FBD15

The Fat Bloke Diaries

Episode Fifteen – Celebration

Derek is trying to make me more leathwake.

Those of you who have been reading these Diaries for a while will know that Derek is the virtual trainer that I use on my Wii Fit. He guides me through the gym and yoga classes with a friendly manner. He’s also a liar. He that tells me I’m doing great when I’m struggling to hold The Plank position for twenty seconds, and that my balance is pretty good when I’m teetering on one leg like an arthritic stork on a tightrope. In a gale.

However my favourite untruth of his is, “You’re obviously no stranger to exercise”. While it could be argued that this may be true now, he’s been saying it since the very first day I stood on the machine, when I was indeed a complete stranger to exercise. That was also the day I first heard the little electronic ‘Ow!’ come from the TV as I stepped onto the little white step, which doesn’t exactly help my confidence, but at least Derek’s always there to build me up.

Every good hero has his sidekick. Batman had Robin. Don Quixote had Pancho Villa. Morecambe had Wise. And Derek… Derek has an anthropomorphic cartoon Wii Fit board, which I’ve taken to calling Snowy.

Snowy is constantly asking if I fall over a lot. I guess this is because when I’m standing on Snowy I fall over a lot. I know my balance is terrible; I don’t need a sarcastically voiced piece of wireless tat to tell me this. It comes from a terrible shopping trip in Vancouver (my bad balance, not the wireless tat), during which I was mugged with malice aforethought by a delinquent set of stairs. They fractured my foot, and dislocated it for good measure. And then, instead of running off with my shopping as any self-respecting teenage tearaway should, the Steps of Doom decided to tear some ligaments and tendons in my hoof as well. But the broken rib was the bit that really hurt. Some might say that the stairs were peacefully minding their own business, happily guiding Canadian shoppers up and down before the clumsy foreigner came along and dived down their length. But I know the truth.

So yes, I do have balance problems, and I’m still a Fat Bloke, but Derek and Snowy are doing their utmost to help me, and it seems to be working. I’m sleeping better, I have more energy and best of all I’m losing weight.

All in all I’m feeling pretty good about myself, and it’s time for a treat. I deserve a little celebration after all this hard work. But how should I reward myself for doing less damage to my bathroom scales? In the past all the little incentives that I’ve given myself have been based around food and drink. ‘I got that document finished early, so I’ll treat myself to a muffin with my coffee’, ‘If I sink this putt I’ll have a celebratory whisky later’, ‘It’s Thursday – let’s go for an Italian’, etc. Traditionally pizza and beer would have featured highly in my self-congratulatory excesses, but not anymore; they’ve been banished to the realm of increasingly rare treats. My problem is knowing what form my well-done-me gifts should now take?

One incentive trick that some folks swear by is to buy some great looking clothes that are a size too small. That way they know that they’ll have at least one thing that will look good when they’re smaller; not everything that they wear will hang from them like a monstrous, shapeless sack.

I’m sure that this works for some of you good people, but not me. I’ve happily kept clothes that others have bought me for just this reason and it’s starting to pay off as more garments cross the gap from the ‘too small’ pile to the ‘wearable in private’ cupboard. Some of these old gifts have even acquired ‘passable for public viewing’ status, but I’m none too happy with the idea of handing my hard-earned cash over to a clothes shop in return for something that I won’t be able to use for some time, if ever. And even if (that should of course be ‘when’!) I do get to wear it, who’s to say that I’ll still be as enamoured of it then as I am now, or even that it won’t have fallen hideously out of fashion like so much else in my wardrobe?

But at least I can afford some clothes now. I’m saving loads of cash these days, money that beforehand would have been thrown away on crisps, chocolates, muffins etc. And of course, pizza. How could I possibly have forgotten pizza? So maybe I should put these newly gained riches towards that big treat for when I do something special, like start running regularly? Some books, perhaps? Yes, perhaps.

Oh, and that word at the start of this piece, leathwake? It’s an old word meaning lithe, or supple. I found it in my new dictionary of obsolete words. I treated myself to it now that I’ve started running regularly.

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