An Irishman's Diet/Week 7: It started with bubbly and ended in tears
Week seven has been a bit of a disaster - a recession in weight-camp country, you might say. Everything was going fine until an end-of-week meal with some friends shoved temptation to the limit.
And it wasn't as if I hadn't prepared as well as I could. I'd even built up a bit of an appetite by passing on the dinner-time soup and fat-loaded nibbles during an afternoon drive. Comfortable in my 40-inch trousers, I thought I looked the part as I accepted my first glass of Veuve Clicquot at the soiree. Bang. The diet was in free-fall.
I say free-fall but that's probably an exaggeration. Like any of those pilots who tend not to fall asleep at the controls but who struggle perilously with the altimeter, I imagined myself taking the pressure off my diet and nose-diving a couple of hundred feet, and parking it at the comfort zone that neither puts on weight nor loses it. For one night only, you understand.
This wasn't a man out of control, but a mature slimmer with serious responsibilities. However, the voices of "don't do it" started to throw a bit of a tantrum in my head and wouldn't accept that I was being measured, and that consenting adults - myself and my in-head dietary advisers - however aggrieved, could reach a compromise of sorts.
So, sipping another glass of champagne I set an example and passed on the flirting bilinis - their whipped-cheese bods sunbathing in adorable sun-soaked oils on the biscuity-loungers. In a moment of dementia I could see in their little pretty eyelids the salutation of a thousand adorable cholesterol investments, fat-packed pensionable PRSAs and AVCs explained in the metaphor of food.
Regrettably, I invested heavily and bit, as they say, of the apple.
The evening progressed, and another couple of yellow-bubbled glasses later, hunger came pounding at my door. Mad, false and ravenous, if you know what I mean.
Luckily, dinner arrived at the same time and by the time seconds were being served, I was in my granny's. Later, it dawned on me how it's always easy to spot the fat bloke at a dinner party - he's the only one excessively encouraged to have more, and more, and more.
"A last roast potato" you hear. "Sure you might as well have it - it'll only go to waste."
Weak and busted, you accept it, while everybody else around the table, in their slim fitting chinos and designer T-shirts, gives that knowing nod and smile that tells you that yes, you're an absolute savage - their little fat friend in the tyre-vest.
However, you rationalise you haven't done too badly. Okay, so you've over-indulged and made a bit of a pig of yourself but it's only one night and tomorrow's another day, and it's all repairable and sure why not have another couple of drinks as well to boot. It'll all be okay in the morning. But it isn't. Tomorrow comes early and you're hungover, tired and you can't sleep. Never could with too much food or too much drink.
You know what's going to happen next. You pass on breakfast and start to drink fizzy drinks straight from the cold fridge - precisely the ones you haven't touched since the first week of the diet. It's cure time and you're Dorothy beseeching the cheerful Wizard to send you back to the good hamburgers of Kansas. And if Toto's not careful, you'll eat him and all.
However, a last modicum of dietary control lingers. You go for a walk.
Where? Anywhere. To the toilet, the photocopier, or even round the block. Somewhere safe from the munchkins or munchies or whatever they're called.
You go missing for seconds, minutes, half an hour, running anywhere away from temptation. To use a film analogy, it's the 23rd century and you're Michael York in his bloated Logan 5 apparel and with a Jenny Agutter-type in toe you're going to Run, and as far away from the Sandmen of burgers, chicken nuggets, wedges, and all the other carbohydrates that drink induces. It's sanctuary or bust. Lacking any conviction you only run down the nearest corridor to the pig-out station - another day lost at the expense of the first. A day later, you pass on weight-class, F-troop and the probabilities of weight gain.
Guilty to the tune of failure and loaded with issues of absenteeism, you see in the mirror a coward's face rich with the blubber of excess and a difficult week ahead to regain the hard-fought ground of weight loss.