April 17th, 2012: I didn’t weigh today due to another fucking cheating event yesterday. I lifted heavy, in addition to running 4 miles. I’m wondering if that increased my appetite to the out-of-control point. After I exercised, I simply sat at the kitchen counter and ate at least 2500, maybe 3000 calories of chocolate chips cookies, Swiss Miss pudding, and Jimmy Johns sandwiches.
This is the scary thing about the mental game in all this shit. I was as lucid and motivated as Muridae mus musculus yesterday and this morning, and then in one impulsive moment, I fucked it all up for the day.
But just the day. Just the day. I stopped the bleeding, went to bed, and I’m starting a new day today. This program is forever, so sometimes the actual continuum of time is more important than any discrete instance of any time value, and independent of any one event that’s not birth or death.
I’m learning and losing. It may be that I’m losing my mind, but I’m also losing weight. Losing and learning.
April 17th, 2020: As a continuation of April 15th’s post, which was more or less about fear as motivator, I wanted to write about how I might truly be using the never ending battle with weight loss/weight maintenance to wag the dog. And I know I ain’t alone.
In case you didn’t know, to “wag the dog” means something like creating a distraction from one issue that’s usually more critical by fabricating a new issue that’s probably not as critical, but equally dramatic. I’d be willing to bet that most obese people have an underlying mental issue that’s only externally manifesting as an eating disorder. I’ve written about it before, and it doesn’t seem like it would take too much of a hard-sell to reach general agreement. This is especially true if you, the reader, have personal experience with eating disorders, obesity, etc.
It’s certainly that way with me. There are some days when I feel like I’m walking on that sanity tightrope, and this has been the case for as long as I’ve understood the definition of sanity, so probably 30 years. I was headed towards implosion eventually. For me, it started with PTSD, moved into alcoholism, emerged as generalized anxiety, and then finally settled into the neatly concrete and externalized testimony of obesity.
Obesity, overeating, etc. is a daily battle, and a damned hard one at that, but I’ll take this challenge any day compared to living in the nightmare world of PTSD. Mental illness and eating disorders are axis powers, the former initially controlling the latter, and the latter wagging the dog. Eventually they become equally potent entities where one simply feeds the other, and this is when a vicious cyclone action begins. My task was to ram a stick in the spokes of this flywheel and stop the motherfucker in its tracks, thereby allowing me to reconfigure the driving force behind my habits.
