Traitors, nostalgic novels and loving our bits, wobbles and all.
Let's transform Mondays and stop them being another day to beat ourselves up.
Are you a Traitor, or are you Faithful?
If you didn’t become hooked on the UK version of this tense adventure competition before Christmas, then I’m not sure what rock you were under. But if you didn’t; here’s the premise - fronted by Claudia Winkleman, the show saw 22 strangers move into a Scottish castle and complete a set of missions as a team to win a prize fund totalling out at £120,000. The twist is that a group of Traitors is amongst them, hell-bent on ‘killing’ their Faithful counterparts to secure the prize for themselves.
It’s one of the best formats of reality TV I’ve ever seen.
And the Australian version is now available to binge-watch. The presenter is just as good as Winkleman, and the characters are even more entertaining and infuriating to watch.
It’s a perfect show to get into while avoiding the rain this summer!
The Traitors, Australia is now available on BBC iPLayer.
Good eats & good chats on Stirrin’ It Up.
I’ve got a list of favourite couples on Gogglebox - Jenni & Lee (obvs), Mo & Babatunde, Bez and Shaun Ryder and Rylan and his Mum all make the cut. But Andi Oliver and her T4 Legend daughter Miquita are high on that list.
So, I was chuffed to learn that they’ve got their own podcast. Stirrin’ It Up is a simple format; someone well-known is invited for lunch at the Oliver’s with a guest of their choice to talk about, well, anything. There are some great guests so far on Series 1, and I enjoyed this week’s with Candice Carty Williams - author of ‘Queenie’ and creator of new BBC hit ‘Champion’ (which I’ve just started watching, is so far excellent but I’ll wait til I’ve finished it before I talk more about it here).
It’s real honest conversation and the introduction of the guest’s guest makes for some interesting insights from people you wouldn’t usually get to hear from.
You can listen to Stirrin’ It Up on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A Brixton Queenie
Listening to Stirrin’ It Up this week made me want to back and read one of my favourite books of recent times - Queenie -, and I thought it only right to recommend it here.
It’s a beautiful tale of a twenty-something trying to make her way in the world as a young, black British journalist who isn’t having a very good run of it. It’s wickedly funny, incredibly raw and set on the streets of Brixton Hill, so struck a particular chord with me.
It’s what I call a ‘once in a long while’ book, not quite once in a lifetime yet, but really very bloody good.
And the TV adaptation is winging its way to our screens soon, so get swotting up before it does.
You can buy Queenie from all good bookshops or borrow it from your local library (please!).
We’re good. Wobbles and all.
Over the last few months, I’ve been sitting around tables with lots of women. I’ve worked on projects with predominantly female teams, at baby showers, at birthday parties, and family dos.
Groups of super accomplished, really impressive, often masters of the juggle females.
And after we’ve asked about work, the kids, the other halves, the TV we’ve all been binging, 98% of the time, the conversation will always round on one topic.
Weight.
Someone’s trying to shift weight from baby number 2, someone’s got a wedding outfit to get into, someone else is just on another diet because it’s Monday and for some reason, that is what we do.
I’ve listened to countless chats over the last six months of women back on the Special K diet (remember that) and who are giving Slim Fast a pop (‘just need a quick fix for this work do’), or who are killing themselves running 5-6km a day in a bid to shift the tiniest of pouches around their middle.
We do all these things. Have all these jobs. Raise all these kids. Juggle all these plates.
And yet we continue to reduce ourselves to a number on a scale, chasing it down and beating ourselves up in the process.
Last Spring, I stood in a wedding dress shop on a little stage under unflattering lights as a woman practically put her foot on the base of my spine to try and do up a dress I knew I didn’t want to wear.
Not because it didn’t fit. But because it made me not look like me. It was long and heavy and frilly and all of the things I don’t look for in clothes whose primary purpose, in my view, are to be danced in.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t slightly disheartened that every dress in the shop didn’t fit me, a situation that, 18 months on, I can look back on and laugh at because I’m a size 14 woman, which is about as average as it gets but there we are. In a bid to try and make me feel better, my Mum suggested it was probably too early to be trying on dresses anyway, as I was no doubt going to go on the ‘mega diet’ before the wedding.
She was right. Of course, I was. That’s what you do right?
Who doesn’t diet before their wedding?!
When I turned to my husband-to-be and told him, no, I didn’t ask. I told him that we were going on a wedding diet he looked at me bemused.
Why? I’m fine as I am, thanks.
WILD.
Listening to someone not feel the need to radically change themselves for one 24-hour period was an eye-opener.
After quite a lot of soul-searching and stumbling across *the* perfect outfit for *my* wedding that, if anything, was a bit big in parts, I decided to do something bold.
I cut the size label out of what I had purchased and decided to have one goal walking into my wedding: feeling confident.
Not skinny. Not toned.
But, happy.
I finally bit the bullet and approached a professional for some advice on how to eat well for a hormonal condition I’ve long buggered about with. I soon began removing things from my diet that made me sluggish, and bloated and caused my blood sugar to do strange things that sometimes led to me feeling bad.
Eating like that, intuitively, helped me to start to realise that the odd takeaway here and there, bowls of pasta, larger portions (I eat like the World’s Strongest Man and I’m okay with that), weren’t going to stop me enjoying my wedding day.
But beating myself up about them was.
Cutting back on gluten, exercising in a new way that left me feeling energised, not hating the gym and making some minor changes (mainly eating more food, surprisingly) did see me shift a few inches before the big day, but more importantly, it saw me walk down that aisle feeling brilliant, no matter what I looked like.
And I vow to keep that up. For me, for every other woman around me who’s started yet another week fasting and for my little girl so she doesn’t grow up thinking that bread is evil.
I decided to transform Mondays. In my house, they are no longer the day to throw everything out of the fridge and repent a weekend of wrongdoing because you deprived yourself all week.
Mondays are for pasta and for being nice to yourself for getting through the crappiest day of the week.
Thursdays are a big day for exercise. Ending my working week on a high.
I don’t berate myself for having a night out and a pizza on a Wednesday.
I sometimes choose a salad in a restaurant. I’ll sometimes have a burger and sides.
I stopped seeing these moments as ‘falling off the wagon’ and saw them as looking after myself in that moment. It’s been a rough day, I’m due on, and some work’s fallen through - I need a cuddle in the form of a carbonara.
I stopped trying to use the gym to ‘work off’ everything I’d eaten. I now see it as the thing that keeps me being able to throw my little girl up in the air, that’s helping me fend off the devils in my head, and that will hopefully keep my hips on side long into my 80s.
All of it has stopped becoming a punishment or a thing to become obsessed over.
And that is really bloody nice.
I went on holiday a few weeks back and, for the first time, didn’t spend six weeks stressing about how I’d look round the pool.
I’m not a size 8. I never was. I never well be.
I’m a tall, curvy mum of one and nobody, and I mean nobody, gives a shit what I look like on a sun lounger.
And I’m alright with that.
IFA x