Part 28: Now I’ve done it.

I realize that my bad eating habits are largely crimes of opportunity. Clandestine liaisons with the crappiest of cookies, the furtive shoveling of forkfuls of luscious desserts into my mouth thinking that they can’t really be that bad and the pre-emptive defensive looks I give to anyone who might be even thinking of judging me as I dip into a frozen yogurt swirl with a spoon - all of these reasons and more lead me to believe that I have a real problem with connecting the theory with the practice in my quest to get healthier.

I have just come back from a much-needed vacation to the magical land of northwestern Lower Michigan, during which I ate and drank pretty much anything that I wanted whenever I wanted until my body literally was saying, “OK Palmer, now you’ve done it. Ease yourself down onto the couch and try not to move; hopefully this will deter your stomach from exploding.”

I don’t know how to explain it. However, it did trigger me to start mulling over that old adage about needing the right tools to do the job well. I can’t help but think that somewhere along the line I trained myself right out of having those tools. The foundation was there - I mean, I was the kid with the carrot sticks and the melted-through peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole wheat for lunch. My mom was exceedingly healthy with what we ate as kids. I remember always having really healthy lunches compared to the kids who had the plastic baggie of Better Made potato chips and Twinkies for their snack.

When my mom wanted to give me a treat, it was carrot and celery sticks in my baggie. Dinners at home were complete with larger portions of veg and the proteins were always of the leaner variety from what I recall. I mean we had pork chops sometimes and on my birthday we’d have Chicken Divan (my favorite at the time), but other than that excepting the holidays, we really didn’t eat anything regularly that I think was in the unhealthy category.

We also didn’t have dessert after meals unless it was a special occasion, and I remember finding it strange when I heard that my grandma had always made dessert too after every meal and that some people ate like that (imagine my surprise when I started to get old enough to eat dinners at other people’s houses and saw the after-dinner ice creams and pies…). Now I have trouble not eating desserts all day long. Why? Why God? Why Buddha? Why great cosmic forces of nature? Why?

Literally, I have several distinct (though when I bring them up now my mother conveniently does not remember this) memories of having just plain boiled Brussels sprouts for a side dish (which I literally used to gag up, and I was kid who liked my vegetables), and you can’t get much healthier than that. I mean, sure, there were the culinary misadventures born of the 1970s having gone all too recently by the wayside to usher in the era of Madonna and rap shades, leaving us to eat such leftover kitschy gems as “rice pie” and the like, but in general, the food was good and healthy all at the same time. The only junk foods I remember in the house with any frequency were three things:

1. My Dad’s Archway Windmill Cookies (a fave among the rest of us as well)
2. My Dad’s Archway Oatmeal Cookies (chewy and delicious)
3. The giant bag of Better Made chips that my brother and I would unabashedly beg for in the checkout line at Nino Salvaggio’s and occasionally our parents would relent and buy for us (I lived for the burnt brown ones, yum!)

So, where did I start to go wrong? Well, the answer to that question has several parts. Most simply put, it was a combination of my brother and I relentlessly wearing down our mother on the "letting us have junk food" front, the advent of being able to purchase my own lunches in middle school (seriously though, what in the hell were these administrators thinking? I subsisted for three years on blue slushies, French fries with ranch and the occasional Nutty Bar) and the freedom that came with a little more age. Walking up to the store to get candy, and having the ability to buy whatever I wanted (you know, under my probably $2 limit) resulted in a lot of mixed fruit Mambas and grape Bonkers (oh, my Bonkers - dating myself with candy) being eaten, I won’t lie. However, the results did not show as they would now. I was much younger and more resilient and we actually walked everywhere that we went to buy the candy, so we probably worked most of it off anyway.

I was never a skinny girl or a fat girl growing up. I was just a normal-sized girl who would frequently hit herself hard with her elbows by accident when turning around after developing hips. It was and has always been, truth be told, a foreign concept to me to be worried about the way I look to any extreme extent. This, as you might imagine, is a double-edged sword. When I was younger, it got me into arguments with my name-brand and hipness obsessed cousin all the time, including one over Converse shoes (she wanted to make sure that everyone knew that she had the high-top black Converse shoes before they were even cool and I had no idea what she was talking about). It also got me into some revealingly socially awkward conversations with the popular crowd in which it would go something like this:

I walk across the classroom to grab some school supply, and this places me nearer to one of the popular girls in the school, we’ll call her Lillian Masterson, and I expertly open the channels of communication with:

“So, like, how much did your sweatshirt cost?”

“What?”

“Your sweatshirt. It’s B.U.M. Equipment, right? I’ve heard those are really expensive.”

“Not really, this was only like $60.”

“Are you serious?!? $60? I could get three sweatshirts for sixty dollars.”

Now she finally looks up from her work to me, with contempt and a shadow of something very much like pity in her eyes.

I walk back to my desk bewildered at how someone could be fine with spending a whole $60 on one sweatshirt just because it has some writing on it. The whole time I’m thinking, “I don’t even have to have writing on my shirt and it’s less expensive.

The name-brand mania caught me only one time that I can remember, evidenced in a very awkward school photo from the first day of sixth grade with me in a white T-shirt bearing an upside-down triangle logo screaming “GUESS?” on it.

And while my attitudes have not changed toward name-branding (growing up into an adult who wishes books like Naomi Klein’s No Logo were required classroom reading), I do recognize that there is a difference between caring about what I wear and how much it cost and how my body looks and feels. I could be dressed in a burlap sack if I were at a healthy weight and feel just fine thank you very much.

So how do I refill that tool chest with the proper assortment of knowledge and self-controls? Well, one place to start is to look very hard at where I suffer my most profound weaknesses. Being brutally honest with myself about what it actually has come to here in Fatland.

Short list of profound weaknesses as they relate to my health:

1. I admit to a feeling of slight depression seeping in on the edges of my consciousness, a vicious voice telling me that I will never accomplish my goals, that my body has gone too far in the wrong way to be salvaged and that it is too late to have the body I want.

On the side of profound successes as they relate to my health, I stubbornly refuse to believe this voice, skeptics be damned.

2. I still suffer from a very significant perception problem in terms of what I think I look like and what I look like to others. To illustrate this, I will use the case of the candid photo. Recently, I was eating dinner with family. During this meal, cameras were bandied about and pictures were taken. A couple of these were of yours truly. And I think one was of yours truly still chewing … anyway, I was shown the evidence - I mean the photo - and it nearly stopped my heart (which, if my photo was any indication is not something someone in my condition should be bandying about with). Literally I was horrified. There was not even a semblance of a chin, nothing defined, just the pudge, the ungodly pudge. I mean, OK, there was a nub - a nub of chin, but that was it.

3. This one is a problem I have across the board: If I talk about it, it generally doesn’t happen. There are a few exceptions, like I told people on my Facebook page the other day that I was going to make pickled eggs that evening and I went home and I did it. Now, that is anathema to my weight loss goals, I admit, but they last forever in that brine, so a little at a time is just fine…right?

The truth is though that I have issues with not following through immediately, or at all in some cases, on the things that I really want to do after I tell people about them. It’s like once the cat’s out of the bag and the jig is up, I can’t follow through, or if I do, it’s several months later. I mean, how long have I been trying to make the upstairs room an office? Or the basement my craft space? How many things have I wanted to learn and to do like properly pickling vegetables or, I don’t know, weeding and watering my garden, that I say I’m going to do and then I don’t? If there were 12 more hours in my day, and I had the energy to be up for at least eight of those, I could do it. I could do it all. Generally, when I get home from work on a regular day, if I sit down on the couch I’m screwed. You might as well stick the popsicle in my mouth and dress me in my pajamas, because I am done. I’m going to watch The Office or some Rescue Me on the instant Netflix with Andrew and then we are going to go to sleep. We may exert energy to make dinner or a bourbon and ginger ale, but at the end of a long day, holla if you hear me, you just want to sit down. I might do some stitching or crochet, maybe even a little writing, but my creative times usually don’t turn on until I should be in bed. And the in-between times are when my body emphatically wants to be in a recumbent position doing as little as possible.

On the flipside, if I go home and just start to work on things so that I don’t get stuck in the after work stupor, then I feel like I can’t calm down, even when it’s time for me to go to sleep. Feeling like I have to keep going every single second of every single day makes my heart all a flutter. And not in a good way.

So, you’ve guessed it: me telling people about how I’m going to lose all of this weight is somehow providing a psychological blockage that in some ways deters me from actually accomplishing it. (That is not to say that I am blaming me writing this column for my failures up until this point, it is just a trend I have noticed in my life is all.) 

What can I do to remedy this?

Well, one thing is that I can pretend that you, dear reader, do not exist. I can pretend that these are nothing other than words on a page that no one will know but me, myself and I. But then, in the great tradition of paranoid weirdoes everywhere, I would (as I did with every diary I ever wrote in from middle school on out) think that someone somehow would read it and then I’d be thwarted, exposed and mortified.

Another strategy would be to subject myself to Freud or Jung and years of heavy analysis to get to the root of the psychological blockage…eh. Nah.

Or, option the third, I could see what works and then write about it in the past tense once I have actually accomplished some of my goals. I could write about other things in the interim with regard to being curvy and then one day you could click on my article and read: “I have lost 60 pounds.” Or, “My pants are now officially too big.”

I won’t say it’ll happen, because...then maybe it won’t. Right?