Determined To Succeed

Day fifty-two.

Ugh. I have a cold and I feel like crap today. It started with the always-suspicious scratchy, drippy throat yesterday. As soon as I felt it start I knew I was in for it, but I fought the brave fight. Even at my meeting last night I nursed a 32-ounce (!) hot tea from McDonald’s (one of the only things I will but from them AND it was on the way) complete with honey. I tried but, alas, the common cold won and today my throat is swollen and hurts like a mutha’, I have a slight fever and I am run down. As I said before…ugh!

I know I need to conserve strength today and rest. The problem inherent with that (and feeling like crap) is that you don’t feel like working out AND you need your strength to fight the bug so you have to eat. I don’t know about you but even looking at food sometimes adds inches to my thighs and belly, let alone actually having it. Double ugh! But I know that’s what I need and I will do it so I can get better faster (damned air-conditioning inside/humid-hot weather outside).

Despite feeling crappy, last night’s meeting was awesome. So many of us were sharing stories about ourselves and how we turned to food as comfort to help deal with shame, pain and events in our lives we all wanted to push down and forget. It was amazing learning that much more about the guys in the group, and oh how it helps knowing I’m not the only one who used/uses food to do that. Wow. So cool (yet so sad), indeed.

Food is always a temptation, isn’t it? No matter where you live you can always find some semblance of your “comfort foods” from childhood, your favorite ice-cream at the store, egg rolls, sandwich, loaded french fries, etc. Man, I wish I could go back in time and invest in then up-and-coming companies like Coke, Hostess and the like. This way, as I got to 400 pounds I’d me helping to make myself rich in the process (just a little fat humor there). I also wish I knew why food almost always is used to dull pain. I know the scientific reasons – that it triggers the release of dopamine (sp) and seratonin (sp) in the brain (pleasure chemicals) that make us feel euphoric. But I am talking about the actual WHY we search for pleasure in food.

Maybe it is because it is a constant. Maybe we always turn to food because it is always there, no matter where we live in the world. While so many of us feel fears of abandonment in life we know food won’t do that. It IS always there, readily available and standing by. (Shaking head) I see now how it works. See, this is how my brain functions when it’s got a fever and I’m feeling crappy. I just start thinking about the great mysteries of life and how to solve them. That’s why when we (O.K., I) move to a new area we both seek out and are bombarded with ads for easy foods like pizza. It is recognizable and, despite its many variations, pizza, after all, is pizza.

My friends, you’re gonna have to forgive me today for the blog being short and incoherent but, after a hard day of waking up with a cold, I need to go back to resting. But I will be going back to thinking about the why’s I ate/eat the way I did/do. Sure we need food but we don’t NEED food as much as we think we do. Sometimes just knowing we are not alone and can talk to people is more than enough to satisfy our real craving – for human company and understanding.

Day three.

I don’t quite know how to describe what fear feels like but I will do my best. I am standing in front of a mirror and can finally see the person I have become and, for the first time in my life, not knowing who I am but knowing I have to find myself again on a path I’ve never traveled before.

There are many other ways to describe fear but that’s the one that is most prominent right now. I said to you all the other day it really feels silly to talk about weight loss, too, in all of this but they can and do go hand in hand. Like when I am really fighting the urge to grab an ice-cream, or a Coke. I have always been an emotional eater and since I am truly admitting to myself how messed up I can be AND not running away from it I also have to admit that. I have been fighting the urges to eat and drink those bad things.

I can tell you all there is an old Bill and a Bill who wants to be a new Bill. I have lived so long with the old Bill that it’s immensely foreign to be looking at a stripped down and bare Bill, one that is trying to be a new Bill for the first time in his life and not wanting to fuck it up. That is fear. And it’s also a fear to do something I have never done before – tell the complete and honest truth. That contains fear. It is an unknown land and I am walking in it for the very first time.

When you’re afraid your heart beats harder and faster, your breaths get shallow, your adrenaline pumps and you become hyper-aware of sensory things – things you hear, your mouth going dry, etc. That is how I am living these days, but I do so very much want to be that new Bill. That also means suppressing the urge to run away and to hide and, yes, to hide with food. I just have to keep reminding myself that the empty pit in my stomach these days comes from fear and having to finally face life and reality not from actual hunger.

I mentioned yesterday how stupid I felt even bringing movie lines into my blogs these past couple of days but there is a movie quote that is very appropriate. It’s from the 1982 Ridley Scott movie “Blade Runner.” In that film Harrison Ford cowers in a corner on a rooftop after having been pulled from its ledge by Rutger Hauer’s character, an android who simply wants to not die (androids live only four years in their world). Ford doesn’t understand why a person, who just tried to kill him, would save him from falling to certain death and is given a lesson in living in fear.

“Quite a thing to live in fear. Isn’t it?” Hauer says to Ford before dying. Ford then gives voice-over about how he thinks, in the last moments of his life, Hauer realized the gifts of life and how that made him value life in the end.

Fear can make you do that, too.

I have told lies upon lies upon more lies in my life and have always lived in fear. Fear of being found out. Fear of people laughing at me, ridiculing me, realizing I was not who I said I was and, most of all, fear of not being liked by everyone. Believe me when I say there are so many people out there in this world, me included, who claimed and claim they don’t care what people think, but they delude others and themselves with that lie. But I admit it now. I did care what people thought, from as far back as when I was a kid, and that is when my path of lying started, leading me to this very point in time. This crossroad. This empty path in front of me that is scary because it contains the one thing I have never done in my life – tell the truth.

Don’t ever be afraid to admit you want to be liked. We all do. There is no shame in that. Fuck, that’s a human thing to feel. We all want to be the perfect one, the one who people look at and have them say “that person has it all together.” But if you don’t admit that to anyone or only tell it half-way like I used to then you will one day suffer the same catastrophic failures I’ve suffered.

Whether or not your situations deal with food or not I can now tell you from recent experiences that lying gets you nowhere and leaves you bankrupt and empty. It makes you live in fear, constant and inescapable fear. I am trying very hard to be that new Bill, but that comes with a new fear, too, and I am scared. I don’t ever want to be old Bill again (and yes, that does include the 400 pounds that also came with that baggage). I want to be new Bill, but it will take time and work and moving in a direction called truth. And I will get there. That road may be scary and dark and uncharted but it is my new path and truth, honest-to-goodness truth, is the light that will lead the way.

Download This Episode

Hey there, my friends. I hope you guys had a great weekend. What did I do? I shoveled snow and watched this little, itty-bitty football game that was on yesterday (actually mostly for the commercials).

I was going to blog today about the commercials I liked best which, in my opinion, were the Doritos commercials. I thought they were clever, funny and memorable. Even in the commercial where the guys in the gym caught Doritos in the neck I thought they did a good job, through use of color, of making me almost taste the damn things. Yes, they worked. They made me want Doritos. Made me munch on the little orange cheddary bastards. But did I have any? No (thank God). I would have been munching on them all night.

Instead I wanted to blog about a disturbing letter I received from someone. This person is going to remain anonymous but their letter struck such chords in me I thought I’d share a couple of key (yet still all-encompassing) feelings I thought would be helpful as we all get back to our weight loss routines after Super Bowl Sunday.

This person fears becoming fat, even though they are not that overweight comparatively speaking to many of us. Why? Because of how one of their parents used to put down the other for being overweight. And to add salt to this already open wound, this person knows their spouse hates overweight people (and so do that spouse’s friends) adding to this fear of being or becoming fat and, therefore, makes this person feel self-conscious, shunned, put down and ashamed for any weight they gain.

I told this person the following things:

The spouse sounds like a selfish, judgmental taker, and that is wrong.  Just because negative opinions about overweight people are prevalent in today’s world (from the fashion world, magazines, TV, you name it) doesn’t mean anyone should put up with it. I’m just gonna throw that out there.

Also, people who judge people because they are fat suck, make us sad and make us want to eat even more. But even so, you have to try to learn, as I did, not to care what others think. This is key. You have to love yourself to take care of yourself first and foremost and do for you what you have never done before. Say NO, ENOUGH. and NO MORE. I WILL NOT LISTEN TO YOUR WORDS ANYMORE.

I am so not a psychologist/psychiatrist so what I am saying is just me offering my opinion and I always beg people to consider talking to a professional to help them with their emotional circumstances.

Again this all comes down to you being happy, especially in weight loss. I lost weight because I wanted to do this for ME and you will lose those pounds, too, but if and only if  you do it for YOURSELF and not for your friends, spouse or ghosts of your parents’ harsh words.

I hope my words help. At least help you to know you have people out there who know what being put down feels like, and who are wiling to listen, share and offer what you NEED to hear. The world is filled with mean, hateful and spiteful people with preconceived notions of why people are heavy. Screw them! They are the ones who are deficient and insecure.

For we are beautiful even if we are heavy and like Doritos from time to time.