Reverse Thinspiration?

Today was one of those days where it seemed as though the whole world wanted to scupper my diet.

Everywhere I looked people were sat brandishing giant bacon rolls, club sandwiches, huge slabs of chocolate cake and sackloads of cheese footballs & onion rings. I couldn't turn around or raise my head up from my desk without seeing some greedy, undisciplined gut-bucket cram as many calories as they could into their fat fucking mouths, pausing only to breathe occasionally and slouch further back into their ever accommodating chairs.

The air was thick with the smell of fried egg sandwiches, sausage baps, doorstep wedges of thick buttery toast and breakfast boxes sporting oil slicks that would make BP blush. The kitchen had been decked out with every single kind of cake, bun, cookie, doughnut, tart, scone, gateau and flapjack imaginable. One woman was leaving and one guy had turned 40. Together they had hit the supermarket and spent the best part of about £40 on enough junk food to sink the QEII. And I wasn't having ANY of it.

I'd kind of predicted that being a Friday and all, folks were more than likely going to want to get the 'breakfast baps' in and so I'd prepared for this before I left the house this morning. After having weighed myself (down another pound!) I first chugged back a pint of water with a Berocca dissolved in it. Well, I might as well start the day with a few skin-friendly vits and minerals, right? Then, after I'd put on my make-up I poured myself a huge mug of black coffee with sweetner in it and sipped that before leaving. On my way out the door I grabbed a fat free yoghurt and a tiny clementine fruit.

I got to work for 9am and proceded to get myself a mug of Pu-er tea and another glass of water. I ate my yoghurt and clementine, drank the water, sipped at my tea and felt decidedly full when the unmistakeable aroma of charred processed meat products, lard and toasted breads, wafted up into my nostrils. I took this opportunity to swallow a couple of the Maximum Lipotropics fat burning capsules I've been taking at this point. Now, I know there have been a lot of conflicting stories surrounding these 'so called' fat burning diet pills and I'm not about to try and claim that they're some kind of wonder drug. They're not. I do however think that there is SOME truth to their being able to assist in getting rid of the fat you're burning off whilst being on a diet. They contain Chromium and Gymnema Sylvestre which can help regulate blood sugar levels and alleviate cravings. I wasn't sure that they were doing much to help me until I ran out a couple of days ago and had to wait until yesterday to receive a new shipment in the post. Over the two days I wasn't able to take any of these Lipotropics I found that my appetite was back with a vengeance and I found it harder to put thoughts of gooey, chocolate cake out of my mind. Then, when I took them last night, I found my ability to resist had improved somewhat. I'm not a salesperson for this product and I am in no way affiliated with the company who manufactures them or the agents and reps who sell them. What I am is a bit fat moose who is under no impression that these are going to do the work for her, but who is willing to give them a try to see if they might help assist the cause. And I think that they do. It could very well just be a psychosomatic placebo effect, but even if it is all my mind, I'll take that little bonus feature and happily turn down all the cake in Europe! They only cost me about £5 on ebay (with free P&P) for a bottle of 60 which is a month's supply. Try them yourselves and if you find they work, great. If they don't do anything for you then you've really only spent a fiver on a food supplement that if nothing else will actually help your digestive system a little!

Anyway, commercial breaks aside there, where was I? Oh yeah, I took a couple of the Lipotropics this morning along with some green tea extract, ginseng and 5-THP which is supposed to help your brains natural production of neurotransmitters and alleviate mild low mood swings. I've also read that they can help people who comfort eat when they're down so I've been necking a few of them every so often too. But yeah, I took all my little pills and steeled myself against the rapidly growing collection of crap that was slowly beginning to permeate every single spare desk, surface, nook, cranny and corner of our already cramped office. And I felt pretty good. I set my mouth into a firm, determined little line and worked at not succumbing to the temptation of bacon - a smell which can elicit a hunger pang and stomach rumble from me at ANY time of day!

God it smelled good. Really bloody good. And it wasn't just one solitary person munching a single bacon sandwich either. There were masses of them flitting about the office, some on white, some on brown, a few of them were on baguettes, but most of them on fluffy soft rolls. The men seemed to prefer brown sauce on theirs and the women red, but a couple of ingenious souls had bedecked their own bacon-tastic offerings with melted cheese and mayo. BLISS! I tried to avert my gaze so as not to be confronted by the numerous sights of co-workers gormandizing and gorging themselves on tasty, smokey bacon treats, but they were EVERYWHERE! I tried keeping my eyes trained on my computer screen, but I could still hear the munching and the contented sighing and umming and ahhing as anticipation gave way to sweet satisfaction and each and every morsel became orgasmic! So I put my headphones on and cranked up the music to a near deafening level, but despite not being able to hear anything, I could still SMELL THE BEAUTIFUL YET UNGODLY SMELL OF SMOKEY SWEET CURED PIG!! I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO DROWN IN A POOL OF MY OWN SALIVA AND THERE WAS NOTHING ANYONE COULD DO ABOUT IT!!!

And then I saw HER.

Reverse thinsperation 101.

Sat a couple of rows ahead and just to the right of my own fairly cluttered desk, sat Pamela. Not her real name, but that's what we're going to call her - Pam for short. Pam was sat on one of the standard issue, comfortably upholstered, slightly oversized, ergonomic office swivel chairs that the company had purchased in order to make our workstations that little bit more comfortable for the 8 hours a day we spend at them. These chairs are designed to comfortably hold a big burly man and not flinch at the larger frame. Big as I am, I sit incredibly comfortably in my chair, just perfectly adjusted in height and depth and angle of back rest, for the majority of my working day. The armrests support my arms, the curve in the back fits snugly around the curve of my spine and the whole thing is finished off with a matching footrest for the shorter occupant. These chairs suit pretty much everyone.

Everyone except Pam it would seem.

When I saw her this morning, her chubby, stubby, greasy little fingers, grappling with an oversized breakfast roll, she too was sat on her standard issue company chair. Only she wasn't sat quite as comfortably in hers as I was. In fact, a great deal of her wasn't actually managing to sit in the chair at all! You see, Pam weighs in excess of 30 stone. That's over 420 pounds and I'm actually guestimating that to be on the side of caution! That 30+ stone is piled indiscreetly upon what should be a slight, 5 foot 5 frame and because there really isn't anywhere for it to go, it just sort of spills out of the sides of her and oozes from out of her back. She has this inhuman looking shape, all lumps and bumps and rolls and tyres and as she sits on her chair it all just seems to flow out and over the sides of the chair down towards the floor. It looks like the fat is seeping out of her and trying to drip off of her onto the food soiled carpet below. She looks like a bathtub overflowing, only this bathtub is full of fat.

Pam stopped me dead in my tracks when I noticed her this morning. I mean, I've noticed her before - many times before - but whilst it's hard to NOT see Fat Pam, you either get real used to the size and state of her, or in some cases I guess your mind just doesn't want to acknowledge that she's there at all. Who actually WANTS to have to see that amount of fat staring back at them like some mutated hippo-pig-a-moose each and every day? Me personally, I just find that for the most part, I'm too goddamn busy to actually have time to check up on what my fellow colleagues look like. A lot of the time I really couldn't care less. But this morning, when I saw Fat Pam it was like the revelation I'd been waiting for. If I believed in a god, I would have taken this as a sign from him to stay the righteous path of restriction and restraint. But I don't and so I just saw something that looked like my worst fucking nightmare - aka - Reverse Thinsperation.

Now if Fat Pam was slim, she still wouldn't be gorgeous, but she'd be okay looking. I mean, yeah she has horrible beige hair that looks like Supernoodles and her dress sense is something to rival Edna Turnblad and Priscilla Queen of the Desert combined (although maybe you don't gots a whole lotta choices in your wardrobe when you look like the back end of a bus.) But if she did the right thing and slimmed down, she would be alright looking and no one would think badly of her whatsoever. But Fat Pam isn't slim and from the looks of the way she was caressing her cornucopia of carbohydrate and lard this morning, she ain't gonna be winning 'The Biggest Loser' any time soon either.

It was utterly repulsive.

To say the sight of her turned my stomach is the understatement of the century. She looked like some insane, drooling, half-pig, half-mammoth hybrid as she chomped and chewed and stuffed and sweated and groaned and slobbered and munched. She tore into her super-sized scoff like a half starved animal, the beads of sweat running down her face synchronising their pace with the rivers of fat that ran between her fingers and pooled on the desk in front of her. Each oversized bite was torn from the wad of indistinguishable mess in her paws before she'd even had a chance to fully chew and swallow the last mouthful - and that maniacal glint in her eye betrayed the civilised front she probably wished she was portraying as her primal, basic, instinct of greed took over.

She made me sick.

Fat Pam was everything I'm not or want not to be. She is the very epitome of the lack of self control we Ana's need to cultivate in order to stay the path. Fat Pam was a physical manifestation of all my food-oriented fears and she both repulsed and strengthed me as I looked on in horror. With each vile, scavenging, ravaging grab, Fat Pam showed me exactly why I need to say no to all that disgusting, high calorie nonsense. She was the 'Ghost Of My Christmasses Yet To Come', a chilling and stark warning of what would become of me if I failed to take my own destiny in hand and work hard at being the slim, beautiful creature I was meant to be.

Fat Pam put me off food for the rest of the day.

And so it was that a sight so utterly repugnant, so nasty in it's abject gluttony, became something I was truly glad to have witnessed. Fat Pam became true reverse thisperation for me today and the best part about it is that I get to look at that living, breathing, sweating, heaving, mass of ugly flab every working day for the foreseeable future. Yay, for work-based thinspo! HA!

So that was my great revelation today. Do you have anyone around you who you just couldn't bear to turn out like? Instead of avoiding looking at them for fear of catching their fat disease (HA!), force yourself to cast your eyes over every single inch of their bodies and allow them to put you off EVER getting like that. Hey, maybe you should even bestow some food-esque gifts upon them too! Well, we can't have them wasting away can we? That's OUR job! LOL!

Seriously though, stay strong ladies.

Ana catch the bus

Hello, good evening and welcome.

Hey folks,

If you're reading this post and checking out this blog, chances are you're already in a similar place to me right now.

I'm not going to pretend like I'm some woeful, misbegotten victim here and try to make out like I'm in the grip of some horrendous eating disorder because I'm not. And yes, I'm well aware that the very fact that I would deny such a thing will do nothing more than add fuel to the flames and suggest I'm in denial or something, but to be honest, it matters not one bit what anyone thinks...

What really matters is what I've actually decided on; what journey I've willingly begun to embark upon. That journey is one I think you might also be walking and perhaps one we can walk together. I'm talking about the journey into the Pro-Ana-Mia Lifestyle, because if you're anything like me, you'll understand the difference between 'suffering' from an eating disorder and taking a controlled approach to the anorexic lifestyle. You'll know that to restrict and fast and binge and purge, is to truly push your body to it's physiological limits, all in the name of looking and feeling great.

Right now I'm restricting. My daily food intake is coming in at between 300 and 500 cals a day, not including those evil calories that get binged and purged once a week as a way of controlling my cravings. Unlike many who walk with our sister Ana, I'm not particularly snobbish in hooking up with Mia every so often. In fact I actually look forward to our occasional lunch dates. I know that won't sit well with the purists amongst us, but to be honest, I'd rather plan these little 'outings' factoring in exactly what I think will make me feel satisfied, than allow my cravings to creep up on me unannounced leaving me grappling for frozen or unsatisfactory, hastily gathered food stuffs.

No, I much prefer to select what it is I KNOW I'll want and like, book a table for two with Mia a few days in advance and carefully slot our appointment into the rest of my working week with the utmost discretion.

You see, what I'm doing is not a 'quick fix' or a 'crash diet' - it's not something I want to try on for size, mimic, mock or even abuse with misplaced curiosity. No, I want to take the basic Pro-Ana-Mia ethos and use it to create a strong, beautiful, slim, young woman who is the epitome of self control.

I want people to look at me and think 'I wonder how she does it' whilst grimacing grimly at their own unsatisfactory reflections in shop windows. I want work colleagues to gaze at my miniscule lunches and look longingly at my petite, immaculate appearance, desperate to be able to have THAT much self control. I want women to both hate and want to be me. I want men to love and fear me. Above all, I want to be the very best that I CAN be, because I know that deep down, I'm better than the rest of them put together.

I'm kind of lucky. I'm smart, I'm funny, I'm charming, I'm witty and I'm engaging. I'm good at my job and if it weren't for this inpenetrable fat-suit suffocating my potentially beautiful physique I would look damn fine too.

I know I have the potential to be beautiful, all the indicators are there: long, glossy, poker straight hair - check, big brown eyes with long luscious lashes - check, cute perky nose - check, straight white teeth - check, prize-winning smile - check. Unfortunately, no one can really see past the umpteen gazillion extra pounds of flab that are just drowning me at the moment, so it's time I let Ana come and take my hand and help me find my real, true beautiful inner, skinny self.

Who's with me?