Dukan Day three: 4.5 lbs lost.

The level of weight loss is slowing; only a half-pound yesterday.  

The book warns that energy levels may drop for some people trying the diet.  I didn't get tired but I did get bored yesterday.   I didn't eat as much as the previous days and my sweet tooth is gone, which is a radical change in my life.  It's summer and warm and sunny here at last: it's the time of the Leaving Certificate (high school graduation) exams and so the weather has arrived to undermine and betray all efforts at last-minute study.   Like some archaic response written into our genes, everyone over eighteen gets restless in these first two weeks of June.   We must be doing something... primitive drives too late to provoke anything but anxiety.    

I went out to work in the garden, seeing as if for the first time how much needed to be done.   I was suddenly captivated by the idea of eating and working outdoors.    I could bear to eat another steak, if served al fresco.    I grabbed the spade, secateurs and other implements of destruction and set about putting my garden to rights.   

Patio, containers, window-boxes, pond...    Hours later the garden was ship-shape and I was shi*-shape: did I mention my back problem?    I knew I was not going to be able to spend twenty minutes on the trainer.   Even going up the stairs to have a shower made me into a grunting hunchbacked gnome.  I was at once reminded very painfully of my original motive for going on the diet and left bleakly wishing for a comforting cup of hot chocolate, with maybe a sly stick of cinnamon to garnish.    

Half a pound: so little for so much effort and yet still miraculous.  

Thinking of it, for an instant, I mistook my measures: half a pound became half a stone and I was about to say 'But my son weighed more than that when he was born!'    In the post-natal ward, every mother made that mistake and then recoiled in horror when confronted with it.    Eight pounds five ounces is a LOT different to eight stone five pounds!     Eight pounds five...  why, I might have lost that much by Monday.   Eight pounds five...

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I remember leaning over the bath to wash my hair one evening after my son's birth.    I should have had a shower but I felt too weak yet, so this was the compromise because I could not bear my sleepy hair any longer.  I leaned over, grasped the hose and screamed in horror!   My stomach looked like a witch's wattle; folds and folds of slack wizened skin hung between my hips.   I jerked upwards too suddenly and fell against the bath edge where my husband, seriously alarmed, found me.   

I couldn't explain to him how horrifying that sight had been, how Kafka-esque that moment.   It was as if an ancient alien had substituted theirs for the almost transparent, blue-veined, elastic flesh I had known so intimately for the past forty weeks.    I had not been able to see my toes in months but I had been used to looking at my stomach. 

Indeed, it had never received so much attention: stroking, rubbing, patting.   There is still the tradition here of patting a pregnant woman's stomach for luck, particularly by those themselves seeking to conceive.   Oils and creams had been regularly slathered on, sloppily by my daughter and more pleasurably by my husband.   On my first pregnancy, my breasts had ached as they swelled; on this one my stomach stretched until I thought I must explode.    

My neighbour, only slightly taller, had given birth to twins eight months before; I had been unable to observe her extended belly without wincing.   As my own pregnancy developed, I began to avoid mirrors and reflective windows.    Whenever I caught sight of myself or my reflection, it seemed uncanny to me.    I remember once, I tripped on a kerb-edge and the thought crossed my mind - fleeting but real - that I would fall and roll into the traffic like a human beach-ball.    My body was a mystery to me: waist disappearing, genitalia disappearing, toes disappearing.   My belly-button turned inside out in some gross parody of itself.    Where had my little inn-ie gone? 

Eight pounds five ounces.   I put on about two stone in that pregnancy, despite the morning sickness.    'Nausea-and-vomiting' they called it at the clinic, running the words together in careless contraction, a diminution it did not deserve.   Now I understood my mother's dismay when she experienced morning sickness on my brother.    Her doctor prescribed tablets but my father forbade her to take them.   He threw them in the fire.  

I don't know how she got over it without the tablets.   Perhaps I helped, as my own daughter helped me in turn?    In the kitchen I kept a milk crate  - the blessed  ingenuity of a short person -  which came in very handy during these months.    I'd get nauseous, my daughter would get the crate, I'd sit on it with my head between my knees and she'd hold something cold to the back of my neck until I felt better.    Perhaps I did something the same for my own mother?    I never asked for medication, but then I knew that the tablets in the fire had been Thalidomide.