Nothing Tastes As Good As..?

Oh mannnn I love food. Food maketh me happy. I’m number one on Freud’s oral fixation list. I’m a nail-biter, a smoker, a pen-chewer, a thumb-sucker… and a total food junkie.

You know how they say nothing tastes as good as skinny feels? I dunno…a dirty sloppy cheeseburger at 3am after the club does taste pretty good. But several weeks later when the second chin starts hiding the neck? It’s ultra-cute on my eight month old nephew…not so cute on auntie.

But I don’t do well at deprivation. I especially don’t do well at deprivation when my so-called best friend randomly sends me one word texts like ‘Nutella’ or ‘bacon’. Which leads to hours of food-porn text exchanges, until one of us comes to our senses and mentions cankles or triple-chins.

And even without that reality-check, I know full well if I eat too much crap I’m going to look like crap. If you’re busting out of your clothes yet say you barely eat the only one you are fooling is yourself. No one puts on weight by ingesting air. And I’m allowed to say this because I used to be a big girl. Maybe I didn’t eat constantly…but I ate and drank the wrong things. Like buckets of wine. Ohhh wine…I miss you. But I don’t miss my wine-belly.

You see ladies, despite what you are led to believe by girl-power-ism you can’t have it all. Or you can…as long as you don’t eat it.

Diets are evil though. Even the word diet makes us feel deprived. Because when the food we enjoy becomes prohibited, the more we aren’t ‘allowed’ it, the more we want it, right?

So we go out to dinner and say ‘oooh, I’m going to have pudding..I’m so naughty!’ And you have it, you love it, you’re in ecstasy, you so deserved that treat…until later when you feel like shit because you’ve ‘failed’. And you get on those scales or try on a bikini and you hate what you see and you feel like you’ve failed even more. So you give up.

You tell yourself, well that’s it. I’m fat and ‘orrible and I look like shit and I have no control over it and why should I live a miserable deprived life and not eat what I want and I’ll never be thin and I’m happy like this except I’m not but there’s nothing I can do about it anyway. Stop doing that.

When I lost weight I had so many people ask me but HOW did you do it? How can I do it? Like it was a big hidden secret. Like there was a magic potion. I had people talking about me, and some said oh she looks amazing! And others said oh she must be snorting loads of coke. She must have an eating disorder. She’s secretly had a gastric bypass. Erm, no, actually.

I just changed my thinking and grew a pair. I stopped feeling deprived. I stopped feeling like food was ‘good’ or ‘bad’. I made my own choices. I chose to eat vegetables and grilled chicken rather than a burger and chips…and I enjoyed it because I chose it. I started thinking about what I put in my mouth, and I realised I had control. No one else. Therefore I couldn’t be deprived.

I gave myself other choices like ‘ok, have that afternoon piece of cake if you really want it…and if you do you have the option of burning it off later during a run or cutting some cals from your dinner or keeping those extra pounds that cause your thighs to rub together and make your arms look like you’re wearing water wings on dry land and stop you wearing what you want to wear’. My choice, no one else’s.

And I grew a pair with regards to exercise. See, for us big girls (and I say ‘us’ because no matter how small I am now, mentally I’ll always be a fat chick) our worst nightmare is entering that gym where all the skinny perfect people live in their leotards, and wobbling all round the gaff and sweating with our big red faces while we pull our baggy tops down over our baggy trackie bottoms, and having people look at us and think ‘you don’t belong here..this is not for you’. Or so we think. And equally, if not more scary, is admitting through trying to do something about our weight that we do actually care and it does bother us.

And often we pin everything on our weight…’when I’m thin, everything will be perfect’. Nope, it won’t. Your body is only one aspect of your life. But it is one of very few things we do have control over.

And even though I only allow public viewing of photos where my figure looks great, trust me when I say at my skinniest last year I had no breasticles…at all. My arms were toned and thin…and a little bit wrinkly where my bingo wings used to live. So I put a bit back on, got a bit of boobage back…and said hello again to a bit of arm-chub at the same time. And I discovered that being slim doesn’t mean automatic happiness or bodily perfection.

Weight loss is simple maths: more calories burned than calories in. Sounds easy…but I won’t lie, the reality is really bloody hard. Those ladies like me you see having shed shitloads of weight, and might be a bit jealous of? Oh, believe me we worked for it.

We sweated for it, we tore ourselves away from KFC even though we wanted to stand outside to rob a customer and lick his burger wrapper, we weighed up food options constantly, we picked up that PMT-fix dessert and practically had to gnaw through our own arms to be able to put it back down, we ignored people who said ‘ah go on! Have a biccy!’ even though we wanted to punch them, we went for runs after work when all we wanted to do was flop on the sofa, we turned a blind eye to people casting glances at our monumental backsides wobbling up and down on the cross-trainer, we chopped our salads and grilled our chicken when we were tired and hungry and sick of chicken and just wanted to throw an 800 calorie frozen pizza in the oven. And not just for a week…for MONTHS.

But, just like we made the choices that made us put on weight, we chose to make the choices that let us lose it. And is it worth it? Without trying to sound smug…yep, it kind of is. I’m sorry girls but the reality is nothing does taste as good as skinny feels. Except maybe Nutella in the third week of your ‘lady cycle’…but I digress.

Now this post is not in any way intended to make anyone feel bad about themselves, or about me showing off. If you’re happy with your shape or size whatever it is, good. I envy you. Especially if you have big bangers, because God knows I miss mine.

But if you’re not happy with your size or shape? You control that, no one else…and there is no magic fix. It’s all on you my dear. Weigh your options before you weigh yourself. Give yourself choices. Don’t feel deprived without certain foods…weigh up whether in the end your weight makes you feel more or less miserable than not eating one of those donuts your workmates bring in every Friday, or getting up an extra hour before work to go for a swim…because never mind skinny: nothing tastes as good as realising you are in control feels.