Operation Big Butt – Day 9-14: False Starts
It’s so easy to blog about big weight-loss plans when you’re heads in the game, and you’re feeling like you can do it with one hand tied behind your back. It’s a whole other thing when you wake up from a chocolate-chip cookie induced coma and realize you’ve fallen off the wagon again.
Actually, it was more like I dove off head first, and I don’t even remember why. A two-year relationship that went bad is probably the culprit. I’m eating instead of having sex, or dealing with my feelings, it’s what I always do. I am the quintessential emotional eater; I’m the quintessential emotional everything.
I’ve always let my emotions lead me around by the nose – sometimes I think I’m powerless over them. And when I feel sad, or lonely, hell, even happy or celebratory – I eat. When I need comfort, I eat. When I’m scared, I eat. And when I’m lonely, I eat.
On a daily basis, I stare into the mirror at my ever-expanding gut, and know that I have to do something, and I have to do it fast; that’s how this blog was born. Not out of a need to make anyone laugh at my weight-loss efforts (though I can understand why it might seem that way), but out of my need to say out loud that I need to help myself. I need to help myself.
And so, several days after my false start, and I’m sure 7 pounds or so later, I’m ready to begin again. And this time, like the last time, all I have is the love of my son and a life that’s rife with possibility to kick me into gear. I know that there is so much more out there for me if I can kick this.
Only those who know that I’m not kidding when I say I’m battling an addiction to chocolate-chip cookies can probably understand. Understand how something that everyone in the world has to do to survive can wreak such havoc on your life and health. I have to eat to live, yet if I don’t eat the right kinds of things, I’m putting myself on a path to an early grave. It’s not like drugs, alcohol or even cigarettes; we humans can live just fine without any of those things, but we all have to eat, and eating to live instead of eating to fill a void is just as hard as giving up any other vice.
And so – it’s not so funny anymore. Day 1 was a hoot. Day 2, I was shaky but still optimistic. By the time I’d taken the swan dive off the wagon, I was deeply ashamed of myself, and didn’t even want to be reminded that I started this blog, but start this blog I did, so it’s time for me to smack the crap out of myself and get back on track.
Wish me luck – and those of you who are so inclined, please pray for me. I’m going to need it.
I feel your pain, and hope you know that you have exactly what it takes to make it through this. As a person who has completed several 40-day fasts in my time for religious reasons, I know that it’s an almost overpoweringly strong impulse to ignore. But the only way to do it, is to do it.
Make the sacrifice now, suffer, hate every second of it, and eventually, it gets easier. And the success is SO much sweeter!
Good luck; you have my support!