Cheesecake

This weekend my boyfriend and I decided to make a cheesecake. We are both on diets, so all of the intelligent people in the audience are asking "Why?". Because cheesecake. I am coeliac (no gluten or I get very sick) and last week was Coeliac Awareness Week, which led to some specials on gluten free goodies at the supermarket. I chose some ginger biscuits and some arrowroot ones – and thought they both make great cheesecake bases! Boyfriend agreed so off we went to gather more supplies for a white chocolate cheesecake.

Flash forward two days and I realise I have been responsible for eating half of an entire cheesecake. HALF! Granted if I was left alone with it I would have eaten the whole thing, but since January we have lost 20kg between us (10kg each) and I have been very careful about what I allow myself to eat. Not only did I eat half a cheesecake this week, but I got Thai takeaways for dinner after my step class because I believed I had earned it from all my hard work.

Cut to today (5 days since cheesecake creation) and I had my bi-weekly weigh in. We use the WiiFit to weigh ourselves on a Thursday and Sunday so that we can track our progress more accurately. On Sunday I was down to 81.5kg, and planning on being around 80 for this weigh in. Yesterday I had only eaten an apple and some cheese for lunch so that I could eat leftovers from the takeaways for my dinner guilt free. When it came to the result I was shocked. 1.7kg weight gain. The WiiFit went from calling me Overweight to calling me Obese again,  and the teeny voice in the Wii said “Too High!”.

I cried.

I cried because I realised I had been kidding myself. I cried because I realised I knew better than this. I cried because I understood in that moment, that although I love cheesecake and we had a great time making it and eating it, we could never eat it like that again. The time of the cheesecake was over.

My boyfriend went to the Wii and did his weigh in… only to be told he had not gained or lost anything this week. Nothing. He does not go to exercise classes. He has a home gym that I know was not used that week. However, he is a man, and he is taller than me – therefore his body could handle the food and not gain anything like my body did.

I cried some more, got mad about how unfair it was that I had done the work and gone to class but he had not gained 1.7kg and I had. I cried because I knew I had to do so much work to lose that extra weight. I cried because he could eat the cheesecake if he wanted. The results for him were not as they were for me.

Once that was out of my system, I wiped off my messy mascara and decided I would only have yogurt for breakfast. Upon reaching my work I discovered my yogurt had expired. This is obviously just going to be one of those days I guess.

Paper

Hello, Dear Readers and welcome to the first installment of a new blog/diary/image collection which I have started just to pull some of these things from my brain and voice them with the wider world. It is narcissistic to think anyone will read this, which is actually helpful in a way as it lets me just BLEHHH all of it onto the page without fear of repercussions and without actually forcing someone to listen to what I feel like saying. I have been keeping a little electronic notepad of these ideas on my phone but I always fancied having somewhere to collect them. As the theme here is learning to live without, I will make topics for each post to fit into this idea, and today’s is Paper, as instead of keeping a paper diary (the kind of thing certain ex-boyfriends would scowl and write in while sitting in front of you at Christmas In The Park, as you were there with your new boyfriend and that did not sit well, but scowling and writing in a book at home has less of a dramatic effect) I will keep an electronic one. One of the benefits of using Blogger is that I use my google login a lot so it is only a buttons click away at all times. How time flies – twenty years ago would this have been a common thing like it is today?

So this time I am LTLWO Paper. For years (even this year in fact) I would go out and seek the perfect notebook so that I could pour my heart and soul onto its pages… only to give up two days in. All of that paper wasted – I never used them again because that wouldn’t be a fresh slate, a new start. There would be pages torn from bindings and it would make me sad to look at them.  I tried to be strict with myself, and yes -once when I had a series of big breakups I kept notes -but they were awful. Cryptic poetic clues to try and decipher. They made sense at the time but when I go back to look at them it is really painful, but not for bad memories - instead for the cringe you get from reading something taken so seriously but written so badly. That inward chill that follows your spine when you see someone do something incredibly embarrassing and it reminds you of a similar time when you had done something of a similar caliber. Regrets are awful but they are part of the human experience I guess. 

This time things are different. Using an electronic copy is both secret and not. If I hate this blog I can always delete it. I doubt anyone will read this, so I doubt anyone will worry if it disappears in time. I am sure I will miss the feeling of paper that has been scrawled all over, where you can feel the bumps on each page and together as a book they make that delightful crinkle sound. 

Next time I will put in all of the notes from my phone's notebook but for now, I think this explains enough. 

 - Beth