February 20th, 2012: Another pound bites the dust. The device around which my life revolves reported to me a number of 311. Maybe I’m back in the New York Groove for a day or two. 122 more southern miles to go.
Today is “Would You Rather”. Maybe it’ll help me through a possibly hungry day.
I’m asking myself or anyone else:
1) Would you rather eat a dozen Krispy Kremes and go back to bed, thereby wasting your whole morning /or/ eat a single, 170 calorie bowl of Quaker instant oatmeal, and start your day off by getting your ass on the treadmill and listening to Van Halen live in concert, thereby readying yourself to Jump and Stand on Top of the World and maybe Dance the Night Away in Panama while Runnin’ with the Devil?
2) Would you rather turn back north and go deeper into the dark Mirkwood Forest of morbid obesity /or/ continue your Andy Dufresne journey to the Shawshank Redemption of freedom from this fat body?
3) Would you rather say “screw it” and give in to temptation like a total weakling and destroy 7 weeks of good work /or/ say “you are goddamn right I’m going to fight on!” and continue on with the good work?
4) Would you rather go down from an obesity-related heart attack right there at work /or/ have the strength and energy to help someone else who may be facing a life threatening emergency?
5) Would you rather be able to run alongside your son when he’s ready to learn to ride a bike /or/ have him have to help you walk or push your wheelchair because you ate yourself into not being able to walk?
6) Would you rather shop for clothes at Chalmer’s Big and Tall Man’s Shop (and not because you’re tall – I’m only 5’10”) /or/ shop wherever you’re supposed to shop for normal clothes (it’s been so long I don’t even know where to go anymore)?
7) Would you rather be constantly out of breath /or/ breathe free fresh air always and without struggling?
8) Would you rather sit on the sidelines and watch everyone else have fun /or/ be right out there with them like you used to be?
9) Would you rather sit on the shore and eat 40 lukewarm hot wings and watch everyone else out on the lake water skiing /or/ be the one hanging onto the handles saying “go for it” to the boat driver?
10) If someone wrote a story about your life, would you rather be the victim /or/ the hero?
11) Would you rather live /or/ wait to die?
I will live until I die.
February 20th, 2020: I’m gonna keep it real here – my age, my past choices, a little bit of the “fuck it” attitude, and a little bit of backbone have allowed me the freedom to come to terms with a lot of things, so I feel comfortable speaking and writing frankly about them. My real answer to #11 from above: it just depends on the day. There are some days I don’t care about living or dying in terms of either activity resulting from what I eat or whether I went to the gym. I can sometimes stand there completely lucid and tell you or any of my clients to stay strong, don’t cave, don’t eat the goddamn cheeseburger, and then in a microsecond of instability find myself gorging down a whole jar of peanut butter, late at night, standing by the kitchen sink in my underwear. During the moment, I don’t feel guilty that I couldn’t practice what I preached, or guilty that you might have gone to bed hungry, but when the last bite is eaten, I’m immediately angry at myself, really angry, and then I get depressed, and I have trouble sleeping. I worry that I might have just unchained the inner demon. I can only get over it by saying to myself: “tomorrow is a new day, I’ll just get back on track then”. I pull hope out of its holster.
Hope is a sword with two edges when applied to any weight-loss program. Hope has kept me from dismissing the general bullshit that constitutes much of life – it has kept me going when I accidentally assess the mathematical reality of life, and come to the stark realization that there is literally no way to get out of it alive, and that all these tasks that’re so draining are sort of pointless, and will never even be a tiny footnote 100 years from now. Hope is the day to day nuts and bolts of these larger dreams or delusions of mine that probably just ain’t gonna happen. Hope promises to me that tomorrow will be a better day. Hope has many times helped me from mentally eviscerating myself for putting excess food, alcohol, Copehagen, or cigarettes into my mouth. Hope is the next train that I’ll catch off the platform that’ll haul me away from the gravity of the station of my misdeeds.
But hope has allowed me to ruin what, up until a diet excursion (screw-up),would’ve been a good day of diet and exercise on the program. I could’ve just had a cookie and then stopped, but instead, that switch in my brain that I seem to have serious difficulty turning off tells me I can go ape-shit, and so I eat 10 or 20 more cookies after the first one (it’ll always be the whole package of whatever I had one of). Instead of stopping the bleeding, I’m able, with conviction, to say “fuck it” and unleash myself. All I have to do as the feeling of being stuffed sets in, right along with the feeling of guilt, is reach into my pocket and pull out a can of hope. I can just start tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day, or the next… I can begin again tomorrow. I have done this as many as two days in a row and recovered – train cars wobbled and rolled, but stayed on the tracks. The few times I have gone three days in a row using “hope” have resulted in a full removal of myself from the process and a return to square one. One time that was a return of 65 lbs. of fat! Metaphorically speaking, I had one flat tire, and instead of stopping and fixing it, I got out of my progress truck and slashed the other three. Goddamn, does it always have to be all or nothing?
It does. And I have to remember to use hope wisely.
