Current Weight: 220.1 lb
It’s been four months since my last post and, for better or worse, I’m still within the 220 lb range. I warn you though, numbers can be deceiving. Oh, so deceiving. Between the months of January and April, I have managed to actually get my weight down to a number as low 214.7 lb. That only lasted a day, but I digress. For the past few weeks I have hovered over the 215-217 mark. And then I made the mistake of going to a seafood buffet. That’s when I learned an important lesson: When you put the word “buffet” in front of any food type, it negates the beneficial qualities of said food.
For whoever may be reading this, you may be wondering why I haven’t been posting on a regular basis. Well for the first week of the New Year I managed to gain weight, and I was too bummed to post it up for the world to see. Then when I started to lose weight, I was just too lazy to post anything. Lately it’s been getting harder and harder to lose more weight. I started the year at 220 lb and am currently at 220 lb, not very productive.
I have taken two programs of that diet that I mentioned a few months ago, and managed to lose almost 20 pounds while under their watchful eyes and it has thankfully stayed off. But those programs are expensive, and I have yet to get a job. Here I am, all by my lonesome, trying to lose 35 more pounds. Obviously, I’m no longer putting myself under the time limit of 10 weeks to lose that weight. However, suffice it to say that I don’t want to wait until I retire to reach my weight goal.
To help police my actions, I have gotten myself a journal. Well, let’s put it this way. I got a notepad about a year ago and never really used it. Earlier this week, when I found out that my weight had returned to the 220 mark, I decided to use that notebook to chronicle any huge changes in my eating activity. When I opened to the first page I saw that I had already started to use the notebook. My first entry was on December 2, 2009. The interesting thing that I found in it was the last statement that I made:
Thought for the day: Losing weight is a mental illness, not a physical one. Fat is incidental to chemical dependency.
It was my way of saying that I knew exactly why I’m fat. It’s because I eat! I know, that doesn’t seem all that innovative but I’m telling myself that I know exactly how to lose weight. I’ve done it. I know how to maintain weight. I’ve been doing it. But why do I eat?
To tell you the truth, I’ve never really given it much thought. I just know that I’ve always been that guy that cleans his plate despite what my stomach might be saying. Fortunately for me, summer is approaching which means there is an abundance of weight loss articles telling people to get in swimsuit shape. Screw them; I just want to be happy in my own skin.
For the past month or so I have been experimenting with my behavior as far as eating is concerned. I’ve been determined to find out why I don’t lose weight, or gain it back when I do manage to lose it. I can’t say that I’ve entirely figured it out, but things are starting to make a little more sense.
I started writing in my new weight control journal this week and tried something different. Instead of writing out sentences and counting out calories, I’ve decided to be as brutal as I could to myself. Sketched out pictures of myself and took pictures of my body (get your mind out of the gutter) and I looked at myself through discriminatory eyes. I took apart everything about my body that I hated and I wrote out exactly why I hated what I saw. It was then that I realized that I didn’t really give a crap about my health. I was obsessed with my own body and how ugly I thought it was.
I’ve got to admit that I was rather disgusted with myself when I came to the realization that I could be so shallow. Don’t get me wrong, I have no obsession with other people’s bodies. When it comes to a girl I’m attracted to, physical appearance has little to do with it. In fact, I made that observation in my journal the other day. I’ve convinced myself that the reason I’m alone is solely because of my weight. I have no idea if that’s true or not, but I suspect that it isn’t.
What’s interesting here is that I forced myself to look at my body and be as unforgiving in any of the observations that I made. All I see is the gut. And that’s it. I feel awful. All these years, that I’ve expressed the horrible way mass media portrays the idea of an “ideal” body type, it turns out that I’ve succumbed to it.
Looking back at all the times that I overeat to the point that it feels like I’m going to have a moment similar to the chest popping scene in Aliens, I realize how I would eat to give me something to do. Keeping the mind preoccupied meant it didn’t have to deal with whatever was right in front of me. Whenever I felt lonely, I stuffed myself. Whenever I was stressed, I stuffed myself. Whenever I was depressed, I stuffed myself.
Everyone has an emotional crutch, and I happen to have two. One healthy, the other… not so much. One of my crutches is a release of tension and a way to get the jumble of a Rubik’s cube that are my thoughts into some semblance of order so that I can think more clearly. That release is writing. I’ve been doing it since about the third grade. In fact, I’ve got another blog that I dedicate to my writing endeavors (QuixoticStories.blogspot.com). I’m a self promoting whore, I know.
My second is retreating into my head by way of eating. I’ll be honest; I get anxious in big crowds where I have to act myself. To be honest, I really don’t think the real me is all that interesting. I don’t do what most people my age do for fun. It’s incredibly hard to relate to somebody and when I find someone that I think I can connect to, I’m scared to death to do anything that would totally screw that up and put me in a different light. But I’ll leave my crippling fear of rejection and failure for another blog.
Of all the times that I cram food into my chubby little cheeks, I can’t ever recall feeling guilty. And yet when I get out of the shower, I go out of my way to avoid looking at my body. I know that when people see me, they don’t see the fat or what I call my “melted nipples” (Alright, I know that sound gross but I think I’ve made it clear that I’ve had some mental issues). But my point is that there are some serious mental issues that I think I have to resolve, or at least bring to light, if I am to consider myself successful as far as getting back to 180.
I started this blog to honestly keep me on track as far as being a healthy person and I’ve come to the realization that mental health is just every bit as important as physical health. I apologize if this isn’t as light hearted as my usual entries but being unemployed for a year has really gotten to me. And that hasn’t helped the diet situation.
To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure why I still keep up with this blog. Only about two or three people actually read it, and I’m pretty sure I had the selfish wish of wanting to become famous when I started (I think my subconscious wants me to be a douche-bag). I suppose it’s the illusion that there are strangers actually paying attention to my doings that keeps me coming back every so often to post.
To wrap things up, I know what I want. I want to be happy. I want to be satisfied with the way things are. A part of me is ecstatic that I’m so obsessed with my body. The only upside to being superficial is that it’s a great motivational tool for losing weight. I hate the way I look and I want to change that. I still intend on getting back to 185 pounds. I’ve lost 20 pounds since I’ve started posting and I have 35 more to go. I’ve been thin before and I know I can get back there again, but with two differences. (1) When I get rid of all that fat, I’m keeping that fat away for good. (2) The second time around, I’m going to be happy.
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