NB: This is not a diet blog. If anyone comes and tells me how they lost this or that on the South Park or the G&T diet, I'll be like, whatever. Diets do not work. Count how many fat people have been on diets.
At the start of the month I weighed myself. This is purely for the sake of the blog. The scales tell me that I have lost 9 kilos in six months and still need to lose 11 kilos to reach the maximum acceptable weight for my height. This now means I weigh just about what I did when I moved into this house 13 years ago and was told by an endocrinologist to lose about 10 kilos.
I went swimming on Sunday. I am not really sure what to say. I felt good afterwards. I enjoyed the endorphins pumping through my body. I think I enjoyed being in the pool, especially when I felt I was pushing my legs to work. But I do feel a bit despairing at the futility of it all. Before Christmas I had firm muscles in my legs and biceps and even my stomach and now I don't.
I want to recapture the late-summer and autumn enthusiasm for exercise. I tell myself to chill, it's winter, it's understandable that I do not want to be out and about like I was six months ago. I did actually have a minor inner panic when I decided that that excuse had gone on too long, that winter is 'nearly over'. Then I thought, no it's not.
I am not sure whether it is sufficient to tell myself that things will be different as it gets warmer and lighter (especially in the evenings). Am I fooling myself? It's easy to say now, that when the clocks go forward and Spring is in the air, I will get the bike out. Having got so much enjoyment out of just two months cycling last year, how can I not want to do that again?
The scales measuring my weight is what keeps me going. I did blog something about going back to my doctors' and 'proving' to them that I am lighter than when they last weighed me. I am not sure why I have that mentality. We are not in a confrontation.
As my doctors, they would be negligent if they didn't mention the topic. They have suggested a gradual approach, choosing an exercise I enjoy, doing a little regularly. 'Told you so' is not really the right response in this case.
But I haven't been back since. I never got round to getting a repeat prescription of Tramadol. And I haven't missed it. I think also that is a positive that spurs me on.
I think that the CFS was like a bad dream. It's almost like, now, I am thinking it was all in my head, which is stupid, because, believe me, it wasn't. You don't wake up one morning and decide you're going to pretend to be ill for four years. You do wake up and realise that you simply cannot go on, cannot function, cannot do what is expected of a normal person. You certainly don't pretend that you want to go onto nil sick-pay, part-time working, final attendance warnings, career stagnation, loss of friendships.
Perhaps, like acute pain, the body has a way of removing chromic exhaustion and the associated pain from muscle memory. I don't suppose people would think I'm mad for having no muscle memory of dislocated shoulder or burns, so why should a chronic pain be any different?
I do still get tired, but I can see a reason for that - lack of sleep, doing a lot. And I can drive myself to do more, I don't just collapse into a wet nelly. It may well be that I am now perfectly back to normal, cured, but I'm scared to say that. And, quite possibly, for the rest of my life, I will be reluctant to push myself to acute exhaustion, fearing the return of chronic exhaustion.
The most frustrating thing is that, having lost nearly a stone and a half, I am not sure what I have to show for it. I do feel a slight difference in my waist bands, at least in the morning. I think I expand during the course of the day, more than I used to. I don't feel as though my clothes are falling or hanging off me. And, actually I am not sure how far I owuld have to go to go down a dress size or three. My trousers and skirts are dictated by my hips which have never been fat. My blouses and dresses are dictated by my boobs. I suspect I actually need to go up a cup size, and my back muscles have strengthened. So maybe I shall turn into a solid lump rather than a fatty lump. I see people, know people, with very slight frames and even with what I consider to be a healthy-enough layer of body fat, andI think - their frame plus fat takes up less space than my skeleton would.
