Over the last two weeks, the good living has frustratingly added weight back. I’ve noticed it in my stomach. While I’m still obviously far thinner than I was, I’ve gained back around 5 pounds from enjoying (over enjoying) good food and not doing anything physical. Next week begins the “training” for the Sunburst, so I’ll have to knock off the superfluous eating habit that I’ve picked up again. I’m fairly certain I’ll lose it again and I’m still at 184, which is roughly my ideal (actually, I prefer 182) but it’s above what I want and it’s going in a very wrong direct and it did it very quickly.
It’s just so damn hard to help myself. Food is everywhere and it’s all junk. Salty and sweet, my two favorite flavors, are practically free and unavoidable. Cake at group meeting for graduating students (caramel cake at that), cookies and chocolates and extra helpings. It’s impossible to avoid it and I’m clearly addicted to it. And I don’t mean addicted in the “haha look at me, I enjoy chocolate” kind of way, I mean I feel physically bad when I deny myself food. It’s like trying to quit smoking, but worse. At least with cigarettes you can just stop forever. Swear off the damn things and be done, never to see them again. Safe in knowing they can’t get you if you don’t get them first. Obviously not eating will have rather tragic consequences, therefore continuously eating is an obligation, but the absurd amount of control it can have over you is almost frightening.
I’ve suddenly begun to look at anorexics in a whole new light. Anorexia isn’t about losing control of your diet, it’s about asserting it.
Tags: food, gaining weight
April 14, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Pfft! I’d contend that last statement is naught but semantics. You certainly can’t laude the “control” of anorexics; they exchange a lack of control over when and what they eat for a lack of control over their self image. A psychological condition which obsessively compells one to literally starve themselves to the brink of death is a pathological loss of control, don’t you think?
April 14, 2008 at 2:26 pm
I’m not lauding anyone. I assumed they were anorexic because they could no longer appropriately decide what was right and what was wrong to eat (effectively paralyzed by choice). I since concluded that it’s easiest to decide that it’s all wrong to various degrees and just not eat any of it. A delusion of obtaining complete control over something that we never have complete control of is, indeed, a mental illness and I don’t have illusions that it isn’t.
April 14, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Chazzz took the words right out of my mouth.