June 14th, 2012: Well, so far the damage isn’t as bad as I had anticipated. Here’s the thing, though, it seems like there’s a lag time between a diet wreck and the scale read-out. So I might have to wait a day or two before the 12,000 or so calories (and I’m not kidding) that I ate Tuesday show up as extra body-fat and added weight. I weigh 259 today. I’m a little relieved and feel gifted that I didn’t cross back into the damn 260’s, at least for today. That would have totally bummed me out.
I did run yesterday, 10 miles, and it felt like I was pulling a loaded 4-horse trailer. Some of that was physical because of the binge, but mostly I think it was psychological. Having not weighed yesterday, and always expecting the worst, I had myself believing that my diet wreck had pushed me back up somewhere around 290 lbs.
I sometimes try to tell myself that maybe it’s good to stray a day occasionally to prevent a total failure. Total failure in this case would be to just blow it all off and go back to my old shitty diet ways. I want to get to a point where I can a plan a binge, I guess (?), or just have a cheat meal or something. I just hate being out of control.
June 14th, 2020: One diet screw-up’s not gonna kill your scale-measurable goals. It may jack up your weight for a day, or add a few days on to the time it takes you to reach your goal weight, but in the scheme of things, the diet wreck won’t do any more quantitative harm to you than a massively hard workout would benefit you. If this just happened occasionally, and by that, I mean no more than twice a month, then it really is no big deal.
HOWEVER, if you hope to remain a program disciple, you seriously have to simply chalk it up. You really have to say to yourself “I had a bad day, big deal”. And then you have to learn to leave it at that and move on. If you cannot do this, then this screw-up can become like an aggressive cancer to your program. Guilt kills the program, so you’ve got to learn ways to move on. When I have the whole program put together in a book, I can give you some ideas about how to stop this guilt train, or stop the guilt bleed.
The last sentence in the 2012 post was “I just hate being out of control”. This control thing, I believe, may be the true adversary of all addicts. Again, the adversary is only you, but we’re so hard on ourselves that anyone else’s thoughts or actions are no match. So we take this control thing to the motherfucking limit – to the limits of sanity. A planned suicide is the most stark and powerful expression of this almighty desire to have control. Here is someone who is literally wresting control from God, or whatever higher power flies this universe-airliner.
I sought control of my lousy eating habits and of my lousy attitude toward the management of them by turning it all into this war. I’m not apologizing or saying it’s wrong; in fact, I think it’s the only way you can ever deal with these addictions. You’ve got to define them as a vampire that will never die and that must be dealt with to some degree of intensity at any given time.
However, where I have this unhealthy “addiction” to food, then following through with a planned diet binge, for me at least, is the same as saying, “yeah go ahead Mr. Demon, lure me into thinking life’s all good when I get to eat like a pig, but then tomorrow go ahead and fuck me up”. As you’ll see in the program, we don’t take days off. We don’t take meals off. We don’t have “cheat days”, “cheat meals”, etc. There is no goddamn purposeful cheating or determination to make a mistake here. When it happens, because it will because we’re human, it’s a mistake and we have to learn to say “big deal, I lost this day”, and move on.
