*Whispers into Blogs-ville*......."Is anyone there?".
*Knocks door*...............
*Whispers again*........."It's been a while but I'm back"
*Knocks door again*.........................
*Kicks door and stops whispering*......."Oh fuck it, where's the bloody Quality Street?"
December 2016. After a visit to the GP today for something entirely innocuous and random, it turns out that I have a BMI that takes me off the nurses chart, across the wall and into the potted plant on her window sill. It's a fine line between shame and pride. Turns out that the line is defined by a dehydrated Peace Lily in a cheap plastic pot.
According the the NHS, I need to lose 90lbs to achieve even the 'top end' of a healthy BMI for somebody of my vertically challenged proportions. My son weighed pretty much 10lbs at birth meaning I need to lose the equivalent of 9 newborn sons. I've been trying to lose the one of him that I've got for nearly 7 years but people keep bringing him back. To lose 9 of him seems well, hopeful.
However I do lose things with alarming regularity so perhaps I am looking at this challenge from the wrong angle. On a trip Drayton Manor Park and Zoo in 2002, I memorably lost 5 teenagers in a day out which went down in risk assessment legend (it involved the inappropriate molestation of a small monkey by one of my charges..........they didn't have a category for that in the Council's Risk Assessment pro-forma).
I lose my phone on a daily basis, my keys, my mind. I have, to my colleagues continued frustration, an incredible knack of putting down important documents and never finding them again. My sartorial choices (this weeks highlight was the Robin print dress from Matalan paired with the knitted Rudolf leggings from Primark) continue to lose my husbands dwindling respect for me. The will to live ekes from me on an hourly basis as I battle the will of truculent teenagers and a Benefits and Housing system that is designed to do neither thing they purport to achieve- to Benefit or House. I am ace at losing shit.
However, the loss of an equivalent of 9 burly newborns seems a bit of a stretch, even for me but lose it I must. I must do this because I am in very real danger of requiring some sort of winching device to remove me from armchairs, theatre seats or indeed particularly small toilet cubicles. I am fed up on having one arse-cheek perma-perched on the bloody tampon bin whilst having a wee in the shopping centre. I am fed up of having a belly that looks like a mudslide from the front and Gerard Depardieu's nose in profile from the side. I am fed up of misjudging the room I have to 'squeeze through' small spaces and dismantling entire display gondolas in the process. I am fed up of having boobs so gargantuan that even a 'specialist' website would politely decline.
I am fed up of worrying that one day I might just go 'bang'.
I put my thumbs through my most resilient pair of tummy control knickers the other day. Knickers that have, quite literally, seen me through thick and thin (thick and thicker mainly but there were some thinner periods.....). It was as if they had made the decision, after years of patient restraint and the bending of laws of physics, to just give up. To jack it in. They felt there was no point continuing- their working conditions were only likely to continue on the downward trajectory, years in the making. This was a vestiarial suicide which I chose to ignore until portions of flesh, like sausage-meat filling the sausage skin, started to bulge and escape. I looked like one of those Play-Doh hairdresser heads, only with flesh emerging from shredded knickers. Can't recommend it.
I will do better. I will be better. I will crack on and make some changes.
*Looks wistfully at the Quality Street*.....tomorrow yeah?
