Losing

I am rubbish at losing.

Really bad.

When I was a little boy, my parents threw a birthday party in my honour. There were games. Oh the games. You know the ones: Pass the Parcel, Sleeping Lions, Musical Chairs. That sort of thing.

Pass the Parcel at this birthday party went like this: parcel is passed, wrapping is unwrapped, the eventual prize grows tantalisingly closer with each child, the parcel goes to one of my friends, the parcel looks TOO SMALL, there are surely NO MORE LAYERS to be removed, the prize is REVEALED, is grasped in the sticky hands of my (soon to be former) friend, is NOT IN MY HANDS ON MY BIRTHDAY.

I forget what happened next. It's difficult to remember anything bar the unbridled fury of my childhood self. The misplaced feeling of entitlement that my birthday had given me. Surely it was my RIGHT to win on this day?

No doubt mortified, my mum carried me away to explain the intricacies of pass the parcel (the game's not rigged, you grumpy little git, etc...) while my friends continued with the party.

I'm better at that sort of losing now. Several years of playing for an exquisitely mediocre basketball team has given me a fantastic familiarity with losing. Also, I'm English so, in terms of sport, losing is pretty much hard wired in.

The losing I'd like to be a bit better at just now is losing weight.

Me and food have a great relationship. I love it. It loves me. We are as near to symbiotic as it's possible to be without actually relying upon one another to continue existing.

Before we had The Creature in our lives, I mitigated my food intake with enough exercise to ensure I did not pile on too many pounds. I ate what I wanted, and enjoyed it. Hours of (mediocre) basketball and plenty of cycling were the antidote to my obsession with carbohydrates.

Since The Creature, I've cycled probably ten miles in total and played just a few hours of basketball.

I've been in denial about my growing mass. But this weekend I decided to weigh myself.

Purveyors of the ugly truth

Error.

Not the scales. I didn't break them. But they did confirm I'd certainly been worshipping at the calorie altar a little too frequently in the last few months. I then added to my feelings of weight based woe by placing my details in this delightful "How much of a fat bastard are you?" calculator, courtesy of the BBC. The answer, somewhat depressingly, is that I'm a fatter bastard than 84% of the world's population.

Fuckeroo.

That's pretty grim. The bitter icing on that particular cake was the little bit of extra information: "You are most similar to an American in your age group". Oh good. In terms of BMI I'm most similar to the nation which is the poster child for gluttony.

The Enemy

As you may have seen already, I'm on holiday this week, and EVERYBODY knows there's no point trying to diet/ration myself while that's the case.

Therefore, as of next week, I'll be making some changes to the food intake and the effort output. Because, apparently, it's not just the ladies who need to shed so-called "baby weight", it's me too.

Top tips welcome, leave them in my comments box, along with any spare cake you've got lying around.