wagons

Here is a secret: if I stop writing here for months at a time, it probably means that I am dead. Either dead, or have fallen off the wagon so spectacularly, and with such an earth-rattling thud, that I wish I were dead, because a life in which eating Twinkies is the only way to cure pain is no life at all.

So I’m not dead. Logic leads you to believe the thing about the earth-rattling and the wishing I were dead, and logic is your friend, my friend. It was – well, I’m not going to say it was stupid to try and go on a diet around Christmas and before big trips in which eating will be a central feature, because it could have worked if I were a different kind of person.

But I am not that person, and it didn’t work, and I sat down and dangled one foot out the back, and then dangled the other foot out, and let my feet sort of drag along the road as the wagon laboriously trudged up mount not fat no more, and then suddenly, the wagon was miles away and then vanished in the distance and there I was, rolling around naked in a puddle of chocolate, and I must have just slipped, woops.

Yeah, woops, my pants don’t fit and I feel like hell! Don’t I feel like a silly asshole!

Logic, our old friend, tells us that I could have gone right back into the diet and the health and the things directly after the holidays with food in were over, but I kept pushing it forward a bit – there was a party coming up, or a lunch, or a dinner, or a thing, and I’ll start right after, and it was a story that is familiar in all kinds of ways, most of them in that place in your stomach where you feel kind of sick and sort of sad, where knots go to die.

My most recent excuse, and the reason I had pasta with mushroom sauce for lunch this afternoon, is that we are going to the Fancy Food Show and how can I be a no-eating Optifast loser when there is free cheese to be had? Free delicious cheese! And, I hear, underpants. Why they’re giving away underpants at a food sho – oh. Wait. Never mind. Ew. I mean, probably not really, but ew anyway. Thanks, brain!

It is funny how the further I push away the starting date, the more I start to slip. At first it was just plain old not doing Optifast, but eating okay. Then it was eating less okay. Then it was eating so un-okay that I was getting sugar rushes at 9:30 in the morning, and that is not bright. And then it was so the most un-okay that I started to get a little horrified at myself.

No one with any respect for themselves should eat the way I’ve been eating.

Excuse me. I need to write that again.

No one, with any respect for themselves, should eat the way I’ve been eating.

It is hilarious to me that I am so astounded by this revelation. It is hilarious that as astounded and touched as I am by this brand-new way of thinking, I know that I am still not going to restart my diet until after the fancy food show. Does cheese have that great a hold on me? It is a mystery.

Well, not really.

The difference may be that while I was half-heartedly thinking I could sort of maybe restart perhaps after the show, could be, with the likelihood of me finding some other reason to push it off one more time at or near about 100 percent, I am pretty sure I will manage to do something bright like actually go through with it this time. Restart, stick to, cut the shit, show some respect like a grownup woman with an irreplaceable body and plenty-replaceable kit kats that do not have to be all eaten at once because they’re not going anywhere, okay?

Okay.

So you know that if I don’t write again for several or nine months, I should be ashamed of myself. Please feel free to be ashamed of me too.

This entry was posted by anne, on Monday, January 23, 2006. You can leave your response.