I had been to the gym in the morning before heading off to the airport in the afternoon. I had done my work out and was on the way to the shower and decided to weigh myself to see if my three day diet had done any good. I was wearing a towel, but would need to take it off to get a fair weight assessment as I had been naked when I'd weighed myself on Monday.
This was slightly embarrassing though as, as I was in my family friendly gym there was a dad with his small daughter just feet away, so I was hoping to surreptitiously hop on and off the scales before they noticed.
It was an electronic scales which you had to tap with your foot to get it working, so I did that and just as I was about to jump into my lightening fast towel drop operation, an elderly man (probably in his 60s) stopped right beside me.
"Oooh, that's new!" he commented, looking at the scales.
I smiled at him and waited for him to leave. But he didn't. He just stood there expectantly.
"Go on then," he said, clearly indicating that I should hop on to the scales to show him how they worked. But I didn't want to do that, partly because I needed to take my towel off first and I didn't want to have to do that whilst standing right next to a beaming 65 year old man and partly because I didn't want a complete stranger seeing how much I weighed. Especially right now when I weigh as much as a small horse.
All social convention dictates that this was an unacceptable invasion of my personal space, but the man did not seem concerned by that. I read somewhere that as we get older we start to lose the filter in our brains that helps us decide what is both appropriate behaviour and also what might be interesting (or more pertinently boring) topics of conversation. Did this man really not realise that to intrude on a stranger (and a fat one at that) weighing himself was crossing the line?
I looked a bit put out and mumbled, "No, it's private" slightly pathetically, but he still wasn't going anywhere so I indicated to him that he could have a go on it if he was so fucking excited about it. He hopped on. He weighed 93.4kg. That's the reason I didn't want anyone looking at how much I weighed. Imagine if they took note of the weight and then blogged about it. Humiliating.
He seemed satisfied now and moved on and I was able to now drop my towel (having been so mortified by the old man's intrusion that I no longer cared about a small girl seeing my arse - I had been humiliated enough and now nothing could embarrass me).
Shamefully I weighed more than the old man, but in better news I had lost 0.8kg since Monday. Though I imagine this will be a drop of piss in the ocean after a fortnight of holiday fun. And it's also pretty easy to lose weight when you've spent the previous week eating all the time.
We got to the airport way too early, but finally got on the plane that would take us overnight to our destination. The flight was going to be 11 hours and we'd need to sleep, which looked unlikely as the seats were cramped and uncomfortable and barely went back at all - my girlfriend felt that the back of her seat was in fact pointing forwards even at its fullest extent.
It was going to be a long night.
And I knew that I'd have to continue my blog for at least one day just to tell the story of the man in the gym. Why are strangers suddenly making me super-aware of my girth?
