I'll never have a six-pack

At the age of 36 I feel quite confident in saying that I'll never have a six-pack. I may never own a silver BMW like the dude who splashed me on my way to work. A second home in Bulgaria seems unlikely. But I don't give that much of a shit.

Such thoughts have been crossing my mind for two reasons. The first is that I am coming towards the end of this year's blog (I will be back in some form in '08!) and I have been reflecting on the reasons as to why I started blogging. One of them, you may well remember, was that I thought that writing about food might help me lose weight. At the time this seemed a rather odd claim to make, but this connects to my second reason for not worrying that I'll never have that six-pack that the man in black-and-white with the cheesy grin has each month on the cover of Men's Health magazine, which is that I have lost quite a lot of weight, and in some ways I've been wondering why this hasn't cheered me up; for in fact it's done quite the reverse.

So this may be a slightly unusual blog entry, of a more personal nature than most I have written, which is, I suppose, to say that it may be more like a conventional blog. You have been warned!

Let me, though, begin with some try to assess how I think I have lost weight, before moving onto good things about losing weight, and then the stuff about how it's all a bag of sand, or whatever they say (and I guess it is a bag of sand off my back because I'm now 73kg, having been 85kg for ages, and up to 89kg at times). "Now here's the deal", as a favourite Alabaman of some of our acquaintance used to say: I reckon each of us has their own way of losing weight, so there's possibly no transferability from my method. Would basically stopping eating bread be a big deal for you? I guess that it has been for me because I bloody love that stuff and find it reasonably hard to describe how much pleasure the sight of a new loaf and packet of unsalted butter would give me after a hard day at work. Anyways, I just don't have bread in the house much these days, so that was part one for me. Part 2 was getting into a breakfast routine because I like breakfast, but veered between wildly abstemious breakfasts (OK, there weren't many of them) and just wild breakfasts (mmm, pizza in the fridge; mmmm, curry in the fridge; mmmmm risotto in the fridge). I can actually picture myself laughing as I tuck into a breakfast of pasta or risotto from the fridge, and in many ways it's quite sad to think that every single day I now have a bowl of cereal (usually maple and pecan crunch, which is yummy) and a yoghurt. Actually, it's quite a fine breakfast, with a double espresso and a Berocca on the side.

Part 3 is the key for me which is that when I am at work - and therefore most stressed and hassled - I just have fruit and vegetables for lunch. It doesn't seem a hardship because there's so much going on, and it is by no means as regimented as breakfast for when I work in the library or it's a weekend, then I allow myself whatever I want, including real treats like giant baps from King's or a sandwich from Mr Felafel. For dinner I have the kind of meals I post on here, which are hardly ultra-healthy, and if I walk past a shop with amazing cakes I have one (or, more like it, if I'm in Budgen's, as I was yesterday, and there is a bag of four white chocolate chip cookies going for 49p, I have them). I exercise plenty, but then I always did that, and I basically don't eat any junk food whatsoever - no crisps, choccie bars etc - but that's simply because I don't want 'em. Chips, on the other hand, I want on a fairly regular basis, and I have them.

In some ways, you may be coming to appreciate that it is actually a slight mystery as to how I've lost a lot of weight, and I guess it's quite conceivable that a button will flick and I'll put most of it back on. We'll see. I recall promising to talk about some positive aspects of losing weight. I guess the main thing is that you come to quite like parts of your body which you didn't much like before. Second, in some ways losing weight can be a way of really enjoying food when you choose to enjoy it, for it cuts out the guilt as you eat into a fudge doughnut, as you know that you've earned it. This, though, is dodgy logic in my book because food offers so much damn pleasure in life, where we might not find it otherwise, that to get caught up in any of these cycles of guilt about food is a dangerous thing. I suppose that what one can say is that moderation offers a pleasure in itself, but even writing that I think of times when gluttony does that too, and I don't think we value being absolutely bloody gorged in our culture. The third thing is that losing weight allows other people to compliment you, for they invariably say that you look younger/healthier for having slimmed-down. In truth I feel no healthier these days and I am evidently rather older, but I do quite like getting compliments, though even this is somewhat double-edged for I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that we should damn well compliment people we like and love whether they like it or not. Do people really need earn our compliments through 'achievements' like losing weight? I think the next time I see a friend looking rough after a cold and a bad night, that's the moment to show the love. Anyway, you know what I mean.

And the grim news is that I haven't even got onto the bad aspects of losing weight yet!

That, essentially, is that we are all so wrapped-up in a body-image obsessed culture that, no matter how blase we think we may be about such things, we think that there's some happiness waiting at the end of a successful diet. Maybe there is for some people, and I guess this is super dependent on all sorts of other variables, but I guess that I am now the lightest I've been in years and I am filled more with a sense of futility at having been suckered by the diet myth than by any genuine sense of satisfaction. I want to be well, I want to look good, and these things have some connection to weight, but I have to say that there's little happiness to be found in dieting. Pleasure in the end, I've concluded, can be found in biting into that triple-layer of fudge icing, doughy doughnut and custard filling, and happiness is about a whole load of things, but it ain't about weight. Dieting is essentially about the self and happiness, it seems to me, is more about you and other people, about the great reflectedness of our world as we see the wonder of who other people are and they reveal the goodness they see in us.

So don't be surprised if I now do a pretty good impersonation of De Niro in Raging Bull as he moves from being a lean fighter to a fat pasta addict. He's supposed to be a loser at the end, but, damn, eating all that pasta must have felt good.

To make a point, I may have overstated some things in this entry, and I know that it doesn't feel nice when one feels fat, and it can feel good in a small way when one loses weight, and I shan't deny that happy medium, but I'm coming to conclude that it's quite nice to simply hover up and down around the weights we are, getting pleasure from food and the people we eat with, and the small ups and downs that thinking about weight can bring, rather than the grand claims that I thought it might hold. I may even come round to like my pot-belly in time, because no matter how light I get, it'll stay, and I'm pleased that six-pack'll never be mine.