Week 9: Much done, more to do and not that much time to do it
March is probably the scariest month for fat people - a sort of halfway house between the turkey-roll and ham-basted gluttony of Christmas and the naked appreciation of a sun-drenched Mediterranean beach. Scary in the sense that the temperature clock is ticking and by the end of the month you're likely to be wearing one layer of clothing less for longer periods, and that means one less layer of camouflage.
So, unless you have plans to go bird watching in Bogota or some other must-see-before-you-die top 100 destinations, you're going to be showing more (or less) of yourself, more often, in the coming weeks.
If you're a happy-meal new-year dieter, you should also be dreading the mid-term exams - a time around the Ides of March when you should have annihilated the Julius Caesar of all weight-problems and marched everybody into your office, court, senate and proclaimed, at least, half of the new you. Or maybe not? Maybe like me you still don't get it. Et tu, tu much too?
But that's probably too much of a Roman generalisation. Personally, I've come to prefer an Eddie O'Sullivan-style of analysis. To paraphrase Ireland's greatest living mathematician, (sorry, coach) statistically speaking, if you exclude the takeaways I've had every Wednesday and Thursday since I started the diet and the first three weeks of January, or the slip I had on the Wednesday before Pancake Tuesday, I've had the caterers in from the local chippy or Indian emporium on fewer occasions than I've had in the previous three months of other dietary campaigns.
And, if you turn a blind eye to my mid-morning to mid-afternoon performance in my last 10 starts - again statistically - I've eaten marginally less chocolate and sweets than a schoolroom of sweet tooths.
But, not to blind you wholly with science, there have also been results.
Real results.
A whole stone of results to be precise. Only a stone you say?
Well, maybe next time when you're in the local supermarket during rush-hour, you might pick up a basket, fill it with 14 one-pound butter-bricks and carry them around for a hour and you'll get the opportunity to experience one-24th of what I'm missing every day. And watch the reactions of your fellow shoppers as you pile in the milk fat and you might be some way to understanding what it's like for a fat bloke to have 14 of these missiles hanging from his pelvis every time he adds a stone to his burgeoning carcass. Who needs suicide bombers when you can do it yourself?
However, apart from the mocks, I've been good this week. Good being fat terminology for eating normally.
So good, that I've set myself a goal. Well actually two goals. Medically speaking I've an appointment in the liver clinic in four weeks' time - fatty tissue apparently around the old boomerang-thingy - residue from hamburger hill and too many fat-clinging doggy bags.
Again, the clock is ticking and my Middle-Eastern doctors are expecting results. Promises, you understand, I made at the last appointment when they laid it on the line for me. So, I'm in serious training for blood tests in a few weeks.
My second goal is a mid-term break in France with the missus. With nothing to wear and fearful that the temperatures are rising on the Gironde, I've promised myself and herself I'm going to be another stone to the good and finally get into one or two of those fancy threads I bought with the proviso that "one day, I'll look good in those".
Of course, for a fat bloke planning a weekend away, nothing is easy. When I was booking the tickets, I took the precaution of informing the airline's telephone help-desk that I was a fat bloke getting bigger and that I'd really like an outside seat, and somewhere along the channel near the fourth row would be perfect. The call-centre, which presumably by the accents I encountered was somewhere in Bangalore, went into meltdown, with all sorts of middle managers running around in my ear-piece screaming blue-silicon that under no circumstances was Channel 4 allowed anywhere near the plane.
When calm was restored, I was informed that as a fat person I was obliged to buy two seats for myself, and one for my wife. Trouble was, they couldn't guarantee them together, which was bloody odd to say the least, and although I was booking an extra seat, I was told I would only be allowed a luggage allowance for one person.
So, I hung up, went online and booked a seat for a skinny bloke. So there you have it. The goal is set and I'm four weeks from a serious achievement.
As Brutus might say of the Big JC: "O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet. Thy spirit will walk abroad and turn our swords of fat in our own proper entrails."