The Curvy Goddess

Sometimes it pays to be a slacker

I've been rambling on here, there and everywhere that I have the money to join a gym.  I was going to join three weeks ago, tomorrow and Monday...

I guess my apprehension in joining was that if I join, although I had the start up cash, next month £42 would be snapped up on payday and I'd have to start using the damn membership.  However in my slackness, a wonderful bit of serendipity occurred at work.  Someone who didn't live in Brighton had won a 3 month membership to the gym I wanted to join and wanted to sell their three month membership for £45.  An utter bargain.  Of course upon seeing this email - I responded immediately and the membership was mine!

Well not quite of course.  Yes I had a letter entitling me to a three month membership, but I still actually had to go to the gym and fill in the paperwork.

Tonight I finally got off my ass and joined.  I am now bona-fide gym membership holder, I even have a card.  One of the reasons I wanted to join this particular gym is that they give you 5 free personal training sessions, I have my first meeting with a trainer next Saturday, which works out quite nicely with my hypnotherapy on Thursday.  And I found that when I do have start paying I actually get a reduced rate because of my employer and so will only be paying £36 a month.

Hurrah.

Hypnotherapy

On my birthday I got a very unexpected gift from my boyfriend.  He had found a very good local hypnotherapist and would pay for me to have a few sessions of whatever therapy I wanted*.  Me being me, I immediately opted for weight loss assistance, which involves 4 hour long sessions.

Before going for my first session with the hypnotherapist I had a long think about what realistically he could help me with and I came up with 2 things...

My damaged relationship with sugar.

My inability to exercise alone.

During my first session with the hypnotherapist he asked which of the two issues I wanted to address first and I chose exercise as I now have the money to get a gym membership started.  The hypnotherapist then asked me lots of questions about how I am motivated, how I solve problems, how I work through things and ideally how much and what sort of exercise I want to be doing.

Although there was no hypnosis in that first actual session, I found it very theraputic to just talk to someone about issues with exercise and found it reassuring to know that my own strategies for problem solving will be used in addressing my lack of self confidence in exercising on my own.

My next session is on the 15th May and I'm very intrigued as what it will feel like to be hypnotised and how it may change my thinking.

...

*My boyfriend knows that in addition to trying hypnotherapy, I am also keen to try past life regression.

Gimme that Now!

I don't know if my obession with clothes is fully realised by all who read here.

Truth is I spend a lot of time on the web looking a pretty plus size clothes, say about 50% of all the time I spend online involves looking at clothes...  But when I am sat here in the morning eating toast with my tea rousing me into consciousness, I need something light like clothes to get my brain working.

Here's what I found this morning.

I love cherry prints so this adorable hoodie at Torrid made me smile with glee!  I also really want this top by Tripp at Torrid.

Got an email this today from the lovely Ozlem at Igigi who sent me a sneak preview of what you'll be able to get from Igigi from May - all of the dresses are beautiful!  In October one of my best friends is getting married and ideally I would love to have made some headway with my weightloss by then.  However if losing more weight continues to be tricky, I know with 100% certainity that I will be buying something to wear from Igigi, which at the moment could be this, or that or even this dress...

Anyway thats my mindless rambling and clothes fantasies for now...

Etsy

I mentioned some time ago that I wanted to pay homage to the brilliant sellers on ebay and etsy who often sell far superior clothes to those you get on the high street.

In trying to collate a load of ebay sellers I came a bit unstuck, realising a list of ebay sellers would be difficult to maintain as many fluctuate in what and how often they sell...  Anyway I am gonna investigate and work on this a bit more.

Etsy though seems more of a sure thing, so I have created a new list to the right of this post and which I will update as I find more amazing plus size clothes shops on ebay.  However the problem with me creating this list, is that thee sellers i put in the list sell stuff that I very much like which means certain sellers/shops may get overlooked.  So if you know of an amazing shop on Etsy selling beautiful plus size goodness that I have completely missed/ignored, please send me a link!

And I am going to do a new regular piece called "Gimme that Now!" which will detail all of the clothes I am in love with each week as I scour my favourite websites.

Anyway enjoy the new linkage, Gimme that Now to follow.

My Birthday Presents for 2008 are Exercise...

Well its been nearly a year since my Birthday Binge and sadly since then I've made little progress, infact I am seven pounds heavier - pooh.

However to say I've made no progress is not true.  I have in the last 3 months made big strides towards becoming an more active person and for the first time in my life I am actually enjoying the exercise that I do. 

I am very grateful that from my family I am receiving mostly money for my birthday to fund my new exercise habit.  I am signed up for another term of yoga and I have discovered that for the same price of attending 2 aqua aerobics classes a week I could actually have a gym membership and have access to as many exercise classes as I want.  So I'm joining a gym, although not really to use the gym.  Apparently I will get five free one to one sessions, so I guess its worth going along to those to see what and how I could use the gym, but I don't feel quite ready for that yet.  As long as I make the most of the exercise classes I certainly be getting my money's worth.

***

I mentioned in my previous exercise related post that I would eventually tell you how the slimming club experience was...  In hindsight there isn't really all that much to report, other than:

• I prefer aerobics in the water as opposed to out of it
• Rosemary Conely's diet is pants and not real low gi as far as I am concerned, I'm sticking with good old Rick
• Going wasn't as terrible as I thought it would be and was a positive step forward in demystfying exercise classes

So Not Fabulous

Today I received an email from littlewoods informing me that they had a new plus size range called so fabulous.

I excitedly looked at the site, only to discover it was the same shit range of stuff I'd seen when they had sent me a link to their spring/summer catalogue a couple of months ago.  The clothes look hideous, totally unfashionable and they seem to make the pretty model look unflattering wide with every single click.

What the f**k?

So ladies don't bother with littlewoods, unless you are looking for a sequin tent.

Kira Cochrane

See here for a fablous column piece from Kira Cochrane who has started writing a regular anti-diet industry, weightloss coloum for the Guardian.

I've really enjoyed she has written so far, but its this latest piece that has really struck a chord with me because she's writing about complications between losing weight and feminism, having been criticised by some readers for dieting.

Kira makes a couple of good points, the first being that by criticising a woman's decision to lose weight is just another way in which women are deined any ownership of their bodies:

"...On the other, the idea that a woman is somehow betraying her entire sex by making a personal decision to lose weight underlines just how much women's individual bodies are still treated as public property, to be picked apart and pilloried, whether because they're considered too fat, too thin..."

Secondly she points out the danger in the path that many overweight/obese women choose - to ignore their bodies altogether:

"...She had had a lifetime of abuse, and, like many women in that situation, decided to ignore her body; to devote herself to the life of the mind. She gradually grew fatter and fatter and fatter (as anyone who has been fat will know, once you're on the slippery slope, it's very easy to keep sliding) until one day the unbearable pain caused by her weight led her to check into hospital for a gastric bypass. While under anaesthetic, she had a heart attack and died.

Hearing about her story at a time when I, too, was taking a completely hands-off approach to my body, I realised that I could quite easily find myself in the same position..."

As I have said nearly 50 million times before feminism, weight and weightloss are complicated issues.  To ignore our bodies and health on one hand is stupid but on the other it seems the BMI is being used as a tool of abuse by the health professions to bully the overweight/obese, doctors feel it their right to make sweeping generalisations about peoples health soley based on the BMI which is also f**king stupid.

Update: Exercise

Time often has this sneaky habit of slipping past me, before I know it a whole month has gone...

I'm talking about February and oh bloody hell 3 weeks of March already gone too!

Exercisewise, February was a great month for me, I am making real progress in my transition from uber sloth/sporadic exerciser to someone that actually does regular exercise.  I hate the assumption that all overweight or obese people are lazy, however I can honestly say that apart from walking, before I was lazy ass.

Then I discovered Yoga.  Sure yoga is not going to burn masses of calories and yes I went to yoga armed with boyfriend and best friend.  But now?  I LOVE YOGA!  I can't begin to tell you just how much I love it, however what I love about it most of all, is that it has started to undo much of the damage caused by PE at School.  Its not competitive, its all about my individual stretching abilities and I love my teacher.  I love it so much that I am going to sign up for the next 12 weeks once this current set of classes is over.  Plus I love the routine, its great that every weds I spend time with my 2 favourite people doing something different and we all usually leave masses happier and chilled. 

Ironically although yoga leave me and company relaxed, boyfriend goes home and then pretends to kill things.  And best friend and myself return to my flat to eat and scare ourselves shitless by watching a Paranormal State (we are both wusses).  Followed by discussions of how when we grow we want to become demonologists and how much we love Chip...

So thats my Wednesdays. 

Mondays however are much different.  Monday I rush home, tidy a little and then go off to aquaerobics with my very enthusiastic Estonian friend.  My god it is hard work.  I leave exhausted, hungry, tired but very awake.  Like yoga it is not competitive and I feel comfortable seeing that most of the women at the class are not tiny skinny gym bunnies.

Despite my good work so far I am keen to add another exercise class to my week, I'm not sure yet which one and am a bit broke this month...  But next month, my local, cheapest offerer of exercise classes is producing a new timetable, so I'm hoping then something else that i would like to try falls on any other day but Monday and Wednesday.

I feel really proud of myself for making exercise finally, regularly happen for me, its been a long time coming!

PS.  I know there is no mention of the RC slimming club here - I felt that deserved its own post which is coming up soon...

Update: Head Stuff - Chavs & FA Blogs

In my absence from here I have been processing a lot of thoughts lately.

It was started off by incident on valentines day.  I was walking home from work when some knob head chavs on a bus threw a ball of paper at the back of my head and yelled f***y (the censorship is for my sanity). 

At home I cried because these boys had shattered my bubble.  Whilst I am still a million miles away from being slender, since losing two stone I have felt more 'normal' if there is such a thing.  The whole incident seemed to crush the feeling of being normal, I felt like I was right back where I started two years ago after seeing my doctor who made me cry.  Then later I was still distressed because I was so angry and upset that the whole thing got to me.  My uber critical side was pissed off with me.  I spent the rest of the evening upset and wishing that I could be invisable and I know that part of my desire to be lighter is so that I will blend in and disappear, if I can't be seen nothing or no-one can hurt me right?

...

Fortunately I was able to put the whole chav incident behind me quite quickly and I still feel 'normal', a lack of progress weightloss-wise isn't bothering me much, but as per normal I am still keen to lose the rest of the weight I aim to.

However I also started thinking about why several of the blogs I regularly read are fat acceptance blogs? Both of the two I read are vehemently against dieting, simply because it doesn't work.  So why I was I reading them? 

I read them because I like what they have to say.  As someone who has spent their whole punishing myself for being fat, they are a refreshing read and although I fully intend to carry on with my mission to be lighter, I am pissed off and fed up with the world for making me feel so crap all my life in the first place.  I've hated my fatness since I was 7 years old because 'other people' have made me feel like shit and thats further compounded my own uber self critical self.

Reading the fat acceptance blogs makes me feel better about the dire state of the world I and all other women live in because there has to be an uprising and verbalised discontent before there can be a revolution right?

For me, as I have also said here before obesity is a complex issue for women.  I know that heavier I was and felt really unhealthy, uncomfortable and unhappy.  Two stone lighter I am definitely healthier, more comfortable with myself but still obese, interestingly there are times when I think that it would be okay to stay as I am now.  But I remain committed to reaching the elusive nine stone, despite often feeling okay, there are just as many times that I feel like a fat blimp and promise myself that I will lose more weight.

I think the FA blogs would probably say I am still clinging to the fantasy of being thin.  I suspect they are right but I can't see anyway I can undo my feelings and desire to be lighter still.  In addition to being highly self critical, I am also an idealist and optimist, I can't help but want the best for myself, which in terms of my health is being lighter and more active, I don't want to go through the rest of my life being disassociated with my body because I hate it (I'm not suggesting thats what the FA Movement endorses, but its the only way I could be okay with myself as I am). 

I don't know how to undo my idealistic and optimistic tendencies, plus in the list of very few things that I like about myself, they both rate very highly, despite having received many batterings throughout my life.  Without wanting to sound too much like a hippy, my optimism and idealism feel right, are part of me and they get me through everything.  I'm not going to break that just to try and be comfortable.

I guess I am not ready yet to let go of my secret desire to be invisible, I'm just so worn down from being made to feel so bad about being me.

...

My statement above is the very reason why we need FA blogs why I'll keep reading them.

(Although I felt very sad writing this latest entry, as I was writing the last sentence, media player randomly decided to play Mika's Big Girl You are Beautiful, which really cheered me up).

Neglected...

I recently noticed that so far I have neglected plus lingerie in my rantings and links here...

Of course lingerie too is subject to the same issues of plus size clothing here in the UK.  Its expensive and boring a lot of the time. 

The reason it came to my attention was that I was contacted by the lovely people at Argoth, whose lingerie is certainly far from boring or being uber expensive.  And they have a fab range of corsets that co up to about a size 22 (40 inch waist can have a reduction down to 36 inches on average with a good corset and I absoutely love the cherry print corset - it is adorable!

So thanks to Argoth, I shall now be on the look out for other good sites offering plus size lingerie and corsets.