I’ve been thinking of it for a while.
In order, perhaps, to get this over with.
“This”?
Diets, in a nutshell.
On this subject, I’ve seen it all. Or not much actually. Dozens of kilos lost along the years, replaced by other gained dozens. With, at the end of the day, gains on the scale and loss in terms of the actual goal.
When I say I have seen it all, I think that except gastric band, I have covered everything, from appetite suppressant, which has been forbidden afterwards, to low fat yogurt diet, including protein shakes, pineapple therapy or detoxifying drinks which make your pee admittedly red but not greasy at all.
Since I was 15, I have met a whole range of nutritionists, from the well-established quack who owns holiday homes financed with his commissions on instant banana pancake mix sachets sales to the embittered and castrating old bag who measured my “waterlogged” leg with her sadistic look every week. There was also the one who told me darkly – even though I wasn’t aiming that high – that my model career was hopeless and the equally indelicate 50-something who reminded me that there were no fat people in Auschwitz.
Moreover, I have experienced several scales, some seemed to be for livestock and others so sophisticated that they give your weight off course – with systematically one or two extra kilos – and your body fat percentage too. Information I wish I never knew, ever.
In short, even if every time I have been monitored by these cellulite doctors I indeed lost weight, none enabled me to succeed with the notorious ordeal of STABILISATION period.
For the past few years, with the help of this blog, of me being a mum and of my man’s love, I thought I reached wisdom, which enabled me to accept this not so dramatic after all set point.
Nevertheless, the notorious set point tends to take liberties. Fluctuate, even. It doesn’t go through crisis.
And while watching pictures of me wearing a swimsuit on the beach, taken by my poor photographer of a husband, I saw a woman who vaguely looked like me. A woman I would have looked at feeling satisfied not to resemble her, if I didn’t have to recognize it was me indeed.
I think it is the most difficult part when you’re fat. Inside, you’re not fatter than your size 12 friends. You know you have a hard time zipping your jeans. You can feel the weight when climbing a slope.
But you cannot SEE yourself.
Or not that often. For avoiding strategies have been well polished for years. No full-length mirror at home, your camera always strapped to yourself so that no one can immortalize you, fixed scale so that real numbers are never displayed. Looking away at every shop front.
And then, one day, browsing through beach holidays pictures or in a fitting room, you bang into, not the shop front, but this avoided for too long image.
For me the crash happened yesterday. No-one died but internal bruises.
And a slightly silly decision.
I will go to see doctor Zermatti. A Zorro for kilos.
To tell the truth, after finding the phone number in the Yellow Pages, I thought it was going to be complicated and that the appointment would be in March 2011. Which sounded reasonable a delay. During all this time I could let myself go since I was going to take charge of all this soon. Soon, but later than sooner.
Except that, bang, I “take advantage of a cancellation”, that’s what the PA told me. And this afternoon, at 14h, I will meet the man who represents a lifeline for me.
Let’s make things clear, I have no illusions, if someone on earth could enable women to lose weight without pain or diet, he would have sent Obama to the Tupperware salesman category.
But the PA uttered the word yesterday: therapy.
And even if during all those years I have carefully buried this solution under tones of eaten food, I very well know that it most certainly is a necessary step towards a bit more self-confidence.
Bottom-line, I will tell you how it goes.
