MOONFLOW

or, "fall down, get up. a love story."

This Week of Weightloss (because now my life is divided artificially into Weeks in which I am working towards weighing less on one specific day – don’t think I don’t know how fucking weird that is) I had a day where I found myself, at two in the afternoon, having eaten something along the order of 18 points worth of Reeses miniature peanut butter cups. You know, those mouthfuls of chocolate that disappear so quickly that you have to pop another in your face almost immediately after sucking on the first? Those.

And I looked at the pile of wrappers that had accumulated in the trash and in the other trash can and in my pocket, as I went back and forth between the kitchen and the living room and the kitchen and back to the living room again, and I thought huh. Wonder what’s up with that? And I had another point or two worth of chocolate.

At the end of the day, I realized that I had spent more or less my entire day’s worth of points on peanut butter cups. I thought about how I felt about that. I didn’t feel so good about that. I didn’t feel so good, in fact. Man can not live on Diet Pepsi and peanut butter cups alone, no matter how hard she tries, or wants to. It turns out man needs things like protein, and maybe less sugar. Which is just crazy, if you ask me.

It had been months and months and months – it had been longer ago than I remember – since I had done anything like eat nothing but cake all day, or a box of cookies over the course of an afternoon, or a ham in the bathtub. Even before I was doing the weight watchers thing, it was a matter of a series of bad choices than a single unattractive long-range binge.

But here I was with a nearly empty bag of cups and the kind of feeling of shame that only can creep up on you when you are blasted with the kind of unpleasantly crisp and clear sense of self-awareness that carries around an 8 x 10 glossy that shows you exactly what it is you look like right that second.

I went to bed with half-promises in my head about doing better and having kashi for breakfast and Being the Best Me That I Can Be and when I woke up the next morning, I found out that there was a reason that I had been mindless mainlining chocolate, and that was because I am become a beautiful woman experiencing her natural moonflow time.

I hate my period. But at least I found a reason for the peanut butter cups.

At least that’s what I told myself. The link between chocolate and menstruation is a long-documented one, and sources can be found everywhere from stand up comedy routines to informal testimonies to Cathy cartoons that fill you with a sense of outwardly-directly loathing when you catch yourself reading them, to just general knowledge, you know? That’s what happens! When you are a woman! And because I am a woman, I finished off the bag, and I looked at it, and I gave up.

Because I had already damaged my body and my chances by loading up with so much crap and I had my period and I was crampy and gross and messy and bloated and unhappy and everything sucked and fucking hell, I deserved to eat whatever I wanted because I just do, okay, because life is hard and I wanted more peanut butter cups which are delicious and make things less hard because they just do, okay?

And thus, this hasn’t been such a great week, with the whole “on plan” thing. I didn’t have to do that. I know there are cravings associated with PMS and I am willing to assuage those cravings. I know there are mood things associated, and changes in my body that are less than pleasant, but why did I have to allow that to take me over completely? There was no reason to do that. And the usual release I experience when I relax and stop watching what I eat, when I let myself have anything I have a fancy for – that’s been tempered by a whole lot of upset and uncomfortableness. It’s like I’m trapped inside my body, banging my fists on a locked door and crying nooooooo!, all dramatic-like, and being ignored as terrible things go on without my consent or help.

Ridiculous.

So I’m not going to weigh in this week, because honestly, I know what I did and I know the results of what I did, and I don’t feel the need to confront them, head-on, like. And I’m going to go back to doing what worked and made me feel good, and I’m going to go back to doing my stupid exercise videos and I’m going to get back to where I was before and maybe not bring any more bags of peanut butter cups into the house. That might work okay, too.

This entry was posted by anne, on Tuesday, July 12, 2005. You can leave your response.