Fat

Fat is a state of mind. People have different perceptions of how fat or thin they are. Most people are never happy with how fat they are, whether they're fat or not.

When you're properly fat, not just tubby, it can be quite good in that you've mentally reached a point of no return: this is you and you are fat. In that state of mind, you can eat what you want, smoke as much as you like, drink and drink and drink. You're not worried about never getting any exercise because fat people don't exercise, you're excused all that crap because you have an Evans storecard!

Then something dreadful happens: you unintentionally lose weight. Suddenly, over the course of three or four months, you find yourself 4 stone lighter (that's 56lb or 22Kg). What the fuck's going on here then? None of your clothes fit you and you have to keep buying new ones. You realise that you have a body shape emerging - womanly curves and things - and that clothes fit nicely around them.

All of a sudden, you become interested in how you look and clothes are no longer objects that just cover you up. Gone are the days when the criteria for buying blouses or trousers are "can I get in them?" no longer do you grab the first size 28 you see, buy it, then escape from the shop - shoving the Evans bag inside a Tesco one.

With each passing kilo, the pressure mounts for you to take care of your appearance. You get your hair cut at a salon. You buy new glasses. Somebody pins you down and plucks your eyebrows. Over the course of six months, you transform from low/no-maintenance slob to high-maintenance, well, you're still a slob, but not as bad.

Then you realise something awful is happening:

You're making a conscious effort to lose weight.

Shocked and appalled!

Skip to the end...

Such a desire to get/keep in trim results in you doing active things: gardening; going for walks; joining a gym; buying a bike.

What with summer, holidays, blogging and moonlighting, I've not done any exercise apart from a bit of jumping in to my friends' pool...

and traipsing around Rome...

Doing evening and weekend work in addition to my normal job has also meant that I've missed on my usual visits the gym, but also that I've been eating more. Tut, tut. As a consequence this Cakesniffer is feeling slightly podgy. This Cakesniffer is going...

Back to Fat Fighters!

The gym is weird place. It's like preparing yourself to do battle against machines of torture. The psychological build-up required is phenomenal. You fret and worry about how much you'll be able to do, whether people will laugh at you, whether it'll hurt, whether the equipment you want to use will be free. It's simple enough:

A) You can never do as much as you'd like to be able to do; you're an overweight 35 year old who was never built for exercise and who has let themselves go to such an extent that anything now is just damage-limitation.

B) Yes, of course people will laugh at you, you laugh at them, don't you? Besides, you know your arse looks ridiculous in track pants, you know your right leg kicks out at a strange angle when you run and you know that your head wobbles and that you go really red in the face when you exercise. People will laugh, live with it.

C) No pain, no gain. You don't pay £20 a month to be pain-free. If you're still hurting two days after going, then you're doing it right. If not, you needn't have bothered and might as well have had those chips and kebab afterall.

D) No, the equipment will not be free. You'll have to wait while some tit does their reps, stops and contemplates for 5 minutes, does some more reps, stops and contemplates for 5 minutes. Why can't they get up and contemplate and let somebody else have a go in the interim? Because they're thick fucking muscle-heads. Cocks.

And why is it that somebody always uses the machine next to you when there's an entire row of equipment that's not being used? This generally happens when I've got bad gas and I'm doing horrible farts and burps.


L-AR-RRR-D! An edit courtesy of Mr Coldcoldearth
This is what a pound of fat looks like. Eeeeeuuuuu....

Lamb tikka jalfrezi, pilau rice and keema naan anyone?


More news from the Village of the Spammed
I've noticed that most spam happens on the posts that appear at the top of the page when you navigate to a blog. So, this can be the latest post, or the post that appears at the top of the page when you click through the archives. In a Sniffy Experimentals experiment, I've edited all such posts so that no new comments can be added.

We'll see.