The Gym

It’s August and I started going to the gym yesterday. Actually it’s the same gym I joined in January. I’m a serial gym joiner.

I have good intentions; I really do want to be healthy. Every time I start going to a gym I know that this time it’s going to work. This time I’m going to keep going. Unfortunately I’ve spent so many years being ‘comfortable with my size’; using it as part of my shield of comedy to engage with people that I struggle with knowing how to be anything else. I force myself to go to the gym and make a start. I plan a million different types of diet to ensure that I’m not going hungry but still losing some weight. I tell myself day and night that I want to do this rather than just needing to. It never sinks in though. I have to remind myself these things every few minutes and that makes me depressed because it’s on my mind so much. When I get depressed I rebel. I hunt out anything on my do not have list and have two of them. I’ll attack a ridiculous breakfast after a week of eating healthy, not because I’m hungry or even because I fancy it. I do it to shut myself up about not eating it. I am most definitely rubbish at being good to myself.

It’s self destructive but I can’t seem to get away from it. I was actually enjoying the gym earlier this year; I’d gone past the point of sitting on the exercise bike for 5 minutes ambling along like I was on a summer picnic and then retiring to the “juice bar” to watch everyone else still working, enthralling my peers with tails of endurance and speed. For the first time in a long career of joining gyms ( I think I’ve joined a total 6 different gyms and used them for a max combined total of 4 months) I actually was feeling the difference, I genuinely started to ‘get it’. It took no time at all to break that spell though. A couple of weeks of not being able to get there through illness combined with a week of not getting chance to go through work commitments and I was broken. Suddenly I was not going back. Suddenly the diet was not important and I began hunting out lard again. I was back on the bacon.

Unfortunately, I really do want to change my ways, I really do need to change them. So I’m afraid I’m going to have to go back to being a gym bore. I don’t seem to have an in-between. Maybe this time I really will find a way of coping. I’ll find a way of being healthy without being obsessed, making me able to feel like I’m still me but without the lard. Surely it’s possible to be happy without the excess weight? Admittedly there is one drawback I’ll either have to wear my big clothes all the time with a belt or else risk sending Jo out to the shops unescorted to fetch some new trousers. I do have this blog to occupy my mind now – something that is just for me so maybe if I can still focus on this then I can just get healthy on the side, rather than have it on my mind for 24 hours a day. One day I will be able to conquer my lard addiction, but then again maybe I won’t. Perhaps I’m like an alcoholic and for the rest of my life one pizza will always be one too many.

Any way – wish me luck because I’m off the bacon and back on the treadmill.