought possible, and I put that down to knowing I won't roast alive if I go outside. My epidermis favours the Northern Hemisphere. That said, I still miss alfalfa sprouts and cheap mangoes. Both countries have their pros and cons and both countries feel like home. Och aye, mate.

Finally, here's some shaky footage of Gareth and Steve staggering around at the top of West Lomond yesterday. I'd never seen/heard wind like this before. Howling!

Spring Forward.

Fall Back.

Heart Rate Monitors?

I went to a Spinning class on Good Friday and came out with jelly legs and a serious case of gadget envy. The instructor and one of the participants were yakking about their beloved heart rate monitors. My friend Jane used to rave about hers and I know Kekster uses one. I've always resisted them as it seemed yet another way for me to obsess over statistics and shiny things. But I LURVE statistics and shiny things! Is that so wrong?!

Anyone out there a Heart Rate Monitor fan? Anyone think they're baloney? I know sweat and slobber and inability to form sentences are good indicators that one is exercising hard, but... SHINY!

Like An Apple

My pal Caro posted a photo of an apple to her Flickr yesterday with this great caption:

"this was the most delicious apple i have ever eaten. could be, because i ate it after coming home from a bikram yoga class, which really reduces my needs and thoughts to the simplest things. like an apple."

Ahhhh. That has to be the very best thing about exercise, I reckon.

Did any UK folks happen to catch GMTV today? This morning I got an email from a lovely lass who said she'd just read a post on a Weight Watchers forum saying that GMTV vixen Lorraine Kelly said at about 8.45AM that I'd be on the show in a few minutes to talk about finding love.

At that time I was in my pyjamas here in sunny Scotland, pouring yogurt into a Tupperware container and thinking that getting up at 8.28 isn't the best idea when work starts at 9. I failed to put the lid on properly so when I arrived at 9.04 the yogurt had leaked all over my bloody lunch and muddy trainers and Enell sports bra and I had to think long and hard, Am I hungry enough to lick yogurt off shoes?

Anyway, as cool as it would be to meet Lorraine Kelly, it wasnae me! I had a gander at the forum tonight and there was another post: Did anyone see diet girl and gareth on gmtv this morning - she looked fab even slimmer than after the books losses.

It's a wee bit odd. A case of mistaken identity? Or maybe my publisher has some sort of Milli Vanilli thing going on, dispatching a spunkier, svelter Shauna for telly appearances? I bet Dr G will want to know if his stunt guy has hair.

Ye Olde Fat Shoppe

Like many I have traumatic tales of shopping for plus size clothes. The frustration, the frumpiness, the flammable fabrics. Then recently at the Yorkshire Air Museum I spotted this advertisement from a WWII newspaper and realised we have come a long way. If a 1940s larger lass heard me moaning about my tapered jeans and shirts with beards she'd be rolling her eyes, "You think you've got it bad, missy? Why, back in MY day all I had was a Charmingly Colourful OUTSIZE FROCK!"

Gracefully draped style, designed to give soft slimming lines to the full figure. In brightly coloured screen print effect Rayon Crepe in various shades. 46, 48 & 50 ins. hips.

It looks like the basic idea was that one drew attention away from the hips with gigantic shoulders, upon which one could have landed a Lancaster Bomber.

The model doesn't seem particularly outsized. I guess it's only been in recent times that we've progressed to actual plus size people modelling plus size clothing, so it might have been too radical to sketch a proper plus size chick. Or maybe they had to ration their pencil strokes since there was a WAR on, don't you know.

They also very thoughtfully catered beyond 50 inches: Others equally attractive in Prints up to 54 ins. Also Rayon Frocks, 46 to 60 ins.

What do you think of the plus size clothes of today? Are they getting any better? I must admit I had a few "Back In My Day" moments when I first arrived in the UK in 2003 - I nearly wept in an Evans store when I saw jeans without stupid sequins and costume jewellery that actually got around my wrists and fingers. And then I found Monsoon stocking up to size 22, so I could buy things off the same rack as my slip of a sister (except I didn't coz it was so bloody expensive). I found three different shops with non-frumpy Going Out Tops. I was excited by the options, but part of me wanted to shout at the younguns, YOU KIDS! YOU DON'T KNOW HOW LUCKY YOU ARE! I didn't have no fancy wrap dress! All I had were black trousers and man shirts!

But five years on, from what I've read in emails and blogs, it seems that overall both the clothes and the shopping experience are still prone to extreme suckiness. It's not all Charmingly Colourful Rayon but there is still some ways to go - as best illustrated by Katy's horrific experience in New York.

. . .

I had eggs for breakfast on Saturday, of the Green & Blacks miniature soft-centred persuasion. Very tasty and no doubt top quality fuel for the eight-mile training walk that followed... but nothing can beat gnashing the ears off a good old Aussie Red Tulip bunny. Will somebody scoff one on my behalf and recount every filthy detail in the comments!? Happy Easter, comrades.   

Unleash Your Inner Tightarse

Just wanted to share a couple of links on the hot topic of frugality.

From the lovely Trace in the comments - Love Food, HateWaste - an official campaign that aims to "raise awareness of the need to reduce the amount of food that we throw away, and how doing this will benefit us as consumers and the environment". There's money saving and storage tips, recipes for pesky leftovers and a guide to stocking a store cupboard. Looks like a goodun, but where's the Honey Jar Ring? The stray peppercorns and couscous grains rolling round the bottom?

Via SJ comes an article by Alanna Kellogg at BlogHer - How To Save Money On Groceries. Personally I've found shacking up with a vegetarian really slashes the food bills. Animal parts can be expensive. Lentils and beans are cheap, if you can tolerate the changes in the atmosphere while your digestive system learns to cope. Bwahaha.

STOP PRESS!

Spooky Mulder. I was typing the above on Friday evening when suddenly! A wee lady appeared at the door from a market research company. "I just need one more survey then I can go home for the weekend," she pleaded with her clipboard and puppy-dog eyes.

These people always come to our door. I think the word got out last year when I was home writing. I'd let anyone in - religious callers, charities, electricity companies, the radio ratings people - anything to get away from That Stinking Book for ten minutes.

Anyway, I caved again. After asking my opinions on stamps from Northern Ireland, nanotechnology, lifeboats and Scottish football sponsors... the next topic was FOOD WASTE!

Did I waste food?
Did food waste upset me?
Had I heard of Love Food Hate Waste?
Where did you hear about Love Food Hate Waste?

Would you believe they didn't have an option for "Heard About It In My Blog Comments".

How freaky cool was that? I was so blown away by this strange coincidence that I watched Saturday Night Fever on DVD instead of finishing this entry.

Where were we?

Ahh, links. This one illustrates the fine line between thrift/ingenuity and outright tightwaddery. It's the remnants of Merrick and Rosso's TightArse Tuesday Guestbook from 2000. Back then Merrick & Rosso were on Australia's Triple J network and one of their segments was Tightarse Tuesday, in which listeners submitted hilarious tales of penny pinching. It helps if you can read the entries in your best Aussie accent.

Ben from Launceston:
I have a mate, named Brad, who went to buy his girlfriend a ring for her birthday, all well and good, then he decided he might get it engraved. He went to the 'engravers' and was told it was $3.00 to start and then twenty cents per letter. He thought this was a little steep, so instead of writing "I will love you forever" he thought he would save a bob and got "I'll luv u 4eva", so he only paid for twelve letters instead of 19. Thus saving a hole $1.40.

Gillian from Gladstone:
Dad, who is now 96, bought a pair of slippers on special, as you do, but unfortunately they were 2 sizes too big. No drama, just cut the ends off them and staple them together. They now match the other pair of Specials in his shoe closet which were too small and he cut out the toes on them. Can't beat a bargain can you!!!

Brownyn from Launceston:
Have i got a rippa tight arse story for u.
My mum is the ultimate tight arse. She collects barcodes from packets of biscuits, canned food etc, in case one day they have a competition. She wont have to go out and buy the products to collect the barcodes 'hey presto' she's already got them.

Taryn from Drysdale:
The people down the road from us had their letterbox broken by some (extremely intoxicated) locals. Instead of bying a new one, they've just gone, "oh no, hang on, we've got an old microwave out here we're not using, let's use that instead." So they've got their big old box-of-a-microwave out on the roadside as the letterbox. And the posty uses it.

Briony from New Lambton Heights:
Two "elderly" people were in the 'egg isle' of a supermarket and these two people were taking the free-range eggs out of the free-range carton and putting them in the battery egg carton so they could have free-range eggs at the price of battery eggs.

Anyone got a tightarse tale to share?

Mean and Green

I had a Mothership Moment in Marks & Spencer. There was a dude putting yellow stickers on a trolley of goods. Lettuces, salads, over-packaged potato products. My heart skipped a beat... could this be... a CHUCK-OUT BIN?

The Chuck Out Bin is what Mum called the bit where supermarkets put all the aging yogurts and the nearly-stale bread. I've often written about my childhood mortification as she pawed through the goods: "To her an expiration date is not a recommendation but a challenge".

I once vowed never to follow in her footsteps, but this was M&S! I'd never seen M&S do a bargain bin before. They've been infamous for simply tossing their near-expired food, making them extremely popular with bin-raking freegans. Also, now I'm older and madly saving for a house deposit and/or a visit to Australia. Therefore I could justify stalking the aisles and lurking behind the posh crisps; waiting for the dude to finish sticking his stickers.

In the end I took the direct Mothership approach and marched on over.

"Hellooooo! Are these on special?"

(They tend to say "On Offer" in the UK but the whole bargain hunt experience transported me to Oz.)

"Yes!" he rolled his eyes, "Happy digging!"

I got a wee tub of three bean salad for £1. You have to be careful with these things as cheap can be dear, "because it tempts us to buy what we need not." But I told myself I really needed something for lunch the next day, and you couldn't buy the ingredients for a pound! Well you probably could. And you'd get a few servings too, then you could recycle the bean tin instead of clogging the earth with another plastic container. But that wee surge of adrenaline and triumph made it feel like a bargain, especially with the shiny yellow sticker.

On Sunday I was thinking about the relationship between food and thrift and the planet. This week's Food Programme on Radio 4 was about commercial food waste. Around 24 million tonnes of food is dumped into landfill every year by restaurants, food manufacturers, supermarkets and airline caterers. Crikey! Apparently the methane generated by all this food has a great impact on the environment.

And just before that I'd been listening to 86-year-old actress Liz Smith on Desert Island Discs, cheerfully talking about her 1930s childhood with bugger all money and her frocks clobbered together from random scraps of fabric.

I thought of these shows later on when doing the weekly online grocery shop. Normally I have a vague menu in my head then go madly clicking through the virtual aisles, throwing in anything and everything. Then I freak out at the subtotal and remove half the items from the basket until it looks respectable. But with money and waste on the brain, I decided to do a proper stocktake of the kitchen cupboards.

Turns out I already had plenty of tins of beans that would have made a great salad. D'oh! And then there were a dozen half-empty packets of various grains and seeds and pulses. Oodles of experimental sauces and spices. Abandoned bags of frozen veggies. I came up with a week's meals there and then; all I needed was bread and milk and some more fresh stuff. Ka-ching!

Among the scoffings this week:

• Vegetable lasagna - using the leftover lasagna sheets that have annoyed me for months, a stray ball of mozzarella and three tins of brown lentils which I can almost convince myself taste like beef. O, the plight of the vegetarian's wife.
• Lentil Dahl - as featured in the Farting Out The Window incident in the DG book! Starring dregs of yellow and red lentils and a bag of frozen spinach I've tried to ignore since October.
• Smiley Bill's Muesli Bars - a.k.a. granola bars (US) or cereal bars (UK). A healthy-ish Bill Granger recipe with oats, dates, sunflower seeds, pecans, honey and a dod of sunflower oil. Finally got rid of all them seedy scraps and they taste BLOODY BEAUTIFUL!

I think green and frugal kind of go hand in hand. Less about sticking a bloody wind turbine on your roof and more about being thoughtful with your consumption. Of course, if you truly wanted to minimise your impact on the environment, you'd need to sit very still and very naked and not touch anything... and just wait to die. This is the only way I can see that one could avoid leaving carbon footprints and exploiting children in clothing factories and scoffing ill-treated chickens/ depleted fishes/ bananas from distant lands. Although you'd still be hogging oxygen and stuff.

But here in reality, methinks you can only do your best to not be an obnoxious resource vulture. That way you get to save money and be smug all at the same time.

Where Are The Snogs Of Spring?

Daylight savings starts Sunday! I've been telling anyone who'll listen. People, dogs, garbage bins. Wind back them clocks!*

It said so in my diary, and it seemed like the right time as the sun has been out and about lately. There's still light in the sky when I leave for work. There were robins hopping around on our lunchtime walk, not to mention a three-legged cocker spaniel that was moving way faster than us.

(* UPDATE - Melissa pointed out that it's clocks FORWARD. Is it any wonder I don't know what day it is!?)

I finally remembered today that I bought my bloody diary in America. So daylight saving only starts over there this weekend; the UK has to wait until the end of March. D'oh! I'll have to remember to go to work on the 4th of July.

It feels close enough to Spring anyway. I'm itching to throw things away, to try something new, to reorganise and refresh. Maybe get a really ill-advised haircut.

Another sign of impending spring is the wavering between soup and salad at lunchtime. Which way to go?! I think my thermostat is totally tuned to Scotland now because it was a sultry 8'C (46'F)the other day and I thought, SALAD TIME! Growing up in Australia I used to listen to the weather report every morning, hoping for a maximum temperature of 15'C (59'C) or below because that was my personal Tracksuit Threshold - cold enough that I could wear tracky dacks (aka sweatpants, joggy bottoms) to school and hide my much-loathed legs.

In other news, the Moonwalk (marathon walk) training is finally back on track. There's three of us meeting up for an eight miler tomorrow morning. When I joined the office walking team I thought, YES! Accountability and commitment! And now all I can think is, ARSE! Accountability and commitment! These things always sound good and noble on paper, don't they? But then you have to actually do the bastard training instead of sleeping in til noon.

Comeback #457

Back in the saddle today! It's been three weeks of sickness and sloth and sloppy eating, with no exercise except the blowing of the nose. I hit the wall in York yesterday as I stared down into the remains of a tasty pub lunch of steak pie with mash and veg. My belly burbled, Why are you feeding me all this pastry? And all these animals? Why haven't you been taking me for walks?

I have long accepted that there will always be times when I lose it for awhile - circumstances conspiring to disrupt the routine... or me just eating too bloody much. But it is weird, even in the actual moment of overdoing, I don't seem to feel the old shame and panic anymore, nor the urge to carry on scoffing into oblivion. It's more like, Righto. I'll enjoy this here pie now and get on with the porridge and kickboxing as soon as.

But lordy it sucks getting back into the routine. How many million times have I been here? I had a nice healthy salad sandwich for lunch and stocked the desktop pantry with oatcakes and apples and bananas and oranges and peanut butter but I just wanted to bellow, BORRRRRRRING! like Homer Simpson. Then I arrived at the gym for kickboxing after a shitty day to discover I'd left my trainers at home. Nothing like that spluttering rage that comes from doing something stupid that can be blamed on noone but you. I stomped back downstairs and said to the receptionist, "I left my shoes at home! Can't do the class! What a shame eh?" Then my friend Vicky arrived and pointed out I still had time to trot home and get my shoes and only miss ten minutes. "OH ALRIGHT THEN," I said. Foiled!

But I'm glad I fetched them, even if I arrived back in time for a fitness test. Apparently they do this every six months. This annoyed me because we had a CHART to fill in and lack of exercise has left me weak and totally not PRIMED for the event... so my chart wouldn't be as good as it could be! I got all competitive and pathetic and even stole glances at other peoples charts in order to become even more competitive and pathetic. It was all, how many quivering push ups can you do in a minute (bugger all), how many axe kicks (57 left leg, 60 right), how many backhanded fist punch thingoes before you swear your arm is going to fall out of it's socket (170-something), how many lunges (barely 20! stupid knee!), how many straight punches... I can't remember but surely it was HEAPS!?

I take the mouth-frothing desire to improve these statistics as a sign that I am on the comeback trail, despite still not being able to hear properly. Woohoo!

. . .

First law of blogging: Never blog after midnight. Second law of blogging: Never blog while upset. I did both at 1AM today in spectacular fashion. SCORE!

Then after much tossing and turning I woke at 5AM feeling like a twit. So I deleted the entry, forgetting that all the people subscribed to the site via the RSS feed had already seen it. Derr! Sorry you guys had to witness such raw panic in motion.

The gist of the entry was: I received an email from someone who was extremely angry that I hadn't responded to their email of three weeks ago. My tiny mind made the short leap from one angry person to the possibility of whole armies of angry persons - due to the current backlog of emails - and all of them thinking I was a heartless evil sell-out. Thus I spewed out the 1AM Entry o' Turmoil!

Important lessons have been learned here. One, You just cannae please everyone.

Two, there's only so many hours a day. Day job, family, friends, book stuff, bathing, kicking things - these must also be dealt with and I've been trying like a bastard to keep up with it all. I get such really hilarious, heartfelt and/or heartbreaking emails and want to break out the Scotch Finger biscuits and blether with you all, but I need to be realistic about what can physically be done each day.

Three, my contact page needed a tweak. For a long time I've had a disclaimer that responses can be slow due to my o'erflowing inbox, but because of the current volume the disclaimer needed to be strengthened.

Cheers m'dears and hope your Monday is/was a goodun.

The Humble Spud

Did you know that it was recently National Chip Week? Brought to you by the British Potato Council, of course. Chips are loved the world over but seem particularly celebrated here in Scotland. Some of my happiest moments in this country have involved chips... limp ones in a polystyrene box after a drunken night oot, with fish and mushy peas by the sea; gobbled down in the car after a hike in the hills.

A popular chip manufacturer currently has a billboard that truly shits me off. It features a big bowl of oven chips with the headline: EAT YOUR GREENS. Then there's wee green icons that say: Low fat! Low salt! Low sugar! Etc etc.

A chip ain't a green. A chip is a chip. It's starchy, sometimes greasy, and usually delicious. Why do we have to pretend otherwise? Why can't we just enjoy a food for what it really is? Why do food manufactures have to dress things up with flimsy health claims?

Recently a Nutella advert proclaimed that every jar contained, "52 hazelnuts, the equivalent of a glass of skimmed milk and some cocoa" and was a healthy breakfast for the kiddies. Never mind the fat and sugar and the fact you'd have to eat the whole jar to claim that glass of skimmed milk.

I wish there was some sort of regulation of food advertising. Right now you could stick a blueberry in a bucket of ice cream and scream, CONTAINS ANTI-OXIDANTS! Next thing they'll put 5p coins into yogurt pots and claim they're rich in... richness? Is it any wonder people are confused about what the hell is a healthy food?

I guess these companies wouldn't make as much money if they said something sensible and honest, like:

Yep, this is Nutella. It's brown and gooey and delicious. The Europeans are fond of it on bread for brekkie, but we don't advise you eat the whole jar with a spoon like certain people used to do. Think of it as a Sometimes food.

Likewise the mighty Chip. I wouldn't call them an everyday food, whether this be in their traditional soggy Scottish or pre-fried weird-coated freezer-to-oven incarnation. But they are tasty, and they are there to be enjoyed without guilt or apology.

I'm still immersed in a Heston Blumenthal-style search for the perfect homemade oven chip technique. When you're married to Scot, chips need to feature on the menu. If you cut Gareth with a knife he would bleed starch. But we do try to keep them reasonably  healthy.

Most people say the Maris Piper potato makes for the best chips but I made a cracking batch with the good ol' King Edward. The best batch yet involved cutting into wedges leaving the skin on, par-boiling them until JUST stab-able, then draining in a colander. Then I left 'em to dry completely and cool down quite a bit. This drying and cooling step seemed to make ALL the difference.

Then I put them onto an oven tray, making sure they had a reasonable space around them coz overcrowded chips don't crisp up very well. Then I seasoned and sprayed them in olive oil, then put into a 230'C oven (which may be cooler as our oven sucks) for about 30 mins, turning halfway. They were bloody beautiful - crunchy outsides with tender guts.

Yeah baby. Chip week may be over but I will party on all year.

One Size Fits All

I was in TK Maxx the other day. I know some people worship the place, but how come every time I rifle through those bulging racks it's all lime green capris and Michael Jackson leather jackets? I was, however, very tempted by the glorious range of exercise gear. Check out these Sauna Exercise Suits.

It says on the box:

"Shed water weight effortlessly! Wear it while you work, play or exercise. Body heat is sealed in to help muscles stay warm and keep you in top condition. Easy to carry and store. Hand washable. Elasticized - One size fits all."

Elastic at the waist AND neck... now that is sexy. Kind of wish I'd bought one now; I feel all desperate and lardy after two weeks without exercise.

I went to the doctor yesterday and I've got some antibiotics. Or andybiodics, which is how Dr G alleges I pronounce it. The ear pain has subsided but I still can't hear a bloody thing. 

My doctor has a set of scales sitting right beside the desk. Why do doctors always have to put the scales, right there? I still have a residual fear that no matter how ill or injured I feel, they're going to oh so casually ask me about my weight. I don't see a doctor very often, but the last few times - shoulder injury, dodgy knee, Sinus of Doom - I held my breath waiting for them to say, "I'll just get you to hop on the scales." Even yesterday when she stuck the ear-thingy into my ear and declared it severely inflamed I sighed with relief.

When I was seriously obese I avoided doctors because of that fear of not being taken seriously; that any ailment would be blamed on my size. And you know what? Part of me actually believed that was true. Part of me didn't want to bother the busy doctors with my bulky presence. The only time I saw a doctor was in 1999, at The Mothership's insistence, when she figured out about the depression. I was desperate to reach out but somehow felt it was my own lardy fault that I felt so shit; that somehow I deserved it.

I remember the doctor didn't mention my weight. She just said she'd help me get help. I felt relieved, but I also like I'd gotten away with something.

She sent me off for some blood tests too, since I'd been feeling so run down. And this is the only real Fat Girl Horror Story I have. I was such a hermit at my largest, so I never had an opportunity to break chairs or to be yelled at by a carful of teenagers. All I have is a trip to a nurse for blood tests and they couldn't find a vein. They wrapped my arm in the extra large cuff and had me squeeze my fist harder and harder. Then they tried the other arm. On and on it went for half an hour. The nurses frowned and clucked and said don't worry dear, but I almost felt too numb to feel the humiliation. There was numbness and this low, rumbling anger directed at myself.

They told me to come back tomorrow to try again, and to have a really hot shower beforehand. And they managed to find the tiniest wee speck of blue that time. The tests came back perfectly healthy. I was always good on paper: perfect blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar. No bad knees.

I'm really wandering all over the place tonight, aren't I? I guess it still scares me how much I used to hate myself. I read lots of fat chicks on the internet, all loud and proud and confident and and unapologetic and I feel jealous and ashamed that I wasn't like that. I just hid from the world and wished I could rip my flesh off. But maybe half the reason I keep writing is just in case there is anyone out there that ever felt like I did. To show that is possible to crawl away from that feeling, even if it takes an age. Even if you still second guess yourself at the doctor's surgery and sometimes find it hard to believe the feelgood is for real.

That'll Do, Pig

Why is snot?
Where does it start and why won't it stop?

I'm sure that statement could be wrangled into a totally brilliant haiku or something, but I'm too snotty and miserable to bother. It's been a week and that cold is still hanging around. From Friday to Tuesday I was proper, Couch and Toast ill. Now it's just the annoying dregs that aren't quite horrible enough to justify time off work. Today all the symptoms have rushed to my head. I'm deaf in one ear, it feels like something is about to explode. I'm also treating my colleagues to regular nose-blowing concertos. Next up: The Blue Danube. Da da da da daaaaaaaa - HONK HONK! HONK HONK!

It's not just my body that's hopeless right now; my brain is below par too. Please excuse this substandard excuse for a blog entry. I know there are a lot of new people swinging by here lately who are probably thinking, Who is this snotty moron and what fool gave her a book deal? I assure I do have my articulate moments. Please don't run away! I'll come good again soon.

An example of my braindeadedness: Mistress Anne of Elastic Waist invited me to partake in their brand new Naked segment, all about beauty and body image. On Wednesday night I spent five hours in front of the computer trying to answer those five little questions. With the way I was gurning at the screen you'd think I'd been asked to solve the third world debt or the Brittney Spears Conundrum.

It just SUCKS when you brain and body won't do what they're told. I think I've taken them both for granted lately, assuming they'll always perform. I'm doing my best to be patient and rest, but I have to admit there's a wee bit of panic there. How long is this going to take? I got miles to walk and emails to reply to. And still the answer seems to be: Settle, petal!

I got stuck on one Anne's questions: When do you feel most beautiful? I don't know if I ever feel beautiful. Maybe it's an Australian thing, but I'd feel like a turkey even thinking that, as though a pack of high school bitches would jump out of my wardrobe and say, "You're SO up yourself!" (oh how I miss Australian phrases like up yourself) then flush my head down the loo.

But I spose I do feel sort of mildly pretty, inside and out. The best way I can describe what I feel when I look in the mirror is like the end of the movie Babe when James Cromwell pats the wee pig on the head and says, "That'll do pig. That'll do."

Not that I think I look like a PIG, mind you. It's just that I feel a quiet peace with how I look. At this very moment, with red eyes and half the skin sandpapered off my Rudolph nose, I don't feel particularly gorgeous. But for the most part, especially with lipstick involved, I just nod and smile and think, "Yep, we're doing alright, no worries. Let's go out into the world!"

UPDATE: Tis Sunday morning. I started this entry on Friday but got distracted. Today the snot has subsided but the deafness has morphed into the Excruciating Ear of Doom. Now it's ringing like I'd been to ten consecutive Iron Maiden concerts. There's also an oceanic whooshing sound. And PAIN like you would not believe. I called NHS 24, the government's out of hours doctor service. The nurse told me to take painkillers and call the doc tomorrow. IF my eardrum hasn't exploded all over the house before then

At least the nurse was nice. They should rename the service to NHS Virtual Mum, because when I described my symptoms she was all, Poor hen. Ooh I know. Ooh I know dear. An ear ache is never nice. Poor thing. Now THAT is what you really want when your real mother is on the other side of the planet. That is why I pay my taxes.

What concerns me more than the pain and deafness is that I went to a Curry and SingStar Night with my work pals on Friday evening. SingStar is that Playstation game that's like fancy lounge room karaoke. Bolstered by about half an inch of wine, I really got carried away. I belted out I Should Be So Lucky, Hungry Like The Wolf, Parklife, Tutti Frutti, I Got You Babe, I Heard A Rumour and two Franz Ferdinand songs. The combination of half-deafness and that half inch of wine made me believe I sounded fantastic. But this morning I had a tentative warble in the bathroom and realised I sound like dog turds! My voice is pissweak enough in good health but right now it is a total drone. I can't believe I subjected my colleagues to hours of that. There's no way in hell I was hitting any of those notes. Especially in the particularly rousing sections of Total Eclipse of the Heart. At least if this earache does me in, I'll never have to face them again.

Just in case I'm not back in a timely manner and you are looking for a means of passing the time, here is a nice interview I did with the Irish Examiner with only one swear word - click here.

You'd Butter Believe It

Last year in a post called Why Stripping Wallpaper Is Like Weight Loss I reckoned that you could pretty much turn anything into a crappy metaphor for lard busting. Sunglasses, chickens, bananas, etc. I've got another one for you today: Making Your Own Almond Butter Is Like Weight Loss. Ohhh... yeah!

Way back in July 2006 Clotilde of Chocolate and Zucchini fame posted a recipe for homemade cashew nut butter, or beurre de cajou as they so elegantly say across the Channel. You grind raw nuts in a food processor until the natural oils emerge and transforms into a preservative-free trans-fatless natural goo. I was dying to make an almond version, but was convinced I couldn't be trusted not to gobble the whole jar with a spoon.

Eighteen months later, I try not to say that sort of thing. I don't like to think of foods as dangerous or triggers or any word that implies that I am a powerless, out of control fruitloop that needs to be muzzled at farmer's markets. So I felt I was ready to pulverise some nuts.

Almond butter is delicately grainy and almonds are very nutritious, don't you know. But it is pricey. £1.80 for a tiny 170g jar! It's a lot cheaper in the USA - I lugged a big jar of Trader Joe's stuff back from Chicago. It had honking huge shards of almond that stabbed the roof of the mouth in a painfully pleasant way. But once that ran out I was back to the expensive one, which made me recall Clotilde's recipe. Hmmm, I said in a tightwad tone befitting of one who has lived in Scotland almost five years, I could buy a half a kilo of raw almonds for the same price and make my own! THRIFT-O-RAMA!

Back in January, I bought my bag o' nuts and prepared to churn out another shitty metaphor.

Making almond butter is like weight loss because...

1. You start out with a lumpy mess!

Ho ho ho.
This is actually 500 grams of raw almonds, which I toasted in the oven.

2. The fundamental recipe is simple
Dump almonds into food processor, process at high speed until creamy. That's all there is to it! Eat less, move more! EASY!

3. The reality is painfully slow and messy and tedious frustrating as hell.
I hit the button.
And I ground and I ground and I ground.
And nothing happened.
So I looked at the clock. Ground some more.
Grind grind grind.
Sweat swear sweat.
Nothing happening!
It's not working! WHY ISN'T IT WORKING?! The recipe said it would work!
Twenty minutes of solid labour and all I had was almond clods!
This blows. WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME?!

4. When you least expect it, it all comes together.
By this point the food processor was almost too hot to touch. I was waiting for the smoke to appear. But after twenty five minutes the first trickle of oil oozed out. BROWN GOLD! And then finally it started to take shape.

5. The end product may not be exactly what you'd dreamed of. Might a bit rough. And lumpy.
Or look like complete dogs droppings. And I'd overtoasted the nuts - our oven has two settings: Cold Indifference or Cremains, so you can never get things right. But perfection is for... perfect people. This stuff had character! It was delicious too, subtle and creamy.

I also managed to eat it in a sensible manner, spread over a series of breakfasts (with Bonne Maman apricot jam, CHOICE!) I didn't attack it with spoons or write odes of longing when we were apart. There's hope for me yet.

CONCLUSION
This mega jar of almond butter was a bargain at just £2. Of course that doesn't account for labour and half an hour of electricity. But just like the lard busting, sometimes the most effective method is not the most efficient!

Total Eclipse of the Lungs

Over the past month I've watched friends and colleagues be slain by various colds and bugs. I sailed along untouched, thinking the power of citrus and green vegetables made me invincible. But the wee tickle in my throat has turned into a bark and I've got a fever and more gravel in my voice than Bonnie Tyler. D'oh!

You know those adverts for flu tablets, where a red-nosed woman juggles three toddlers in one hand and a multinational corporation in the other while the voiceover sighs, In Today's Modern World, I Just Don't Have Time For A Cold! I would always snort, "Shut up, you overpaid martyr! Nobody's that busy!" But this year, despite not having kids nor a briefcase, I've discovered such insane levels of activity. Which is fair enough because I've been coasting along for 30 years in a truly half-arsed manner. I only blog about the ACTION, which might create some sort of illusion of a wildly exciting life, but really it's mostly been me faffing around and shouting at televisions.

Anyway, I feel like shite today. It's a good excuse to put on my tracky dacks (that's Australian for sweatpants) and my baffies (that's Scots for slippers) and curl up on the couch with a book. I'm supposed to do an eight-mile training walk tomorrow but I might need to postpone until Sunday. I feel twitchy at the thought of NOT ticking off that box on the training schedule but I spose one should listen to ones body. Right now the body says: LET THERE BE TOAST.

. . .

In other news, apparently the Dietgirl book has flapped its way down to South Africa (thanks Moira!). I think it might also have made it to India, as there was a little mention in The Hindu that charmed my pants off:

"The concerns about obesity and how to beat it finds expression through the ‘Amazing Adventures of Diet Girl.’ ... The interested may also Google their way to her blog for more information."

Bon weekend, groovers!

The Chocolate Gap

Creak... creak... creak. What's that sound? It's the sound of my Will To Live returning! It's only four weeks until daylight savings begins. It's getting lighter in the mornings. Birds are twittering again. For every minute of sun we gain each day, I will surely become one percent less crabbit! Right now my temper is short, especially when watching University Challenge and the students deliberate too long before answering the question.

"Hurry up FOOLS!" I screech at the telly. "This is not a pub quiz!"

If I was the producer of the Challenge, any hesitation longer than five seconds would be rewarded with a small electric shock to the buttocks. I'm sure we could rig up the chairs somehow.

Speaking of televison and chairs, Monday nights aren't the same since Nigella Express finished. I used to scoff at Nigella's sprawling adjectives and deep-throating of vegetables but I love her, really I do. Watching her show makes me ever more resolved to enjoy my food and never diet again. Yes there is the annoying Scoffing By The Fridge Light scene at the end of every episode but I feel she has the right idea. There's a great chapter in her book How To Eat about dieting and healthy eating that is one of the most sensible things you could hope to read on the subject. She celebrates food. She doesn't divvy it up into Good or Bad. She can wax lyrical about a bag of spinach just as much as a wodge of chocolate cake.

One time in the new series she made herself a tasty lunch of sourdough toast, chopped into three slices. One had hummus, one some avocado and tomato and olive oil on the other. It was a nice little meal on a nice little plate, but a year ago I would have freaked out... FAT! CARBS! PLEASURE! I used to restrict toast to a Weekend Treat, which of course made me pine for it from Monday to Friday, sputtering with resentment over a perfectly tasty bowl of porridge. These days I'm not breakfast bossy  - sometimes it's toast, sometimes it's yogurt, sometimes it's leftovers, whatever I'm hankering for. The less restrictive I've been the more I seem to lean towards a healthy choice.

Anyway, The Nige has inspired me. I have a gigantic folder full of recipes I've saved over the years that I'd filed under Cook These Once I'm Skinnier. I've always loved food and cooking but I'd deemed most recipes off limits. As if I couldn't be trusted with certain ingredients; as if one mouthful would be my undoing.

Why not just COOK what you want to cook? You don't have to eat it all at once. You can share it with pals. What are you waiting for? I'm talking to myself here, by the way. Was that confusing?  Anyway. I am going to make some of these Forbidden Recipes. Fetch me apron, luv!

Gareth says I have a Cooking Show Face, an expression of utter peace and happiness that is reserved purely for when there's cooking on the telly. My eyes are wide and gleaming and he'll be telling me a story about his day and I do not hear a word. He reckons there's a certain Cooking Show Posture too. If chocolate is on the menu, he'll cackle, HA HA you've got a Chocolate Gap! and wave his hand through the space between the couch and my back, which is alert and upright like a police sniffer dog. Do you have a chocolate gap too? Get out your rulers, tell me I'm not alone?!

Helicopter Arms

Geekgasms ahoy! Thanks to my pal Claire I've found a new obsession - MapMyWalk.com. I can plot all my routes on the map thingy, log training walks and other activities, then calculate distances and calories burned. There's calendars and graphs and I can track all sorts of wacky information like daily mood, weather and quality of sleep. I can enter all my SHOES and keep track of how many miles each pair plods. I already use a blog and a spreadsheet and WLR and a paper diary, but really... you can never have too many statistics.

I also like to stalk websites written by redheads, because it's nice to read about accomplished redheads making their way in the world. If you believed what you saw on the television, all we do is go around stabbing people or generally being calculating and eeeevil. My current favourite is What I Wore Today by Kasmira in Cincinnati. As the name suggests, she writes about what she wears. She has a brilliant sense of style and colour, not to mention lovely legs. I bet if you handed her a piece of string, a paper clip and a banana peel she could fashion some killer accessories in a jiffy. Ginger power!

I also love how she looks so comfy and relaxed in her clothes, like she has fun getting dressed every day. I want to be like that! I want to have more fun with clothes and this new body of mine. It's not even new anymore - I've been a size 14 for almost two years now. But I'm not always the best at judging how much space I take up. I absentmindedly take 16s and 18s into change rooms; I still have a tendency to walk with my arms flying out like a helicopter, as if they're resting against a much wider body. A journalist asked me recently, "Do you go WILD with new clothes now?" and I said, "What do you mean?" and she said, "Isn't that what people do when they lose a crazy amount of weight?" and I thought, Ohh! Why haven't I done that?

I've been more advanced this past year, trying a few frocks and stuff but it's all a bit dull. I'll get dressed up for a night out but feel like a dowdy granny as soon as I meet my pals, who always seem colourful and adventurous. How do they do that? My most exciting purchase has been my boots which have a current cost per wear of £50, coz I'm too chicken/lazy to think of something to wear with them. I feel like an imposter when I'm clip-clopping around, like someone is going to yell, "HEY lardy, who do you think you are in them boots?"

Are there any other losers out there who struggle to dress their new bods? Or are you all going for gold doon the shops?

K-Mart or Bust

I started my Moonwalk training today. Woohoo!

We’re supposed to get an official schedule in the post this month but I made my own because I want to get stuck in. For the next 18 weeks I’ve scheduled two short weekday walks  (3-6 miles [5 – 10km] then a longer one on weekends (starting at 6, building up to 20 miles [32km] and then tapering off before the big day). The schedules I found online had four walks per week, but I want to keep up my kickboxing and weight training so three’ll do me. It’s for charity, after all!

Four of us girlies went for a wander at lunchtime. Being Scotland and all, it was raining. At first it seemed dead boring compared with kicking and punching things, and I worried I’d die of boredom when it came to walking 26.2 miles in a row. But soon enough the endorphins kicked in and I thought, AHH how nice to be outside and temporarily free of the office shackles. There was also smugness, for we were striding like women possessed while the rest of the town were stuffing their faces with Gregg’s sausage rolls.

I realised that I need to take this training seriously. 18 weeks from now, I’ll have to be on my feet for nearly eight hours in a row. I was rather knackered after 45 minutes today! Granted I pushed hard at kickboxing last night, but I’ll have to build up some endurance. People have told me they’ve easily done the Moonwalk with skipped training sessions but I want to be a shining BEACON of fitness! I’m in a team of twelve work friends so I refuse to be Ms Slowy McSlowarse, bringing up the rear or collapsing on the side of the road begging for mercy and/or bacon sandwiches.

Another thing I like about training is that it will force me to use my time more effectively. I am still faffing around like you'd not believe. Today I woke up at 8.25AM, having hit snooze over and over for 70 minutes. I washed and dressed in a flash, slapped some almond butter on a piece of bread then galloped and swore my way to work. Miraculously I was only five minutes late, but that is not the behaviour of champions. For one, I discovered via Google Pedometer that it’s only 0.7 miles between home and work. WHAT!? On lazy days I’ve counted that to/from journey as Proper Exercise! Hmm.

So if I’m only 0.7 miles from work and don’t start until 9AM, there really should be plenty of time to do some exercise or writing, have a proper breakfast and not arrive at work in a mess. Of course that means getting to bed earlier, preparing things the night before, etc etc. But lately all I do is run round like a headless chook, bawling at the sight of my To Do list and unanswered emails. It may sound strange but I think adding a big fat time-consuming bitch of task like a marathon training will help me tackle all the other stuff. Fingers crossed, eh?

. . .

Thank you everyone who has been in touch about the book. Thank you so much for your emails and blog entries and rockin' reviews! And hearing news of K-Mart sightings back home in Australia made me strangely emotional! K-MART! That's the place I used to buy boxes of own-brand choc chip cookies and demolish them all home alone. That's the place I bought my Sweet Valley High books. That's where I pulled a tin of tyre paint off a shelf when I was three years old, coating myself and the aisle in black goo. Memorieeees!

Dip Dip

I have a burning ambition to do a tricep push up. Also known as a close-grip push up and probably seventy five other names, but it's the one that looks like this.

I cannot do 'em for the life of me - I barely manage a standard push up! For years I've jealously watched people churn them out at Body Pump classes while I slumped on my mat. There is a strange beauty in that neat up and down action... it's like the human equivalent of a collapsing ironing board!

I figure this time last year I couldn't do tricep dips and now I finally can, so maybe in another years time I can do the pushup. At this rate I reckon could work up to a pullup in approximately 75 years!

My Day In Elle

When it comes to confidence it's all about context. For a long while now I've claimed to be totally cool with all my wobbly bits, as I stomped up hills or paddled canoes or dashed to the hardware shop in a tracksuit encrusted with paint and yesterday's Weetbix. But back in November I had a real test of those convictions: a photo shoot for ELLE magazine!

I was so excited when they asked me to write about how I came to a place of bodily peace, lurve and understanding. But when it came to the accompanying photo shoot, you might say I had an old-fashioned Fat Girl Freakout. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I'd written 1500... so wasn't a picture and a half enough?

"I'm not Elleworthy," is what I whimpered to everyone who said I was being ridiculous. I thought they'd have to amend the slogan on the spine: The World's Biggest Selling Fashion Magazine: Now Contains Morons!

I'd had my photo taken before under less daunting circumstances: just me in my own clothes with freelance stylists and photographers. This time it was in London in a posh studio with Real Magazine People, and they were supplying the clothes! I couldn't sleep for a week beforehand. Despite giving them my measurements I feared they'd not find anything to fit me. I had visions of seams bursting; of buttons flying off and blinding nubile assistants.

I woke at 6AM on the day of the shoot to wash my hair. I dried it at 7AM. At 8AM I became convinced it looked greasy.

Shauna: Does my hair look greasy? I think it looks greasy.
Rhiannon: It doesn't look greasy.
S: But I think it does, I used too much of your hair stuff. It's more powerful than my hair stuff.
R: Is it?
S: Why didn't I use my own? Why did I risk New Hair Stuff today of all days?
R: It doesn't look greasy!
S: I think I better wash it again. Do you think I should wash it again?
R:   . . .
S: I don't know. I can't decide.
R: Well you better hurry up and decide. You only have two hours.
S: Oh my god what do I doooo?

Not only does my nervousness cause loss of appetite, there's also severe indecision and paranoia. In the end I listened to the voice of reason that is my sister and did not re-wash my locks.

We met the lovely Sam and Anna from my publisher outside the studio and together we entered the temple o' glamour. It was all high ceilings and huge windows and yawning white spaces. We sat on a plush couch and were offered refreshments, but I declined because my teeth were chattering so wildly that I feared I might bite a hunk out of a teacup.

The Elle People trickled in, and they were very nice and chatty. I began to relax. Then the hair and makeup artist got to work. She did a great job at disguising all those sleepless nights! Then she bouffed up my hair and pulled fancy moves with the straighteners. All I could do was gawk in amazement. Make up artist? Make up magician more like! Woohoo!

Next I met Bonnie the Stylist and she was gorgeous. She took me off to a dressing room with a rack of clothes and a neat row of swanky looking shoes all waiting to be caressed by my size eight hoof. She explained we'd be doing a series of portraits with a soft, elegant look. I nearly snorted because I saw myself as more suited to a rustic farm girl look.

She pulled a shirt off the rack and it looked impossibly dainty and pretty. Thankfully it fitted. The trousers did not. I couldn't get them past my knees and I mumbled, Sorry! Sorry! I'm sorry.

I was so irritated that I'd said that out loud. What happened to the Happy Just Being Me stuff? I felt crushed and pathetic, but Bonnie was like a reassuring old Aunt trapped in the body of an elegant, tiny young woman. She told me not to worry about sizes and labels, and besides, she had plenty more trousers to try on. Soon I was clothed and climbing into a pair of high heels.

Dudes. Nobody warned me about high heels. I mean really high ones. I started to walk back into the studio expecting my legs to just, you know... walk? But instead I staggered like I'd been thrown out of a moving car. How do people wear those things all day? I was mortified by that entrance and the fact that I was clearly the elephant in the room... yet all this fuss was due to My Amazing Weight Loss?

It was one of those moments when I could stand outside myself and listen to the wild screaming match between my Old Thinking and New Thinking. Who will be the victor today? I hope you can understand how everything I'd learned over the past seven years could temporarily desert me. It was the context - a room full of glossy magazine people, cameras, bright lights, high-heeled clomping. I'd never felt like such a big fat fish out of water. My mind raced as I took my place on the wee set, Who have I been kidding? I should lose another ten kilos. Maybe twenty. Why did I eat so many bloody bagels in New York?

But then thankfully the New Thinking took over. The moment the photographer smiled and lifted the camera to her eye, I felt a massive rush of adrenaline and glee. I'm in London! In a studio! With fancy hair! And crazy shoes! Gettin' me photie taken! For ELLE! This isn't awful, it's pretty much the coolest thing ever.

I remembered my favourite Flight of the Conchords episode with Jemaine's heartfelt speech about racism: "I'm a person. You're a person. That person over there is a person. And every person... deserves to be treated like a person."  All the people in the room were persons, and they were treating me like a person. So I should remember to treat myself like a person, and not a lardy freak!

The camera was hooked up to a computer so the photos instantly popped up onscreen. That could have been daunting, especially when people were clustered around it with serious expressions, pointing to blown-up eyebrows, teeth and jawlines. But somehow once we were in the swing of things I could look at the images with a pleasant objectivity. It was fun doing all the poses too. At first I couldn't stop laughing, so there were dozens of giant gummy grin shots. Then the photographer said, Look sad! So I looked out the window and saw an old lady shuffling towards a mailbox. I pictured a Royal Mail van burning around the corner and mowing her down. I think I even summoned a wee tear. Then she said, Pretend your secret crush has just walked into the room. Oooh. Cue demure blush. At one point I had to toss my hair around, like I'd just stepped out of the salon. Fun and games!

We had a lunch break. There was table full of freshly-cooked gourmet treats but I picked at a tiny wedge of quiche. Not because I'd gone all Starving Model but I didn't want to get anything stuck in my fangs! I thought about models and how its no wonder they snort things and live on cigarettes and have tortured love lives. I can't imagine anything worse than your career being based entirely on the way you look. How do they not explode from the constant scrutiny?

There was a basket of miniature bars of Green and Blacks chocolate. In all the flavours! OH I trembled with joy, or it may have been high heel instability. I grabbed one, clopped back to the dressing room and nestled it beside my Spare Bra. I had to bring two along - one black, one flesh coloured.

The rest of the shoot passed without incident, except for when my arms got STUCK inside a shirt! It was outfit change no. 5 methinks. The top was carefully placed over my head and outstretched arms, but when they pulled downward they couldn't get very far. I felt like a right goose, trapped in designer cotton with my arms glued to my ears, but at least I laughed instead of apologising!

Afterwards, I changed into my civvies and was just about to head out when I remember my choccie. They were packing up the clothes in the dressing room. The stylist's glamourous assistant smiled and scooped up the goods from the table.

"Here's your bra and your chocolate!" she said.

She had the chocolate bar in one hand and my giant, ultra supportive bra in the other. She could have worn one cup as a hat, I swear. It was hilarious.

. . .

So the story is in this month's issue of Elle, but it's only this month's issue for another half hour as the new issue comes out on the 30th. How's that for timely blogging? Anyway, I've done a dodgy scan if you fancy  a peek. Gareth and I keep cackling over one frame in particular because it's like the opening credits of Kath & Kim:

There's always a joker in the pack.
Bwaaaaaaahhahahaa!
(apologies if you've never seen K&K!)


(click for larger)
Full story: page 1, page 2

The Long and Whining Road

Gareth told me that after one of my radio interviews a lady phoned in and said, "It's all very well this girl writing about losing loads of weight, but we all know it's just calories in, calories out."

Oh reaaaaally, I longed to hiss at Mrs Gloria Smug of Tunbridge Wells or wherever, IS THAT RIGHT?!

Technically she may be correct. And I know some annoying folk like Gareth, for example, just cut down on beer and cheese if their jeans feel snug. But since I've been crapping on about this stuff for seven years, I feel the need to splutter defensively as a representative of those who find it more complex.

This Body Stuff is very complicated. I won't just say Weight Loss Stuff, because personally it has always come down to how I felt about my body. At first I was too busy point countin' to realise this, but what I really wanted was simply to feel alright to be me. To look in the mirror and not bawl, regardless of my knicker size. THAT, dear comrades, was and still can be the hard part.

I hate to use the cheesy J word... *choke*... JOURNEY! Because it makes me think of John Denver or sunsets or a soft focus montage or this delightfully crusty book of Gareth's -

How about the word process? Wendy used it in a comment on this most excellent Big Fat Deal entry last week and I like it.

SO... I started out swimming in self-loathing but ended up somewhere rather healthy and peaceful, where mirrors are my friend and the streets are paved with quinoa. But getting there was a slow process. I had to figure out how the hell to move on from years of believing FAT was my most defining characteristic. It took soul-searching and mistake-making and blog blurting. There was certainly more to it than bloody calories in and out!

I've been guilty of over-simplifying things myself. Sometimes a journalist will ask, How Did You Do It? and my mouth flaps open and shut like a goldfish, because I just can't remember. I'll look at the book cover and think, Who? Wha? Me? How?! And I'll hear myself say, "I started out with a walk to the end of the block" or I chucked out all the biscuits or I frantically peed before Weight Watchers meetings, momentarily forgetting how scary and difficult it was; how long it took to look beyond the scales.

Anyway, my point is... if you happen to find it all more complicated than calories in and calories out, and someone keeps telling you that it's not more complicated than calories in and calories out... well why not just go ahead and punch them in the gob? You might even burn some calories!

. . .

Dublin was ACE! All hail the mighty Irish and their sexy accents! I had a great ol time, guzzled a 20th of a pint of Guinness and chatted to journalists and radio folk. The Ray D'arcy Show was fun, Ray and his gang were hilarious and friendly. It was my first time live in a studio so I was a bit shell-shocked and rubbish in the first segment. Arrgh! But there were texts and emails flying in from the listeners - including a few asking about loose skin. That old chestnut! No folks, you don't have to look like a shar-pei! My favourite text was, Does she look as good as she sounds? Woohoo!

This week the book officially comes out in Canada, New Zealand and Australia! I'll be on Radio 2CC in Canberra on Friday morning and the Body+Soul show on Mix FM (Syd, Melb, Brisbane, Adelaide) on Sunday, both Oz time. Also a chat with the rockin' Roisin Ingle on Newstalk in Ireland will air on Saturday morning GMT. See my author page on Good Reads if you'd like more details of the book pimping activity!

Every Body Needs Somebody

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a lady in possession of a few unwanted pounds must be in want of a buddy.

Well, it is true in the case of lovely Piabella of The Belly Experience. She wrote recently:

"I need a buddy. Someone to encourage me and keep me going and let me bitch to them about the bad times and celebrate the good times, and I could do the same for them."

How does one find a lard-busting companion?  We have blogs and online forums, but a one-on-one comrade can be invaluable. Someone to check in with over a morning email. Someone to yap to about the nitty gritty of your lunch, your exercise plans, your urge to bury your head in a bag of Doritos. This kind of everyday communication is great for accountability, ideas and a mutal cheer squad!

Yet it can be hard to find such a person in the Offline World - not everyone knows someone who can truly relate to their plight. What we really need is a Match.com for lard-busting. Like romance and dating, we all have a vaguely common goal - instead of Getting Laid, it's Getting Healthy.

But while we're all in the same general lardy boat, different people are looking for different things in their companion, depending on where they're at in the process. For example, this might have been my Personal ad in 2001:

But now it would be more like:

Which brings me back to our Piabelly. Could you be her perfect email buddy?

Piabella is 28 years old and lives in Australia. She would like to lose around 30 kilos (66lb). She is currently trying for a baby. She is moving to New Zealand soon. She is not fussy about where her buddy comes from, the magic of email means we can be flexible. She writes a cracking blog and has recently joined a gym. Here's a wee bit from our chat:

"I guess what I'm looking for is someone who has just started a weight loss thing, cos then they'll be in a similar boat to me, someone who wants a bit of encouragement and is willing to give a bit back, willing to rant about food and exercise and listen to rants, and listen to me talk about how proud I am that I've managed to drink more than one 600ml bottle of water in a day. They can also brag about their water drinking capabilities if they wish!"

Does this sound like you? Do you need a buddy? Be bold and brave and drop our lady a line - piabelly at gmail.com!

Goals Goals Goals 2008

Righto. 2008 Goals! It's been a little weird this year because losing weight is no longer the mission. So where do we go from here?

Considerations

1. I am done bloody done with obsessing about weight, eating and exercise.
   HOWEVER...
2. My flesh really needs to stay within the confines of my clothes, due to the financial/social implications of bursting out of them.
   AND...
3. Given my long and colourful relationship with food, a certain watchfulness is required!

Because it never ends. There's never a moment when you lunge across the finish line and get a medal and a marching band plays a jaunty tune. But hopefully staying in my jeans won't have to be a dull and dirty task. I struggled in the latter half of 2007 when life got ultra-stressful, but I'm slowly getting it together again. For the first time in living memory I got through Christmas without gaining weight. It was odd but pleasant to start the new year without the usual bloated panic.

So my goals this year revolve around exercise. When I do the exercise, I feel happy in my skin. If I feel happy in my skin, I don't feel the desperate need to get lost in the biscuit tin. The goals incorporate a few things that really float my boat:

1. Cardio with Pals - cardio basically bores the shit out of me so involving friends makes it a social appointment instead of a chore
   
2. Physical and Mental Challenge - I feel wracked with Calvinist guilt if I rest on my laurels. I have to push on to new frontiers, especially frontiers that fill me with fear and dread... otherwise a piano will fall on my head for being idle and complacent!
   
3. Structure and Purpose - I've never felt so healthy and positive as during my 5K training back in 2005. I liked the schedule, the challenge, the inching towards a goal. I ate healthily because it made me run better, not because I was freaking over the scales. I want that feeling back again!

So my exercise goals are:

1. Keep on kickboxing - social and violent, how can you go wrong? I am determined to nail the spin kick without feeling the need to vomit.
   
2. Lift weights twice a week - CONSISTENCY, dammit! I was so stop-start last year that my overall strength didn't increase much. This year shall be different!
   
3. Stretchy stuff once a week - in previous years I always vowed to do it twice or more but it never happened. Time to be realistic. So one yoga or pilates DVD or a class if feeling adventurous.

And the big ones... fun fun fun...

4. Train for and complete the Edinburgh Moonwalk - a marathon-distance charity walk in June. Basically you start at midnight and pace 26.2 miles through the streets of Edinburgh in your bra (and shorts or trousers, naturally). Over ten thousand lassies doing it all for cancer research! We've got a wee team happening at work and I am dead excited - time for a new challenge. It will be long and tough but I will geek out with the training schedule!
    
5. Do the Sea to Sea cycle route - this is a popular 140 mile jaunt right across the north of England -- from Whitehaven on the Cumbrian coast to Tynemouth on the North Sea coast. Dr G did it last year and had a grand ol time, despite the big bad hill in the middle. I stupidly agreed to give it a crack in 2008. To be honest, I'm not sure about it at all. It's a truly laughable idea right now. I'll have some really bloody serious work to do, given my current Absolute Beginner status; the fear of going down hills and inability to pedal up them. Let alone cycling for a few days in a row. Hmmm. We're planning our trip for early September. Hmm hmm hmm. But it's ON THE LIST and out there baby, so I'll give it a red hot go!

Somewhere Over the Radio

Yesterday was rockin' and rather surreal. It was seven years to the day since Dietgirl started with that first sobbing-on-the-scales moment back in sunny Oz. And somehow I'd wound up at the BBC in London, rabbitting on the radio about everything that's happened in between.

I woke up ready to spew from fear, so could only nibble a toast corner and three grapes for brekkie. Nervousness remains the only emotion that kills my appetite. Soon enough I was in a tiny soundproof booth with headphones on, chatting to presenters all around England. Some asked very sensitive and probing questions, some asked about What I Used To Eat. Chips ahoy!

Comrades. Thank you so much for all your kind responses to the wee book - all the comments and emails and Facebook messages and photos. I've been reduced to honking snotty tears on many ocassions. My reply time is molasses right now due to book and workplace busyness, but I didn't want anyone thinking I'm a total snobbyarse. Thank you everyone who has taken to the time to blog about it or write a review on Amazon or tell your next-door neighbour. You have no idea how helpful your words can be. I'm in the process of pulling them all together in one entry, so if I end up missing yours, just hunt me down with a big stick and I'll get it sorted.

This all feels so unreal sometimes. I started writing in 2001 because I felt like the most lonely, lardy, hopeless lass on earth. If I could travel back in time I'd say, "Look around, you goose!" There is no need to feel lonely. We've all been in this lardy boat together. Rock n roll.

So, I did five interviews and I don't think I swore once! Although I did talk about poo one time. And of course that would be the interview that Dr G recorded for you all. It also makes me laff  because we get interrupted with the breaking news that the Bristol Rovers vs Fulham match has been CANCELLED due to a flooded pitch... And now back to Dietgirl!

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Return to Fancy Gym

Excitement! Sweat! Nostalgia! The lovely Lainey gave me a guest pass for Fancy Gym, the temple of fitness that used to be my second home before I moved across the Forth for love. We went along to Body Pump, hosted by Kiwi Vanessa, a.k.a the best instructor in the universe.

Last time I was in her buff and bossy presence was January 2005, during Operation Wedding Dress. She was as fit and strong as ever; I think I counted 50 kilos on her bar for the squats. She corrected my form during that track - my wonky knee wasn't tracking properly. I can't believe she noticed me. Woohoo!

I've missed Body Pump so much. The plastic clickity-clack of the weights, the ridiculous sense of anticipation during the Warm-up, the mutual nods of agony with your neighbour when the evil Chest track is over. Without thinking I set up my step at my old spot up the back on the left-hand side, right next to the mirror. During 2003 and 2004, most Mondays and Thursdays, I'd keep one eye glued to my reflection, searching for signs of shrinkage.

But most of all I'd missed the motivational banter, and Vanessa did not disappoint.

"PAIN IS TEMPORARY!" she bellowed as we grunted through the Shoulder track, "BUT FAILURE IS FOREVER!"

Modus Operandi

Oooh I've nearly finished my 2008 goals list so am feeling excited and purposeful. About bloody time.

The Mothership reports that Dietgirl got a great mention in Ray Chesterton's column in the Aussie Daily Telegraph today:

"With the issue of obesity in the news in Australia, a new book is a timely release. 'The Amazing Adventures of Diet Girl' by Shauna Reid details in an intimate and often hilarious style her personal battle of the bulge to cut her weight in half from 159.5 kg to 79.8 kg from 2001-07. There are no recipes: weight was shed via a controlled diet using food from a commercial weight-loss company."

It could have been quite a different book had I actually spent six whole years on a Jenny Craig-esque regime:

Day 1: Chicken cacciatore. Yum!

Day 7: Chicken cacciatore. Joy!

Day 976: Chicken caccaitore. KILL ME!

Then the whole moving-to-Scotland-finds-love sub-plot would never have happened by virtue of being too darn bankrupt to go travelling.

For the record, it will be seven years next week since it all kicked off and it's comprised: one year of Weight Watchers, four months of Sure Slim... and 5 years 8 months of my own hard work and bumbling trial and error :)