On Vices

I'd say that I suffer from an addiction to food, but in all honesty, at first glance I don't suffer. Looking at me, all you see is an overweight woman. You don't see the mental turmoil, the physical problems I deal with daily because of the strain my weight has put on my frame. I have a sort of affection for food, because on a bad night, chocolate is going to comfort me in a way that is deeply emotional and even spiritual. There are, of course, physical aspects of the relationship I have with food - some foods release endorphins into our bodies, helping to make us feel better about life and ourselves. Sometimes, it's just that sensation of actually being full, because it's more fulfilling than being exhausted. When you eat, you feel full almost immediately afterwards; when you're exercising, you might feel tired, but you don't see or feel the benefits of what you've done for weeks or even months. There is no way to easily judge what you've done for yourself through exercise, and at the end of it, I've always felt empty and kind of lost.

Chocolate, though? Chocolate will wrap an arm around me and tell me that I'm not a bad person, I just make mistakes sometimes. It'll reassure me that we all screw up once or twice or maybe ten times in a month and that doesn't make me bad, just maybe in need of some guidance, and chocolate can TOTALLY offer that to me, and it'll do so without me having to pay a therapist or a personal trainer to tell me that I can feel good inside maybe in a month or so when I finally decide that all this work is paying off. Chocolate will assure me that the woman who just called me something nasty two cars over only did so because she's misguided and probably late for work.

And tacos? I almost can't discuss what wonderful things tacos do. They give me a warm, sorta greasy feeling. That sensation of having your arteries clog up is disgusting to some, but for me, it's another way of feeling full inside. It's a sensation of love and affection that sort of disappears otherwise, because that guy I married and I rarely see each other anymore, and when we do, there's always at least one child between us, keeping us from touching each other or even really having a conversation. G's hyperactive tendencies feed this problem; he has difficulty staying quiet for more than a second or two (I'm being literal here), and he often simply can't stop talking. I'm not going to sit here and say, "My sons are the reason I'm fat and nobody loves me," but I think we've all been in that position before in our relationships where we just kind of stare at ourselves and get so fed up with how things are that we let ourselves make any and every excuse in the book.

Why?

Because who honestly LIKES taking responsibility for what they've become if it isn't what they wanted to be? Nobody heads off to their 10 or 20 year high school reunion to tell everybody they're a twice-divorced college dropout with four kids, two part-time minimum wage jobs, who can't manage to collect child support from either dad. I'd rather go and tell everybody I'm a famous cowboy astronaut actor who won the Nobel Prize. I don't want to be 200 pounds overweight and with nothing to show for my life. Yet for some reason that's part of what I'm allowing myself.

You may have noticed the lovely little addition to the right side of my blog: it's a weight loss ticker and goddammit I'm going to keep going. I'm going to start it with my heaviest weight and the weight I am today, and end it with my eventual goal.

Wish me luck.