Weekend Update

Walking through Broadway Market yesterday on the way to the pub I passed Kate Nash and her Cribs boyfriend, but also a lot of seriously scrummy looking cakes and fudge, and the sweets sent my mind whirring. Almost automatically, I started plotting how I could leave the pub and binge. It seemed like a foregone conclusion that I would, especially once I had a few glasses of Pimms.

The event was birthday drinks for a friend of a friend, and as soon as we arrived I just wanted out. I didn't feel like being chatty and polite – and it didn't help that I was at the very end of the table.

I don't want to be here, I kept thinking. But I didn't want to be at home, either. What I wanted was for the date I'd been on the night before to have been a good one. What I wanted was not to feel like I'd been a bit of a crazy person but that there was no way to remedy it. What I wanted was not to feel rejected, dispirited and – even in the presence of friends -- a bit lonely.

I wasn't getting what I wanted. But nor, I realized, was cake going to fix that. In fact, I knew I'd likely feel sadder if I'd binged. So I didn't. Two weeks clean.

***

If the above makes you think I'm about to throw myself into the Regents Canal... I'm not. I've actually been having quite a good time running around: one night to a raw food restaurant in Shoreditch with an old friend, last night out with other friends, and this morning to a yoga class at a trendy gym. (I was supposed to hang out with the NJB later, but when I'm already feeling lonely, hanging around the NJB actually makes it worse.)

But dates are hard. Four months after leaving BN2, I don't regret the decision (and in fact, know leaving was one of the best things I've ever done for myself). But occasionally I miss the things he knew about me.

"Don't tell guys you were once over 200 pounds," advised my friend A. "It just makes them imagine you at that size, and that's not what you want. Let them think you're naturally skinny."

I'm not sure why, but I have this crazy need to explain myself – so that whoever can know that there's an actual good reason for my finickiness/crankiness/agitation sometimes when it comes to food.

Take Friday night's date. He wanted to meet at 7:30 pm for a drink. I didn't know if we'd go for dinner, and I didn't want to spend any part of the evening plotting how to get food or getting so far past the point of hungry that he'd see cranky, indecisive me on Date One. So I pushed the date to 8 pm and ate first.

I commented about the quality of the chocolate for sale (it was William Curley, some of London's most amazing) and when he bought the drinks he bought a bar of it. White chocolate with raspberry. I used to love white chocolate but now it's just too sweet – and besides, it's my policy not to eat outside of meals and snacks.

He kept offering it to me.

"You're on a diet?" he guessed.

I shook my head. Why I didn't just say, "I don't like white chocolate, thanks," I don't know. It seemed rude somehow. So somehow this chocolate I didn't want to eat became this huge issue.

What can I say, I'm a freak. Or maybe he is.

***

On Friday, I wanted to write a post I'd already mentally titled "Don't Get Mad, Get Even" – but I ran out of time.

Last weekend I was stewing about the lack of movement on the scale, wondering why – if my diet and exercise were the same as they always have been – they weren't doing the trick after Dorset.

Then I realized (a) I'm not trying to maintain, as I have been for a while -- I'm trying to lose, and (b) my diet and exercise are not really the same as they always were. For one reason or another I haven't done much weight-lifting for a couple of months – not good news for my anemic slug of a metabolism. And since splitting with BN2, I don't run to Pilates and back – a good 2.5-hour weekly workout that hasn't been replaced with anything else.

My bowl of porridge that I eat every morning? In the past few months it's gone up by somewhere between 150 to 200 calories. The add-ins are healthy – chia seeds and peanut butter or coconut butter – but they're still calories. I'd rather a bigger bowl of porridge and fewer toppings (I'm a volume eater), so I've ditched them until the weight is off.

The calorie content of my snacks also has slowly crept up – nothing huge, but still an extra hundred calories a day that I don't really need. Ditto the 60-calorie square of dark chocolate from Trader Joe's I've taken to eating randomly at some point in the day. And I rarely ever drank alcohol in the last year with BN2, and now I have drinks a couple of nights a week. (I'm not giving up drinks at the moment, but they're not free calories and I need to remember that.)

The renewed vigilance definitely is helping – I know I'm not back to my previous weight but at least the belt on my jeans is back to its old hole.

"You look like yourself again," said a trainer at the gym when she saw me doing arm exercises on Friday. (I had told her about the Dorset weight gain.)

"Yes, I feel like I'm back," I said happily. I caught sight of myself in the mirror and didn't avert my eyes.

***

Whittle My Middle Challenge, April 22:
Front plank: 3 minutes, 20 sec
Side plank: 60 seconds each side
Torso twists: 21 reps (using Bittman)
Plank ups: 10 reps
Boat pose: 30 seconds
Bicycle crunches: 2 sets of 30
Side plank with twist: 10 reps each side

April 25
Front plank: 3 minutes, 20 sec
Side plank: 60 seconds each side
Torso twists: 21 reps using 7 kg weight
Plank ups: 10 reps (Could I hate these any more? I don't think so!)
Boat pose: 30 seconds
Bicycle crunches: 2 sets of 30
Side plank with twist: 11 reps each side.