Breaking Up is Hard to Do

Last month – a week before I left on holiday – my gym and I went our separate ways.

Ever since last May, when my office moved to the South Bank, it had been a bit difficult to make time for each other. There was no gym in my new office building (it just opened this month!) so I stuck with my old one, which was a 25-minute walk away – sometimes more, depending on trudge factor. And yes, it was always a walk – there is no convenient tube or bus route between my old office and my new one. So I was getting up a good half hour to 45 minutes earlier to get to the gym in the morning, and in the winter, it was a struggle.

In February, my company stopped the corporate rate. Between that (to remain a member, the price for me would more than double), the distance and the fact that my attendance had dwindled (I was substituting running outside and occasionally, walking the hour from my flat to my office), I knew things were over.

What I miss most already is my Saturday routine – I’d do Body Pump (instructor was, quite simply, the awesome-est) and then some cardio and then head to lunch. Without fail, I did it every single Saturday I was in town.

Currently, I’m researching some new classes (mostly yoga, which I became completely obsessed with while on vacation – more on that in another entry), but I’m struggling a bit. I don’t do well without a routine, and from a purely physical (and physiological) standpoint, I can’t run every day. And I’ve got a few other complicating factors, including Bachelor No. 2, who lives on the opposite end of London from me and eats like a total boy, and a total English boy at that (translation: extremely unhealthily). He was seriously sporty at university, but as even he points out, that was many, many dinner parties ago. Almost every weekend I haul my running gear to his house (because every week he insists he wants to go), and then – like Waiting for Godot – we do not move. Sigh. But this morning, when – predictably – he announced he’d decided not to come, I went myself. It wasn’t easy.

* * *

BN2 knows I struggle with eating, but he does not know why or how or to what extent. (I am a rotten liar, and he asked me directly what the specialist doctor’s appointment I had was all about a couple of months ago. I told him in the briefest terms, and didn’t even use the word “binge.”) He knows I don’t handle anything well when I get too hungry, and he knows that exercise is important to me.

What he does not know is that staying at his place is getting me slightly crazy. I cannot – as he does – eat croissants or pain au chocolat or toast with butter and honey (or sometimes, nothing at all) for breakfast. I can handle it every once in a while, but it shouldn’t become a regular fixture. It doesn’t fill me up. It’s so easy to eat too much of. And it sets me up for a day of eating poorly. In short, it was starting to cause me stress. Stress makes me eat, or at least, want to eat.

Yesterday I managed to bring it up. He asked me to remind him to buy milk so we’d have it for tea in the morning and I just thought: Here’s my chance. Except for his slightly defensive “I asked you what you wanted for breakfast” – and his total obliviousness to calories and nutritional content (he puts butter on his peanut butter sandwiches – it’s so sweet and childlike in a way that I don’t want to be the one to make him think twice about this) it was really not a big deal. So along with the milk we bought porridge and peanut butter (to be eaten separately, thank you very much -- I rediscovered in Indonesia how filling peanut butter can be.)

I breathed a huge sigh of relief… until this morning, when he wanted to make me a peanut butter sandwich while I was in the shower “so I can have more time with you.” What kind of person says “no” to an offer phrased like that?

Um, that's me in the spotlight. That's me in the corner. I thought about all the instructions I’d feel the need to give (“please no butter, and please not too much peanut butter” – he is about as heavy-handed with any kind of spread as Tammy Faye Bakker was with makeup – “and please don’t toast it and…”) and the fact that no matter how he made it, I’d feel obligated to eat it. And so I said no thanks, and felt at least as guilty as I did when I decided to do exactly what suited me and go running.