May 15th, 2012: The scale likes to remind me, often, how easy it is to gain pounds, how hard it is to lose them. I lost one pound, so I’m back to 267, but that’s after a 2 lb. gain yesterday. If I’d have edged any closer to 270, I would’ve been really pissed. This isn’t to say it may not happen tomorrow, but tomorrow is then, and this is now.
Knee jerking on diets has caused me to do dumb and unhealthy stuff in the past. It’s patently obvious I’ve never experimented with anorexia, but I did try to upchuck some cookies and candy bars I ate one time when I was on a diet. I used to hurl beer all the time, and by God, I’d keep right on drinking. I hoped at the time I stuck my index-finger down my throat that I wouldn’t immediately feel hungry again. Puking food on purpose is more challenging than off-loading 18 beers from the up-elevator, let me just say. It was disgusting, it sucked, and it’s not something I’d ever do again. But I didn’t feel hungry again.
Knee-jerking and panicking about a few lbs. in the wrong direction on the scale has the potential to make normally sane people run too many extra miles, or search out absurd methods to put the scale number back down to what they want it to be. Imagine what it can do to someone like me who strolls near the cliff of insanity on a regular basis.
Here is another time for consistent belief in the program and in yourself. It’s like the really religious guy who consistently prays, versus the guy who only asks for help when the shit hits the fan. It’s like the kid who doesn’t wanna have anything to do with his old man unless he needs money.
So to myself I say: “Don’t be that guy as you follow this process. You do what you’re supposed to daily and you won’t have to grit your teeth and skin your knees begging for some fuckin miracle that ain’t gonna happen. You did this, you caused this, you dug this hole, now dig your fuckin way out.”
And I am, and I will.
May 15th, 2020: What would you do? What have you done? What kind of acute insanity destination has a diet driven you to?
I am so terrified of ever being obese again, and I hated being obese so goddamn bad that there were times when I would’ve tried just about anything to get the weight off fast. Common things like bulimia – whether that’s bulimia nervosa (binge and purge), or exercise bulimia, I battled many of these “easy-ways out”.
I’m not sure if I would’ve tried more acceptable methods, like gastric bypass or liposuction had I been able to afford them. I’ve got nothing against either, except for the fact that I honestly believe anything that might’ve taken the burden off of me in a timelier manner may have only caused me to return to the same place I was before, only faster.
I once was bailed out of much of my debt all at once. The burden I had been packing around for so long was lifted so quickly and mightily from me that I think it fucked me up. I no longer had an enemy, the battle I had been fighting for 15 years was over in an afternoon. I did not understand enough about myself at the time the financial disaster that was to result from this door opening. The clouds in the southwestern sky only built up faster and darker.
My problems lie within the mental domain much more than the physical domain.
You may find the same thing happens to you with your diet. You may feel the strain so often and the struggle so daunting that you start to look for any avenue to the fast lane. Getting help, medical help, like gastric bypass and liposuction are certainly acceptable, but I believe you have to have the right mental fabric in place prior to undergoing that, or you’ll only feel the effects of the next storm as if they’re a hurricane. Doing something quicker, more drastic, and against what anyone sane would recommend will straight fuck you up. I guarantee it.
I learned that to push back on these negative forces requires an almost in-human level patience, and the consistent power of a billion-years of a drop of water on concrete.
