October 31, 2005
Boo
I'm sort of a Halloween Grinch. I don't like dressing up and I don't like how this "holiday" brings out the worst in people, specifically women. Otherwise capable, intelligent, sophisticated women can't wait to be some pimp's "ho" for a radio station-sponsored party and I just find the whole thing gross. So I avoid all things costume-related and instead do things like carve pumpkins and eat candy corn. This either makes me 89 or a prude, or both, but I prefer it this way. There are no fishnets involved.
Posted by hannah at 11:15 AM | Comments (2)
October 27, 2005
The Monster
After maintaining the same weight since Aug. 18 (which was 10.5 lbs higher than the lowest weight I hit one week in April), and not worrying about it too much, I weighed myself today. (Last night my jeans felt tight, and not in a I-just-washed-them way.) I have gained 3.5 lbs in the two weeks since I last weighed-in. So, I signed back up for weightwatchers.com.
Like most, I binge in private. Both in the literal sense – only in my house when I’m the only one in it – and in another sense as well. When I get the urge to eat and eat and eat it’s coming from some dark place in me that I’m usually unaware of. Where that monster lurks and how it can remain dormant for long periods of time before it reaches out to pull me in with a bear claw, I don’t know.
In public I like to impress everyone with how far I’ve come when I ask for a box for the rest of my meal. As I spoon my leftovers into the white Styrofoam container, I anticipate how good it’s going to feel when I get home and am able to gorge myself on the remaining pasta or chicken fingers inside. ‘I deserve it,’ I tell myself. ‘Look how good I did at dinner!’ As if eating the rest of my meal later is somehow acceptable because I didn’t down it all in one bite.
I’ve read stories about the secret eaters, the women who hide Twinkies and Snickers bars under their beds, and I’ve judged them. Thought to myself, “How gross that they can’t even go a little while without a Twinkie that they have to eat one under the covers.” But if anyone were to discover me, eating the meal that I just boxed up shortly before, I would be mortified. If anyone saw me eat an entire bag of Reese’s mini peanut butter cups, it would be hard to hate myself more, but I would manage.
I often find it amazing that my highest weight was only 212, with the massive, massive, quantities of food I am able to devour. Sometimes my lust for food is insatiable. Gluttony is an ugly word. I’d rather say I can be a voracious eater but that’s a lie. My sin, she is gluttony. My theory was (or still is, all too often), why have one Oatmeal Cream Pie when you can have five? Why stop at one when eating the entire box feels so.much.better. Unfortunately, my brain never figured out that it only felt better while I was actively filling my face and the instant that the food was gone, both physical and mental sickness seized me. But regret is weak in the face of sin. Feeling good for a moment, for whatever reason, is more powerful than feeling sick for a hundred.
When I get in these moods – the kind that make me want to ditch everything and just eat till I’m 1,000 pounds – I sometimes don’t know what to do to get out of them. The weight loss sites and tips for depression say: Go for a walk! Drink tea! “Do something for someone else,” my mom would say. (And while it is true that serving someone else will break your self-centeredness faster than anything, it’s certainly not the easiest way out of a funk.)
I don’t know what it is in me that wants to be self-destructive and I guess if I am trying to hurt myself with Halloween candy or cookies that is better than Johnnie Walker or crack, but it’s all self-destructive behavior nonetheless.
I thought I had this thing licked. For almost a year I counted my POINTS and ran a half-marathon and went to classes at the gym. I felt good in clothes, in a bathing suit, with nothing on but a smile. My skin looked better; my hair was shinier; hell, my teeth may even have been whiter. And then I just gave up and everything feels so hard now. I don’t want to wake up early to run. I don’t want to limit myself to 8 ounces of skim milk. I don’t want to do anything but eat – whatever I want, whenever I want it. It’s the monster. The beast that I will have to slay, again and again and again.
Posted by hannah at 03:00 PM | Comments (12)
October 25, 2005
Glow Glow Friendship
Last Saturday night I took part in a great Atlanta tradition - the Stone Mountain Park Laser Show Spectacular. Sarah, Mary, Mary Lee and I packed up a picnic, grabbed some blankets and sweaters and went East. We got to the park an hour or so before sunset and ate dinner on the lawn in front of the mountain.
Kids around us played football or made limbo bars out of seven or eight glow necklaces. We bought a few necklaces ourselves, but of course turned them into bracelets.
The laser show kicked off at 9 a.m. with (what else?) P!nk's "Get the Party Started." It was an hour of lasers and fireworks to such great American classics as "Proud to be an American" and "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" (natch). It ended with a laser version of Stonewall Jackson and comrades riding off into the sunset before returning to their immortal, enduring engraved spot on the mountain.
It was so redneck and so Georgia and me, my friends and our glow glows loved every second of it.
Posted by hannah at 02:30 PM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2005
Anymore
I just want you to understand that I’m not angry anymore – Ani Difranco, “Angry Anymore”
The counselor I saw a few times over the summer called the other day to recommend a book about adult children of divorce. I looked it up on Amazon and dropped it into my shopping cart, but I didn’t buy it. I don’t feel the need right now to rip open that wound, now that it’s mostly healed.
I know a lot of people can’t understand how an experience like that can shape you – partly because they want to believe their own children of divorce will be unshaped – but shape you it does. I’m pretty proud of the person I am, most days, and I wouldn’t be who I am if I without those formative years and experiences, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t erase it if I could. I’m simply tired of thinking about it; sick of wondering if their divorce, if his leaving, is the reason I had such a difficult time adjusting to the idea of a boyfriend, to the idea of a person by my side for the long haul. It’s foreign to me – though it shouldn’t be. (My maternal grandparents were married for 76 years, if that isn’t the long haul. . . )
We can learn, like the trees, how to bend, how to sway
Children are resilient, they say. And they are. I was. It wasn’t the girl child who needed healing - it was her adult counterpart. It wasn’t until the grown-up version of myself fell in love and learned what it was like for a heart to break that she finally understood the mighty blow my mother suffered. It wasn’t until I understood that promises made between adults are different than the promises made between children that I had to come to terms with the fact that I am the child of parents who broke theirs. It wasn’t until I began to think of myself as a wife, as a mother, that it terrified me to realize that if a father could so easily walk away, how much easier would it be for a husband, and how much easier still for a boyfriend?
But forgiveness is powerful. Letting go is the most difficult simple thing you can do. And I feel so lucky that I was finally able to release that secret hurt, to let it wash down the drain.
People are resilient, they say. And we are.
Posted by hannah at 05:46 PM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2005
Rock It
After a year plus of actively losing, and trying to lose, weight I think I have hit the proverbial wall. I just can’t think about it anymore. I would like to drink of a glass of orange juice and think of it as a just a beverage, not “three Points.” After the few (okay, like 8) pounds I regained in the early summer, I have stayed the same for about three months, which puts me right about where I was going into 2005. I’m okay with this, honest, because it means I’ve maintained a 35-pound loss for almost a year. Which means, to me, that those 35 pounds are gone forever. And that is a glorious, wonderful feeling.
But that ALSO means that, in a lot of ways, I have completely forgotten what it felt like to weigh 200+ pounds and be officially plus-sized. When my size 12s are tight and my bra feels funky and I swear my ass grew overnight, I forget that this is not the body I’ve been inhabiting for 30 years. I was much heavier, not too long ago, and I busted that I-promise-it-grows-overnight butt in order to get to the place where I can feel grumpy because my size MEDIUM top isn’t laying quite right. In some moments, I am the girl I used to hate.
Of course, by society’s standards, I am still Fat. My BMI is 26, which is considered “overweight” and I certainly can’t fit into half the clothes high-end department stores and boutiques carry, but I’m close to the point where I can’t really care all that much anymore.
I ran 10 miles on Saturday. I wore a bikini every day I was in Florida in August. My shoe size is smaller.
I’m not at Goal. It might take me another year to lose the final 15, 20, 25, however-many-I-decide pounds. So what. This is my body – mine, mine, mine. And from here on out, I’m gonna rock it.
Posted by hannah at 05:41 PM | Comments (3)
October 03, 2005
Minnie
I love Disney too much. Too, too much.
Posted by hannah at 04:43 PM | Comments (4)
