I had promised myself I would only post recipes to this blog. That was weeks ago, and I didn't see this coming. I just watched, of course, Confessions of a Shopaholic, and had an out-of-movie experience right in the middle of it. For no real reason at all, I went, first to my fridge, then to my cupboard, in search of some combination of delights to enjoy emmensely - and first found boredom, and then, for the first time in my life, asked myself, "Do I really need this?"
I've tried all kinds of diets based on all kinds of presumptions. Calorie counting, protein based, low fat, moderate fat, fruits & veggies only based... I've tried exercising more. That's hard to do when you are short, fat, and have back and foot injuries that are long-term, painfull, and make exercising more of a nightmare than a liberation.
It hasn't helped that, back in eighth grade, more than 20 years ago now, a guy who's heart I fell for but who's body left much to be desired because he was far too thin for his own good, daily openly mocked me for being overweight. I know, that's crazy, to fall for him like that - but the falling happened before he mocked me. I guess he had it all figured out - that so long as I cared about him, he could control my every thought, feeling, and decision. I'll break another rule I'd set for myself, for this one article. Bastard. Asshole. And my personal fav, a mockery of his initials, "Judgemental Jerk."
He even had me reporting to him daily on what I'd eaten the day before, specifically, in list-form. He had me giving my lunches to this other girl, a known anorexic who could eat 10 candy bars a day if we pressured her to, but wouldn't gain an ounce. He once mocked me, by singing "You are so beautiful" at me. I was so naive. I thought he was singing to me. I was too young to know that guys like him, who are either so thin or so "muscular" (which he wasn't) and/or who work out a lot, are often even -more- subject to that inner need for acceptance and who'll do anything, who do actually do everything, to gain it. His belief was that thinness meant popularity, and his being pencil thin gave him the confidence he needed to succeed. His mockery destroyed what little confidence I had in myself, and I never really did fully gain it back. Too many other people in my life chose his path.
I write all that, for one, to honestly openly mock him. His character is a fraud. People love him for his "charisma" but it's a sham. I hope for his health's sake that at some point, he, a tall guy, at least reaches 120 lbs. Last time I saw him, he was 95 lbs, and 5' 11". I hope for his own sake that he's still alive - perhaps he can change over time. No clue. Don't know him anymore. Don't want to. Those who treat others like dirt become dirt, and I'm trying to clean my own life up - I don't need his dirt.
But for another, I write it to show that I seriously HAVE been through it all. There's more, but tonight, I feel like picking on him. Because I can, and really, it's good for me. Sometimes pay-back is ok. But I won't waste the rest of your time with stories about him. This is about me. My experience. Not just what's made me fat, or even why, but what it is that I've realized will get me out of this. Nothing I've tried before has ever worked. I now realize why. I've been so heavy on the "diet education" that I've not really summed up all I've learned about food, calories, and so on, and then just acted on it. Different things work for different people. My best friend's husband calls it "slaying the fat dragon." Sadly, some women out there call it "trying to get a man" or worse "trying to be good enough for a man." I now call it, "Is this something I really need?
Because that's what's truly important here. Can chocolate play a role in my life? What about celery? Corn? Soy? Wheat? Candy? The thing is, each of these can have a positive or a negative role in a person's life. Each of them can go either way.
Before I go on, I want to address something that I think that movie started to touch on, but it runs deeper than it had time/attention-span to go into. I love that movie simply because it provokes thought in a truly intelligent and fun way. But the thoughts are what are truly important. The domino affect is amazing.
Especially these days, our country, as a whole, is in need, from the ground up. The poor need food, shelter, clothing, showers, and laundry facilities - not to mention a real bathroom. The upper-lower class has these things, but is about to loose them, in probably the next month or two. The middle class is realizing that public education is all they can really afford, and the upper middle class is just starting to cut their credit cards. The upper class is desperate for the lower classes to need the credit cards in order to make ends meet on the short term. And then you have the millionairs+. They're solely dependent upon advertizing, sales, psych trips and even guilt trips, and above all else, the status quo, for their survival - and most of them are one wrong word away from financial ruin.
We the people are needy. We're hungry. We want something to make our infantile need for more pleasure than pain go way; something to make this nightmare seem like a dream. We're addicted. Not just to money or drugs, but to anything that will just make the pain seem a little more tolerable. And I realized it when I opened my cupboard door, stared down my popcorn and pasta, and said, "No. I'm actually not hungry. I don't even know why I'm standing here. Oh. I'm a foodaholic, that's all. Nice to know that." I closed the cupboard door, came into my living room, and started writing this.
A lot of people would turn to religious moors or even to God for answers, support, a shinging light at the end of a long tunnel. Some would turn to their cultural heritages, their families or friends... I suggest finding helpful support where you can... But don't become dependent, helpless, weak, irresponsible. Don't let them let you do that to yourself. It's alright to be an adult about this. It doesn't have to be dull or unfun. In fact, it's liberating. Making your own choices, rather than having something else controling your next move. Or someone else. Those kids you knew in grade school, or your parents cold words of disapproval, or a lover walking away... Don't LET them get in your way. Be your own person. Take control of your own destiny, from here on out.
I'm not at all going to encourage some list of food dos and don'ts. I want to move as FAR away from that ugly mess as possible. While it's true that doing just that, in the extreme, is necessary in extreme situations (like if you're over 200 lbs, it's alright to cut cake off your list of acceptable foods to eat - clearly, your body just doesn't metabolize cake in a healthy way). But the truth is, generally speaking, all foods have their positives and negatives. All foods have properties. Just like a carpenter has use for both a hammer and a saw, he wouldn't use a saw to drive nails into the wood to make a cabinet, nor a hammer (by itself) to cut down a tree for wood to make that cabinet with. What I want to hone in on is a very simple question. Are the properties of this food, in the quantity desired (mentally/emotionally) what you need today?
It's true that psychological and emotional healing is at the base line of being who and what you want to be. Not just as a person, but as an experience. As your own one-person show. Oooh, see, I'm all pc today! Look at that. Seriously though, what do you want to experience in this life? If you weren't heavy, how would your life be different? And, I'll beg the opposite question of my skinny-as-a-rail-on-purpose friends. How would your lives improve if you allowed yourselves to, in a controlled manner gain a few pounds? Seriously. Some of you are near death and don't even realize it. In fact, some of you are ruining your own metabolisms to the place where you'll actually stop metabolizing food nearly all-together, and while it all turns to fat, your organs will start using up what's left of your muscular tissues. Just remember - your hearts are muscles. So are your stomachs. Etc. You're killing yourselves by trying to be thin and "acceptable." Stop it. Aim for healthy, not for thin. And I encourage my fat brothers and sisters to do the same.
Personally, I wish I could be a figure skater. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a balerina. I also wanted to be able to do at least one pull-up. I've never done even one, in my whole life, though I've tried many times. I wish I could run and keep up with people. Or at least walk and keep up. I wish I could swim with more strength and less near-athsmatic struggle, simply because my body gives out and my lungs follow too soon. I wish I could handle stairs. Most of the reason I can't do these things the way I want is because I'm so heavy, and most of my weight really is fat, not muscle - and that's where the rest of the problems lie. The injuries can't be helped, but the healing would come over time, if it were easier to do all these things.
The easiest thing I can control, right now, is what I take in. While exercise is a wonderful thing, I'm in a pretty bad spot to be focussing primarily on that right now. And so, I must ask myself, "Do I really need this?" Even if that means standing in my kitchen for 20 minutes going through each item individually before determining that I don't need anything at all, and I was just looking to feed my addiction to pleasurable things in general, that's what I have to do.
It's more than just food though. Entertainment. Yes, in such a stressful economy, we all need some way to escape for a short time, blow it all off, relax, and let our troubles trouble themselves alone. Oh, yes, I'm so pc today. But we do need that, or we'll all go mad. And probably kill each other, sadly. Sometimes I think that TV, movies, games, and so on are the only reason we're all still even here. We have this incredible ability to get lost in a good story or mental-hoop-jump for the fun of it, and then come out morally on top of the world, and sometimes, even solve our own problems. Goodness, this post was inspired by a movie! We do need to feed the creative sides of our minds and hearts. But, in the immortal words of Captain Kirk, "Too much of anything, even love, isn't necessarily a good thing." So true. Some of us are addicted either to relationships or people, or sometimes both, and find our entertainment that way. But we give up something important, even vital: our lives lived otherwise, and really, our personal identities. Because we aren't well equipped, often, to handle the hard times by asking ourselves, "Do I really need this?"
Well, do we? Do I? What do I actually need? Today and tomorrow?
I think the hardest thing for me to do right now is assess what my needs actually are. I'll have to compartmentalize them, simply because there are several catagories involved. Food, general health, entertainment, relationships, career-choice, financial habits, personal affects... I'm quickly realizing just how little attention I've paid to what my real needs are vs. what they aren't.
Before you lable me a kill-joy, I want to first start with, of course, step 1. Admitting what I LOVE about my current habits. Obviously, somewhere, I get something out of everything I do. Every experience I choose to engage in, I gain something. True, generally, I lose something as well. That's the sad way of this world. "Equity" is the word we've chosen to use to describe this phenominon. "No pain, no gain" as they say. They. I'd love to sock it to them. But what if I did? What if I turned that phrase on it's ear, and faced the real pain of being willing to give up some immediate pleasure for a more long-term goal that I'd be even more satisfied with in the end? What if the parents of the Girl in the Green Scarf were right all along?
What do I gain from the things I enjoy? It's all immediate. Having ever been truly needy just sets a person up for this. So, I guess that's where I have to start confessing. I was raised in relative poverty by parents who couldn't see that it was alright to settle for "second best" so they could live within their means. We were always in need because they kept "sacrificing" so that I could have "the best education money could afford" (and look to the relatives like good, loving parents, but don't be fooled: behind closed doors, they were insanely abusive to each other and to me). That neediness taught me dependence, and all these circumstances together taught me that I wasn't capable of standing on my own, and that if I tried, I'd fail, because I wasn't worth it.
When you're poor, you're always in need, and you're always looking for the nearest bandaid to heal the most recently broken bone. You just learn to not look before you leap and hope that what you're doing will bring at least some sort of temporary relief. You're addicted to trying to find a cure for the pain your in: you're always looking, always thinking you're finding it, always self-medicating, and always on someone or something else's string. Instead of dealing with the pain and taking good-choice action to remedy it, because the "good choice" often means remaining in pain, for now, for a higher purpose later on. It means taking the risk not only of immediate pain, but also of facing the fear that your risk won't be rewarded in the end with anything you wanted. Not ever really being rewarded for good choices made teaches a person not to bother making the good choices. I think that's what's wrong with our country, as a whole: we don't have "government programs" for rewarding people who make good choices. We rise or fall on what we choose to think of ourselves after we make whatever choices we make - but often, we have deluded self portraits anyway.
What I gain from food, entertainment, shopping, and so on, is the satisfaction of knowing that some need has been filled, at least temporarily. Either a physical need or an emotional one. Or a chemical one. They say that smokers have been shown, in brain studies, to have "patterns" set up in their brains, relating to neurological receptors, that cause them to chemically need nicotine. They say the same thing about sex addicts. I suspect that it's our infantile need for pleasure that causes this, and when we feed that need, instead of being perpetually satiated, eventually, the need becomes even greater. It becomes harder to say "No" and easier to forget what our actual non-pleasure needs are. We can even forget our own hearts, our own very real emotional needs that go beyond what all these short-term need-fillers can provide.
Personally, I gane a near sense of chemical euphoria if any particular addictive need is truly, albeit temporarily, met. It's a strange sensation, really. If some need has gone unmet for a time, and then I engage in whatever activity normally fills that need, I'm actually hypersensitive to that particular sensation. I can feel the chemical change taking place in my brain. The same way a headache can be felt, or the taste of some food or drink can be sensed. In fact, here's a true confession: earlier today, for no real reason, I ate some chocolate, for the first time in what, a couple of weeks now?, and experienced just that. It felt kinda creepy, to be completely honest. I'm not normally that aware of it after eating chocolate.
I guess the main reason I'm writing this, beyond the "Ahah moment" at my cupboard, is to show how I see a distinct parallel between shopaholism and foodaholism. Both are about giving something up to take something in. With shopping, particularly with a credit card, it's exactly as the movie described. It's easy, and seems pain-free, and a pleasurable experience when you get to take in some new, shiny, fun little thing that does express some side of you to the world around you. Food is actually the same way. No matter if it's home-cooked, McDonald's, or some fancy restaurant food - it's something that's fun, easy, and pleasurable, and it even can be used to express what kind of person you are. Frugal? Relaxed? Extravagent? Poor taste, good taste, or no taste? Thoughfull or thoughtless?
And what you give up is truly hidden. What menu is printed with the calarie count of the actual serving amount that will be on your plate? Etc. In a way, I'm writing this to brag on that little epiphony. But moreso, to share it in hopes that somehow, it'll help someone else out there see the writing on the wall before it's too late. I hope to God that we can all learn more fully to take control of ourselves, our lives, and really, the beasts that have worked so hard to destroy us through misdirection, even through, at times, misinformation.
But these are personal battles, that have to be fought from the inside out. From within our four walls first, working outward. We can't fight battles together unless we fight them ourselves first. We can't be the blind leading the blind any longer. We each have to open our eyes, face our own truths, and say "NO" to the demons that harass us night and day, fighting for control over our very souls, and not give in, before we can even hope to be of any help to each other. We can always encourage each other, but we can't, if we have not yet begun to fight, and to learn and grow as people, really do anything else for each other. Many of us are just younglings, as of yet. But we are capable of learning, growth, and change for the better, and that's the most important thing to remember and focus on.
Peace in the chaos.
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