Determined To Succeed

Day twenty-two.

It’s quiet this morning. I can actually hear myself think. And what am I thinking about? The fact that I had a weekend that was good, really good, and sober. That I was here and present and a participant in my own life instead of being so detached from it I could hardly remember what day it was. The fact I had great workouts and went shopping, and the fact I now have to re-lose some weight because I have been eating a bit too much again because I am, well, stressed.

If you have ever studied addictive behaviors you will find that people almost always replace one addiction with another and an extremely high percentage of them replace their usual drug of choice with food. Being that I am a dual addict and my first drug of choice WAS food it was easy to begin eating a little bit of this and a little bit of that to deal with the stresses of sobriety. Yes, there are stresses in sobriety. Of course there are, and these stresses are constant because you’re always working on your sobriety, like you’re always working on maintaining your weight loss.

I can’t speak for anyone else out there but I stress because I want to make sure I am now on a clean, good and honest path. Because I always want to do the right things and am not sure if some of the things I say are right or not. I struggle with being the newer, better me and having that have the best parts of my personality and not the shitty parts that dominated it before. I struggle because I never want to go back to old Bill again, either in addiction or in weight, and because I struggle I stress eat.

It’s stupid, I know. I do know better. I know that I shouldn’t eat a stupid gyro wrap from my local diner with fries. That was stupid (especially since it wasn’t very good at all and made my stomach all messed up). It’s stupid because I know in my brain eating doesn’t calm stress, it only adds to it eventually. Sure what I eat may taste good at the time but any addict will tell you that the quieting of the brain during addiction comes from the endorphins produced when you give yourself the drug. But when they wear off you feel ashamed and never want to do it again – you just don’t know how to break the cycle.

I am at 235.9 today and I am pissed off at myself. I am pissed off because I can see in my face my cheeks get chubbier again. I feel bloated. I see the numbers creeping up on the scale. Most of all, though, I am pissed because food is so automatic for me I didn’t realize I was eating too much again until yesterday really. That the old patterns were coming back and I need to arrest them, too, especially if I want to maintain the “high” of being sober in other areas of my life.

Look, food is fuel. It isn’t the answer to a problem. It won’t solve money issues. It won’t make pain go away. It won’t solve what’s going on in your life. Used like this it’s only a distraction, a distraction from what’s really going on inside. But like any addiction you need to recognize you are in need of help, in need of control and in need to stop and face what is really causing you to seek out food (or your drug of choice) in the first place. Today I vow to fight that addiction, too. I made that vow yesterday and did O.K. in my eating. Not the best I could have been (I had an extra helping I shouldn’t have) but I was better and I will strive to be better than that today (no matter how delicious Jersey corn is).

And how will I be better? I will be better in my eating because I will tackle the day as I began my day. Listening to the quiet and hearing myself think. And when I can think like that I have the power to change the things I want to change about myself including that stupid number on my electronic scale. And no matter what, I will think about how I no longer want to feed either addiction. How I just want to be me and the best me I can be.