The Filling Cabinet

Every office has one, a filling cabinet, they are the bane of the life of anyone who is trying to watch their weight.

  Now before you e-mail me, to say I’ve spelt it wrong, it should be “filing cabinet”, I’d like to point out that offices have both, you’ve probably just never realised that what’s it called.

 Allow me to explain, the “FILING Cabinet”, is a big silver thing that contains all the crap no one is really sure what to do with, it’s the thing you sort out in that period between Christmas & New Year when you have nothing else to do.

  The "FILLING” Cabinet is also all of the above, but it’s the cabinet where any food bought into the office is placed.

  Cakes for people’s birthday, left over buffet from a board meeting, the holiday sweets from Ben in accounts trip to Magaluf.

  The FILLING Cabinet is the Joker to the dieter’s Batman, the Moriarty to the Weight Watcher’s Sherlock, the Phil Mitchell to the slimmer’s Ian Beale….. you get the point, it’s their nemesis!!!

  This morning when I arrived at work, some kind of cake and chocolate fairy had obviously been at work overnight. The FILLING cabinet was awash with chocolate muffins, doughnut, Quality Street and biscuits! As I hurried by them to the kitchen to make a brew.

Devil Katie was shouting.....

“Do you know what goes well with a brew? A Chocolate muffin”

Angel Katie, had my back though…

“You said that Christmas would start on Christmas Eve and until then you would stick to your diet”

Devil Katie tried a different tact…

“You’re already fat, what difference will one chocolate muffin make”

As I picked up my brew and walked out the kitchen, I paused briefly by the muffins.

And then I walked away…..

Do you know what also goes well with a brew? A satsuma (It doesn’t, but it’s better for me when I get on the scales!)

The Phone Call of Shame

“Ring Ring, Ring Ring” (or in my case, because my ringtone is “Uptown Funk”, it’s a quick burst of Bruno giving me some ...

ME: “Hello”

VOICE ON PHONE (VOP): “Is that Katie?”

ME: “Yes”

VOP: “hello, this is Matt from your gym, we just wondered if you were OK?”

ME: “Yes I’m fine, why?”

VOP: “well you haven’t been for a while and we wondered if we’d upset you?”

ME: “oh no not at all, I think the gym is wonderful and your teachers amazing, the staff are generally lovely, you haven’t upset me at all, I’ve just been really busy with work”

VOP: “Will you come back soon?”

ME: “Yes of course”

VOP: “When?

By the end of the conversation, I felt so guilty that I promised faithfully to go to the gym on Sunday morning and to go and find him to say hello, so he knew I’d kept to my word. I haven’t had boyfriends who cared about my welfare as much as Matt from the gym! Maybe I should date him!

  It did make me feel bad though, because oddly I really do enjoy going to the gym and I love Just Jhoom and Zumba and I even find it oddly enjoyable when I get to go first thing in a morning and spend half an hour on the treadmill listening to whatever randomly pops up on my iPod, although this is my new favourite work out tune at the moment!

The reason for causing my gym to worry is that I’ve genuinely been so busy with work and travelling around the country that I haven’t had time. The time I have had has been spent either catching up on housework or making sure the dogs are walked. Although apparently a 6-mile walk for Buddy wasn’t enough on Saturday!

Buddy wide awake & raring to go after his work....Cyril  having a kip!

 Even though I appear to have moved into my car, I have been sticking to my diet and on Tuesday faced a massive temptation! Lucy and I had to go to Portsmouth for a meeting and because we had allowed ourselves some “getting lost time”, which we didn’t we had time for a brew. Nipping into a branch of Subway, I ordered us a coffee and this is what happened.

ME: “2 coffees please”

LADY BEHIND THE COUNTER (LBTC): “would you like a cookie to go with it?”

ME: “no, thank you” (feeling virtuous, halo glowing a little brighter)

LBTC: “They’re free”

ME: “No, really it’s fine”

LBTC: “Would you like the receipt so you can have a free cookie, the next time you come in?”

ME: almost crying, “Please don’t make me eat the cookie”

  I appreciate the lady was just trying to be nice and having eaten Subway cookies in the past, I know they’re delicious, but and this is the weird thing; since I was hypnotized, I haven’t touched any form of chocolate, cake, biscuit or desert. I wasn’t sure I could say to the woman behind the counter, “the reason I don’t want your cookie, is because I’m fat and the reason I got fat was because I ate too many delicious cookies and now I’ve been hypnotized and so I think cookies smell like dirty toilets and taste like shit, so please stop offering me pieces of shit”

  Taking the positives from the week, I’ve made a new best friend from the gym and managed to clock up 5 weeks without any form of sweet stuff, I’m taking that as a win!

  

A Triple Threat

Four and a half pounds OFF this week, I think that’s the biggest loss I’ve had since the first few weeks of starting Weight Watchers and I’m very proud of myself. I was asked what I’ve been doing differently and at first I said nothing, but then I thought about it and actually I have been doing stuff differently. I’ve basically been sticking to the plan, quite rigidly. I think when you’re on a diet for a long time, bad habits start to creep in, you might not count a bit of mayo you have on your salad, you sneak half a biscuit out the tin, because how much damage can half a biscuit do? This week I’ve stopped this, no more half a biscuits, I’ve eaten the whole biscuit and counted it!

Rich Tea biscuit, 1 Weight Watchers prop-point

  I’ve also been drinking more water and because I sometimes find water bland, I’ve been adding cucumber, mint, lemon and lime to it and drinking a couple of these everyday. It tastes lovely and is a bit more interesting than water!

So this week I’m a happy Slinky!

  When it comes to my Slinky mission, I’m quite realistic, I know ultimately in total I want to lose about 10 stone; this will take me down to a healthy weight, well within my BMI. Dress size wise I’ll probably be a size 12 and I’ll still have my curves and my boobs. That is what I’m aiming for. Whether it’s because I grew up in a household where we watched films starring the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Margaret Lockwood and Bette Davis, but I think a woman should have a bit of meat on her, just maybe not as much as I have at present.

    I remember my Mum saying to me once that if I was careful with what I ate, then I could always be a size 10 and I think growing up a size 10 was as the Beautiful South sang about perfect. Then at some point in the noughties if you were a size 10, you were chubby and being a size 0 was what was considered beautiful!

  Models, celebrities and those girls who like to think they’re famous because they once bumped uglies with someone slightly famous, all seem to strive to have a “perfect body”. But as I flick through the pages of a magazine, it seems the perfect body involves having various bones sticking out of you; collarbones, spine and ribs and boobs are a big no-no! I always wonder how they’re not in constant pain? I always think if I looked like that and my dog jumped on my knee, Cyril could cause me multiple bone fractures!

Me & Cyril

Whenever a magazine does a feature on how much a celebrity weighs, I always look at their height, that way I can try and put it into perspective as to what I would look like at that weight. At my skinniest ever, I was 9 and a half stone and I’m 5ft 6, I felt I looked a bit like a lollipop head (my head looked too big for my body) Victoria Beckham is apparently 5ft 6, (if I ever meet her, I’ll get her to take her heels off and stand back to back with me so I can measure) She is famously a size 0 (UK size 4) and knowing how I felt at 9 and a half stone, I think if I were a size 0, I’d just feel like I’d turned into Jack Pumpkin head.

  However, in my opinion, there’s a far worrying trend started to sweep celebville. It now looks as though if you’re a size 0, you’re likely to be subjected to chants of “who ate all the pies” as celebs now strive to be a size triple 0! Apparently “thin is in”, but it’s really annoying as triple 0 sizes aren’t readily available! I say that’s not annoying; I say that’s a good thing!

  Now don’t get me wrong, I know (because I have friends who genuinely have this issue) that there are some people that struggle to put weight on and remembering to eat is a problem, not because they don’t want to, but because food isn’t important and they’re busy doing other stuff. I just think that to go on a diet so extreme that it could affect your health is bonkers.

  However slowly my weight is coming off, it’s coming off and I’m not harming myself in the process, I am re-educating myself when it comes to eating, I’m learning not to use it as a crutch for everything and I’m discovering forms of exercise I actually enjoy so in the words of Ol’ Blue Eyes I’ll do it “My Way” and by that I mean follow the Weight Watchers plan!