Saturday, November 12, 2005

Fairy tales

Sometimes it seems like this whole thing is happening to some other version of me. That I'm sitting here having an out of body experience, watching a me that's no longer me lose weight. It's hard to explain, but I think it partly comes from a difference between my perception of what I've done and other peoples perceptions of what I've done.

Yesterday I got cornered on my way out of work by the mad Scottish woman. I think I've mentioned her before. She's 8 stone 8 and wants to be 8 stone 1*. She's been going up and down between those two numbers pretty much for the four years I've known her, constantly re-starts weight watchers, and is a terminal chocoholic. She was grilling me on how to lose weight.

She was constantly going on about how amazing I was, and how she wanted it to rub off on her, but the strange thing is that sometimes I still don't feel like I've lost that much weight. I constantly see the fat that's left rather than the absence of the fat that's gone, and it also feels like there's a properly thin version of me standing in for me sometimes, persuading people that I've done far better than I have. The warped body image of the formerly obese, huh?

It's almost too big to take in. For people on the outside, looking in, it's less personal maybe, and they can see things that I don't. Maybe they could really see how big I was to start with, without the benefit of denial. Maybe they don't see the flaws that I focus on.

The problem is that it adds to the unreal feeling about the whole thing. Sometimes when I'm running I feel like I suddenly wake up and wonder what the hell I'm doing, and where my lie in disappeared to. As though someone else got me out of bed and down to the park or the gym and only then do I realise what I'm doing. It's not that I feel like I want to go back to bed, I keep going, but I wonder what made me do it. What put me in a situation where I can be disappointed to only manage a half hour run when I used to feel like dying after 30 seconds? Did the fairies come at some point and give me a new me. Or have they been tinkering away every night, changing a bit at a time?

I suppose that the benefit of the general feeling of unreality is that occasionally I get a flash of light and I see myself as I probably actually am. The contrast between that and how I usually see myself outweighs any comparison between my current mind-self and what I used to think I was.


*Incidentally, these numbers actually gave me something of a shock when I was playing with a BMI calculator earlier. She is under 5 feet tall, which makes her 8 stone-ness somewhat understandable. I was still shocked though when I realised that my BMI is 26.something and hers is 24.something. I thought there would be far more difference than that!

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