Zombies

A brain is an awful thing. Awesome but awful.

You know that feeling when you're sitting in a fast train and you pull up to stop at a station rather abruptly and your inner ear tries to convince you that instead of arriving at a full stop, you're actually still travelling (I always feel like I'm moving backwards)? That your wits are telling your brain that it must still be moving because the miniscule amount of fluid sloshing around in an equally miniscule part of your nervous system tells it so? A sensory illusion of self-motion of some kind.

(And thus ends my theory of stopped movement based on scant memories of long-ago secondary school biology classes...)

I feel a bit like that stopped but not stopped train in regards to staying at roughly the same weight I've been for the past six months.

(Well... I went up ten pounds during the Summer months thanks to taking time off the evening workouts and just relying on an albeit ridiculous amount of walking to be enough to keep the status quo while I had family visiting over different periods, and yes, I admit, not sticking to sixteen hundred calories on days I wasn't doing my 5:2, either. [I do love my 5:2, though. I feel like it cleans out my head twice a week. I suspect you won't find that on the website manifesto, but what can I say? Clean eating and a clear head is worth the paltry five hundred calories and feeling ravenous by the end of the day, two days out of seven.] The thing is, is that I had a pretty great Summer, and that makes me a little... wary, because part of that pretty greatness is that I wasn't being so strict with myself, and I enjoyed it.

The weight has slowly, s l o w l y come off again so yes, I'm back at March, so although technically I've lost another ten pounds since then, those pounds lost are actually the ones I put on over the Summer months, but if I want to read this in the wishy-washy light of a silver lining, I have, in a practical sense, actually lost weight since March. Yay?)

So I know physically why those pounds came a-visiting (most of them have, thankfully, already packed their bags and gone) but knowing mentally why I opened my door to them in the first place is always a little more complicated.

I have theories, most of which revolve around being so tired of doing all this work and still looking like the Goodyear Blimp. Somewhat deflated from before but still large and slightly dirigible (especially after a day of eating nothing but vegetables). Although there are friends who I haven't seen in a while who can't believe the transformation (one friend actually didn't recognise me after not seeing me for three years), I'm still a big, fat, unattractive girl to a general public who just judge this ship by its hull (to nick one of my favourite, although non-PC, Jim Davis/Garfield jokes).

It does seem that the more weight I lose, the more dissatisfied I am with myself, too, even more self-critical if that's possible. I'm paying much more attention to my rolls and folds and general outline now than I ever did when I was at my biggest, but there is the fact that I did my level best to avoid looking at myself at all back then, so there are a myriad other issues at play about which I'm either not aware, or not ready to tackle yet.

But to get back to my stopped train metaphor, I've lost so much weight over the last four years, that a 'sudden' stop and plateau is making me feel like I'm moving backwards. I look in the mirror and ol' brain here tells me that I am getting fatter again. That although the fact remains that I'm the same shape and weight I was back in March, my head is trying very hard to convince me that my cheeks are a little rounder, that my jeans are a little tighter, that my spare tyre is blowing up again.  And it's not true. My scales, inch-tape, and the fit of my clothes tell me it's not true. And yet I catch my appearance in a shop window and see four years fall my from reflection.

Brains, man. Brains. They should come with a user's manual. Or at least a mute button. I'd prefer an off switch, but that might cause more problems than it solves, so until I'm in command of its capricious ways I'm going to have to train myself to rely purely on empirical evidence and not my brain's impression of my appearance, because, indeed, the ways of my noggin are awesome and awful!