getting to know gluttony

I don't want to say my mom is the reason why I'm fat but...it is her fault.

I kid.  Sort of.  But my mom equates food with love and living in the South, food is fried.  We fry everything.  We fry chicken and potatoes and vegetables.  We fry desserts.  We'll fry anything.  We'll fry milk if you give us the chance.  So my mom equates fried food with love, which means I was doomed from the start.

My mom learned that kind of love from her mom, who probably learned from her mom.  I don't think that's an unusual parenting style, especially in the South, but it's a slippery slope.  I don't see much wrong with showing someone you care by feeding them as long as that's not the only way you show love.  You also have to teach your kids to have a healthy relationship with food, just like you'd teach them how to have a healthy relationship with people.

My mom skipped that part.

My parents were not very affectionate, especially my father.  Once again, not unusual, but Mom's love shined through the most when she cooked.  She conveyed her love through cornbread instead of kisses and while she just did what she knew, it had an unintentionally negative impact on me.

When I was younger, Mom asked me what I wanted from the grocery store.  I told her I didn't want anything.

"But the kitchen is practically empty." 

It wasn't. 

"I just hate the idea of you and your sister walking into the kitchen and not having anything to eat."

That sentence struck me.  My parents have been very fortunate to have always been able to provide us with more than we needed as kids.  I don't think her concern came from a place of fearing she might not being able to have access to proper nutrition, but came from a place of fearing she might be a bad mom.  I say that because she never said she worried about us opening the closet and not having clothing or opening our backpacks and not having enough school supplies.  It was all about the food.

And so my mom passed down the notion of food and love to me, whether she meant to or not.

Even as far back as recent months, as much as I've tried to diet, I still look to her as a compass of sorts, following her lead when it comes to eating.  I tried to be good and follow a strict diet but if I see her eat a small plate of food in the middle of the night, I feel like it gives me license to do the same.  Or if she asks if she wants to go get a pizza for us, she knows I'm going to say yes.  Sometimes I'm only as strong as she is.  And when she gives in, I have no trouble caving as well.

I'm not exactly sure how my weight gain started.  I don't think it was anything tragic that led me to the linguine.  At least not at first.  I was an active child.  I often played with my cousin, who was around my age.  But as I grew older, I simply grew out of playing outside.  I was not a rough and tumble child.  I was sensitive from the beginning.  I was artistic.  I liked to draw inside instead of kick up dirt outside.  I simply think the combination of an ever stocked kitchen coupled with inactivity caused my initial weight gain.

I didn't notice my extra bulk until a classmate of mine pointed it out in fourth grade.  We had all come back from summer vacation and the first thing he said to me was, "You got fat over the summer."  I'll never forget it.  It was the moment I became aware of my appearance.  And over the years, I've only become more and more aware of myself to the point of obsession.

That was around the time I went from eating out of pleasure and convenience to eating so I could comfort myself.  I took those notions of love and feel good feelings I inherited from my mom and ran with them.  Any time I felt bad, I used food to recreate those feelings, to cover up any pain I felt.  And this continued into adolescence.

When I hit puberty, everything only got worse.  Not only was my stomach expanding but my face exploded with acne.  I was an awkward mess of excess oil and body parts padded with fat.  And so I ate to forget the freak show in the mirror.  I felt ugly and inadequate and eating only made things worse in the long run but I either didn't realize or didn't care at the time.  As self-aware as I thought I was, all that weight certainly creeped up on me.

But eventually, I got sick of being so big and so I lost around 20 pounds during the summer after 11th grade.  I came back to school and felt and looked decent.  After I graduated, I continued the weight loss journey and ended up losing a little over 60 pounds and went to college with a better attitude and a better body.  But I hadn't defeated the cause of my weight gain.  I was still insecure.  I was still sad inside.  I still felt inadequate.  Somehow I had found the resolve to lose weight despite my overwhelmingly negative attitude about myself.

And then my first year of college destroyed me and once again, I turned to food to cope.   But only for a while.  Eventually, I got a hold of myself and dieted and exercised away all the weight I gained that first year.  But the issues remained, nagged at my mind and wouldn't let me forget the gross, fat guy I still thought I was.  I buried the feelings with school work instead of food.  I hadn't overcome my issues, only ignored them again.

It was only when I graduated from college and moved back home that I let food back in again.  It was like meeting an old, familiar lover.  And we made sweet, sweet love.  60 plus pounds worth of love.  I was more depressed than I had ever been and I did not care about anything except filling my stomach up with everything I could get my hands on.  I was in self-preservation mode.  If I didn't reach for pie, I probably would have reached for pills.

All the weight I lost, all the hard work I put into changing my body and my mind slowly unraveled with each passing day.  I packed the weight back on over the course of two years.  And I ignored it.  I didn't want to face myself and so I simply didn't.

And one day I looked at myself and saw that I was back to where I started.  Overweight and still miserable.  I realized I hadn't changed, hadn't learned, hadn't accomplished anything.  I felt like I had wasted my youth.

For me, food was the only constant in my world.  It wasn't just my comfort.  It was my companion.  It was my best friend.  And although some best friends can be destructive, I didn't care about the long-term damage.  I was looking for the short-term solution.  I couldn't just give up on food.  I felt like I was abandoning someone who had been there with me through thick and thin (both literally and figuratively).  Me giving up food would be like me telling you to suddenly cut your best friend out of your life.  I just couldn't do it.  It was a ridiculous notion.

But one day, just like that one  magical day in high school, I said I was tired of being like this.  I didn't want to see another birthday as big as I was.  I didn't want to ring in another year overweight.  Since January, I've made the decision to lose the weight I had gained not once, but twice.  And I've managed to lose 39 pounds so far.  I still have a long way to go and I've hit several obstacles along the way but I've done it before and I'm confident I can do it again.

But it's still hard.  Even now, despite how far I've come in trying to recognize bad food behavior, when I'm at my lowest, all I want is food.  It's still the only thing that soothes me.  No person, no god, no orgasm, no compliment or accomplishment is as satisfying as food.

And I even tell myself to stop.  I'll grab some chips or reach for the frozen pizza and I'll pause and tell myself it's not going to help.  It's only going to make things worse.  But I eat the chips or the pizza anyway.  I don't care if it's going to make things worse because I'm hurting in that moment and need to make the pain go away.  I say I'll deal with the consequences later.  I never do.  I deal with it by eating more pizza.  By eating  more cake and pie and chips and candy.  I deal by not dealing.

I've realized that it's easy to lose weight.  That's a bold statement with the seemingly insurmountable weight struggle so many people are going through but it's simple science.  More calories burned than consumed.  In fact, you can even pinpoint how much weight you want to lose on a weekly basis.  1 pound equals 3,500 calories.  Eat 500 less calories than you normally would every day and in 7 days you will have saved yourself 3,500 calories, which totals 1 pound.  The trick is finding out how many calories you usually eat and how many calories you need to consume to maintain or lose more.  But that's the basics.

But my point is, physically, losing weight is easy.  It's the mental part that is the hardest.  Diet and exercise can change your body but what is going to change your mind?  It's all a head game, a constant fight with the demons inside you pointing you in the wrong direction.  And until you tackle those demons and exorcise them from your brain, you'll always be in the middle of sensibility vs. gluttony.  I should know.  I've been caught in the crossfire more times than I can count.

My mom's not really to blame.  I was just kidding.  If anything, the combination of fried food love and my stunted social skills and possible mental defects that no one had any control over is what contributed to me being this way.  It's all just circumstances, random events and chances that led me here.  But I'm at a place now where I can take responsibility for my own body and actions.  Looking into the past and finding the cause of my weight issues is good because I can learn and grow from it but I don't play the victim here.  Not in this case.  I don't look back to blame, only to resolve.

I've managed to lose the 39 pounds despite not having dealt with my issues.  And until I do, it's very likely that I'll gain the weight back.  That's why it's imperative I try to fix the inside while simultaneously correcting the outside.  The problem is I just don't know how to do that.  So until I do, I have to stay on top of my eating and working out.  I gained all the weight back because I didn't stay on top of it.  I let myself go.  I allowed my inner insatiable beast to roam free in a playground made of pasta.  I've temporarily caged him but with makeshift bars.  He's still clamoring to get out.

I can only hold him back for so long.