Our gym is rubbish

I went to the gym. Exhaustively. I don't feel any thinner. This is most upsetting. I did a saintly 25 minutes on the cross trainer pushing and pulling and trying to ignore my ex-housemate's voice in my head going "No Kat, the cool down period doesn't actually count towards your total time."

God exercise machines are just so boring. It makes me tempted to fork out £50+ a monthf or Gymbox with their sexy-sounding classes and machines with DVD players attached. Then I remember I'm currently paying £5 a month and am poor anyway and resolve to get thin and rich before I enter Gymbox's glossy chrome and glass doors.

It actively irks me that having got through the craving period of quitting, my body is now telling me that I have to go on a diet as well. Diets are for people with control issues and no taste buds. I have too many taste buds and lack-of-control issues. Exercise it is then. I do hope flyering gets my arse back to its normal size.

Fit or fat

So a funny thing – turns out that smoking really does keep you thin. Either that, or giving up makes you fat. My trousers are buckling. I have a gut. My thighs are gracefully arabesquing out sideways. In short, when I go to lie by a pool in three weeks time, I am going to be the slow, determined walker who has to think about where they put their feet in case they crush a stray child.

Last night, I tried on my swimwear for my post-Edinburgh holiday. It was disastrous. It’s a positive kindness that nobody has to see me naked apart from my mirror which must have the moral fibre on an epic scale not to have cracked in fright.

Iin this case, the cat most certainly cannot have the cream: I’ve been punished for my dithering by a spare tyre that you could throw to swimmers in distress. I genuinely cannot remember a time when I had this much excess poundage lurking around my midriff. Thank Christ for low-rise trousers, anything higher and I’d be constricted to tracksuits. Only I don’t own a tracksuit, so I’d have to go and buy one. Dear God, don’t make me go and have to buy a tracksuit.

I wonder if going to the gym twice today and tomorrow and two weeks of frantic flyering will somehow distract me from food and boredom. It better had – dumpy 5’ girls look cute and voluptuous. Dumpy 6’ girls look like wrestlers.

Willpower, or yellow bellied denial inhabitant

I’ve been uncharacteristically quiet of late. This is because the quitting has actually been going really well. Well – if you count only smoking when in the presence of alcohol and friends who smoke. Which I do. Shut up.

This isn’t even justification for carrying on smoking. I still don’t smoke during the day, but now, if I’m out with friends who smoke then it will usually take at least three drinks before I can be tempted outside. That’s a good two hours of willpower right there people. I've also stopped thinking about them. I don't carry "in case" cigarettes anymore which means that in smokers terms I'm down in the scum pool with all the other people "who don't smoke but maybe just one thanks".

I managed nearly 10 years of smoking practically every day without being physically addicted. While I would turn into a nervous nicotine-craving wreck at the merest sniff of a gin and tonic, lunch or coffee with friends, it was what the cigarettes represented than what they were. Emphysema and a conspiratorial chat, evidently.

The idea of giving up cigarettes entirely was, if I’m honest, never totally likely. Unless I cut out people, friends and being sociable altogether which, as someone who is consistently voted most talkative in that infernal Facebook comparison widget, is about as likely as the tooth fairy.

It would be nice for the world to be black and white but then, as we’re constantly being told this week, grey is the new colour for autumn. As is yellow, clearly.