An Irishman's Diet Week 8: Renewed determination to shed baggage
It's been a tough week in the weight-loss bargain basement but I'm back on track, back on an even stricter diet, and desperate once again to succeed.
I've also a confession to make. Over the weeks, I've been fiddling around with the numbers, jumbling the figures you could say, to make myself look good. Nothing strong enough, you understand, to cause a Barings Bank-like collapse in the weight-world but cheating nonetheless. Surprisingly, it wasn't the food. Or even the drink. Nor even the exercise. No, I cheated on the weighing scales. And, if I'm really being honest, it was bloody easy.
Going back to my first class, I'd worn my heaviest socks and boots and an extra pair of vests, and filled my tent-size trousers with my two mobile phones, a plethora of household batteries, as much change as I could muster without bringing attention to myself, the odd bit of turf and lassoed two dodgy paper-weights around the elastic inside my underpants.
Needless to say, my first weigh-in was exaggerated - which was kind of handy when it came to accepting the plaudits from my F-troop colleagues when over the weeks I've started to remove my stockpile of adjustments and appeared to be losing weight.
In recent weeks, I've also taken to positioning my feet on the fat-instructor's weighing scales in such a way - putting the pressure on the edge of the scales - so as to give an even more favourable reading.
But hey, that was in the past, and possibly last week's pig-out brought me to my senses, digging up enough of the old feelings of failure, uncomfortableness and personal hate to luckily jump-start another rehabilitation.
So I've decommissioned all the batteries, extra mobile phone, fertiliser, elastic and ton-weights and have embraced the policing authorities in fat-school and am totally prepared to distance myself from paramilitary hamburgers and wedges eaten on the run or otherwise, and to fully accept that the gunman of over-eating and lack of exercise has been for 20-odd years the bane of my humpty-dumpty lifestyle.
So, this week I'm back on the wagon and motivated enough to undermine all those ego-posters that see the self as the poster-boy for diabetics or that Lost look-alike Hugo "Hurley" Reyes with the $156-million weight problem. As a measure of my more honest and transparent regime, I've treated myself to a new weighing scales.
Buying scales is never straightforward for a fat bloke. And to the ironed shirt with the lollypop tie who chastised me in a well-known department store with the overly loud "hey you, if you break that you'll have to pay for it", I can assure you I'll never shop in your store again.
What was I doing to elicit such a rebuke? Well, I was trying out weighing scales. Trying out weighing scales? Yeah, I didn't know how to try out a weighing scales either. That was until I read that British MP, agony aunt and Celebrity Fit Club celebrity Ann Widdecombe - who incidentally lost two stone on the programme - had tested five such inanimate objects for the Observer.
I was particularly taken by her favourite - the Salter Mechanical Bathroom Scale - which the former Tory minister for prisons maintained had "a pleasingly good-sized platform and you could jump on it from a distance and it wouldn't slip".
Now, I don't want you to think I'm the sort of bloke who wakes up in the morning and says to himself "Jesus, I'm bored - I think I'll go down to the local department store and annoy the bathroom sales staff", but this opportunity sounded too good to be true. So, at the weekend, I went shopping for a weighing scales, particularly one that I could jump on from a distance. However, the good folk in a number of Dublin department stores had a problem with the height issue, and under no condition was I allowed to run and jump.
That was until I set up an experiment in one of the aisles which caught the attention of one fussy department head who told me in no uncertain language that I could go and take a run-and-jump as he asked me to leave before he called security.
So, I had to send in a plenipotentiary to buy the damn weighing scales who refused point-blank to test before buying them.