Repairing the Damage

I am fasting today because I ate everything that wasn't nailed down yesterday.  (Actually, there were some nailed-down things I wanted to eat, too.  I thought that maybe I could claim the nails add a little iron to my diet.)

You know what the hell of it is?  The real hell of it is that we rob ourselves of pleasure, even in the midst of binging.  The feeling of guilt, of panic, overwhelms the taste of the food, dulls our senses to it.  We chew so quickly, stuffing the food down, working frantically to make the evidence of our sin disappear.

Sometimes it's just easier to starve.

Saturday = Satis

Fasting today.

A juice fast.   Bolthouse Farms:  Green Goddess and Berry Boost -- O, how I love thee!!!!  There is something about buying a big beautiful bottle of juicy nutritious wholesome goodness and saying to yourself, "OK, self, here it is, you are all set for the day.  All your calories are in here, and it's really very simple.  You can chug this all in one go or pour yourself little servings at intervals, but when it's gone, it's gone, and you're done."  No guesswork, no gnashing of teeth, no decisions, no counting, no regrets.  It's nom nom nom and it's all taken care of, there is nothing to throw you off track or send you skipping merrily down the road to hell, prettily paved though it may be with its lovely bricks of good intentions.  You are good to go.  Green Goddess has 560 cals for the entire bottle (which, I might add, is quite large).  See how pretty that is?  Pretty pretty pretty.  A pretty plan indeed.

I am listening to Mozart chamber music, surrounded by journals and books pens and cats and sunlight.   My kind of day.  I worked harder than I had planned this week, and I am therefore being indolent today.  And days of indolence are excellent for fasting.  :) 

Satis is Latin for "enough."  Today is Saturday.  Satis, Saturday.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Seeing all the way through

There are days when I am certain of things, and days when I am not certain of things.

The not certain days are disconcerting and the most disconcerting part of all is that in the midst of questioning my life, and everything in it, and the seeming futility and pointlessness of the road I have taken, I seem to lose sight of the fact that I will in fact wake up later -- sometimes a day, sometimes a week -- and see that everything is okay and the road I am on is good and not everything is all fucked up.  My circumstances are the same, but my perspective changes.  But I forget that when I am having a dark day.  And the dark days, the days when it seems I have made irrevocably bad choices (actually, it's not even that...it's more that I have failed to make choices, good or bad, and allowed inertia to carry me downstream like an oak leaf)....those days seem to come closer and closer together.

This dichotomy reminds me of something else:  my relationship with food.  When I am in control, I am so very, very, very in control, and I can't imagine ever going back, ever gaining another pound, it's going to be all down from here, and I look with this condescending mixture of pity and irritation on my binges of only days before.  When I am out of control, it is the exact opposite -- the scale is going to continue to go up, it is never going down again, never, because I will never again figure out where the off button is, and  I look with longing and bafflement at the days of control and they seem as foreign to me as if they had not in fact been experienced by me at all, but were something I read in someone else's blog.

Great Lengths

The binge monster.

What great lengths we will go to in order to avoid it.

When we were little, we were worried that monsters hid under the bed.  Now we worry that they are hiding in the refrigerator.

Afraid of monsters?  You bet your sweet ass I am afraid of this one.  It preys on me when I am most vulnerable.  The growling of my stomach is a siren song for it, summoning it from the stygian depths where it slumbers.    I watch helplessly as it lumbers up to attack.  I know it well, this beast with its matted fur -- its corpulent, hirsute arms will squeeze me in a chokehold embrace while it bears its moss-covered fangs, slobbering and smirking all the while.  I'll admit I've done some weird things in my time to avoid the bastard, but tonight is a new one, even for me.

In what has to be one of my more inspired and insane moments to date, I actually consumed 1/4 cup of hot sauce which was so hot that I then had to drink four large glasses of water in rapid succession.

Yeah.  I know.  I'm probably going to pay for this later (I have a pretty strong stomach, but still)....but it will be WORTH IT because the binge monster turned around and slinked off in disgust (I don't know if a corpulent being actually has the ability to slink, but stay with me here), dissuaded from his purpose by a peppery red concoction.   It was like an exorcism but with hot sauce instead of holy water.  At any rate, the bastard has left the premises.  Maybe he will try the house next door....he'd have a lot more luck with the twinkie queen living there.  Maybe I'll just put a sign on my front door for him next time with a picture of a cupcake and a big red arrow pointing to her house.

Na na na na I can't hear you

I cannot think about disaster readiness.  It's been around forever...my mother used to talk about having to do nuclear bomb drills and everybody had to know where the atomic fallout shelter was and stuff like that.  Well, it's never gone out of fashion, it seems.  Lately talk of an apocalypse seems to be all the rage.  People are talking about buying MRE's and learning to wash clothes by hand with a freaking washboard and buying handguns and making sure they have enough candles and blankets to live indefinitely without electricity in the event of a major catastrophe that lasts years.  I read about people stocking up their garages with food and weapons, I know people who are buying gold because the currency is going to collapse, etc. The global uncertainty about political strife and climate change and people are talking about the sky seriously falling.

Ok, two things:

1.  This is freaking me out.  I like the earth just the way it is (well, okay, maybe a few changes...I'd dismantle all the nuclear weapons and stuff).  I'm not sure I would even want to live in a post-apocalyptic world where everything has been burned to a crisp and I'm having to pick people off my property with a double-barrelled shotgun.

2.  I can't think about this at all because well, damn.  Anas are going to be the first to die in a catastrophe that causes food shortage -- we have no fat storage to draw from.  We'll look really good for a few weeks, wearing those jeans we wanted to get into for like, forever, and then poof, we're gone, whilst the more gargantuan members of the species continue to thrive.

So.  Disaster preparedness, kiss my ass.  I don't want to think about you anymore.

Thematic Envelope

So this saving money thing is going nicely with the ana thing.  Less food, less stuff, simplify simplify simplify.  So far this month, the money I have not spent when I otherwise would have (and it's gone into the kitty for the good cause thing) is below.  The estimates are easy; I am such a creature of habit, I always get the same things at the same places when I go out; and if I go somewhere new with friends, I look at the menu and decide what I would have gotten and add it to the total. :)

1.  Dinner after work (10.00)
2.  Breakfast with friend (11.00)
3.  Loaf of artisan bread to c/s (5.00)
4.  Lunch out while working out of town (11.00)
5.  Lunch out while working out of town (8.00)
6.  Italian dinner with Big (48.00)
7.  Dinner with friends (10.00)
8.  New H. L. Mencken box set (and damn I really want this thing...I'm going to exercise some self-restraint for now and either order it at the end of my 60 days or ask for it as a birthday present in the fall) (44.00)
9.  Vegan crayons (9.00)  (see notes for #8)
10. Vegan cookbook (12.00)

This has been a really neat thing.  When I go out with friends, I am able to just sit there while they eat without having to feign sickness or some other excuse.  Suddenly I have this perfectly rational and truthful explanation for why I am not joining them.  This plan is an ana's dream, I tell you.

Weight today:  102.  I'm averaging 1000-1250 cals a day, which on my metabolism-deranged body is not enough to move the numbers.  This week I'll be hitting it a little harder and ramping up the exercise....

Ice

Outside, the snow -- frozen into sheets of ice -- glistens in the sun.  Everything here has stopped -- we are not used to such things in the deep south.  I've used this time to hermit in a rather sloth-like sort of way; I am somewhat reluctant to engage in the ridiculous frenetic exercise that normally fills my days, because Big (my husband) is here with me.  I don't know if it would matter, though.  My thoughts and feelings about food and weight are not on his radar.  He's seen all the evidence and we've even talked about it, in small, truncated, awkward conversations.  It's not something he likes and it's not something he understands, and so, in his world, it doesn't exist.

I thought I had a limitless capacity for denial, but I'm nothing compared to him.

Of course, this is a mixed blessing.  I like being left to my own devices....I like that I can skip meals, engage in bizarre rituals of preparing food and eating, etc.. I like that I can embrace ana -- hell, she practically has her own room, her own key to the house, she could get mail here -- and there is no one to police me.  I am free to do whatever I want.

The only thing is, I often wonder:  what would it take for him to see that I am hurting, that I am scared, that I sometimes feel that I am one step away from losing my tenuous grasp on the few marbles I have?

I've told him, in the most direct way I can.  That didn't work.  We went to counseling together.  That didn't work.

I wonder how small I would have to get before he would see me.

Really see.