devil on your back

"And every demon wants his pound of flesh..."
-Florence and the Machine, Shake it Out

Do we all have demons?  Are we all required to claim a vice at the beginning of our lives?  The world is stained red and we have to suit up with sex or alcohol just to make it through.  We all feel the pull of pain and we choose different methods of self-medicating.

My method's with the marshmallows.  I eat my feelings.  I stuff down my pain with pasta.  I'm fat.  I'm in the fat group.  That's my addiction.  That's my comfort.  That's my demon.  And it's disheartening to know I'm a part of such a problem.

I'm the fat stomach the camera from one of those news segments covering "Fat America" zooms in on as I walk across the street.  I'm the open mouth stuffing fries into my face.  I am the target audience for diet pill advertisements and fat burning exercise infomercials.  I am inundated with Burger King coupons and thin model magazines.  I'm torn between the temptation and the torture.  My brain is assaulted by all these mixed messages of decadence and deltoids.

The holidays hit me pretty hard.  I have to admit, despite my weight loss and my new healthy attitude toward food, I'm still addicted to the (good) bad stuff.  And for the past two months, I have shoveled food in my mouth at any given opportunity.  Naturally, I let myself go during Thanksgiving and Christmas but I also went wild in the days between.  Let's not forget my birthday was also wedged in there so I had to celebrate with a gigantic pizza and cake.  I ate a lot of fast food and couldn't wait until dessert so I could dig into marble cake with whipped icing or Mom's homemade peanut butter balls with almond bark.  I ate with abandon and didn't give a crap.

I always justified my eating habits by saying it was a temporary holiday thing and I would go back to normal after Christmas.  But now that it's the new year, things are hard.  All I want is more cake and that's something I wouldn't have dreamed of five months ago.  Did I somehow change my chemicals by eating healthier and then changed them again by eating garbage?

If so, the transition begins yet again.

I really don't see anything wrong with loosening the reigns during the holidays, only as long as it's done moderately.  If I indulged sensibly and continued with my exercising, it wouldn't have been a problem.  I don't think food should rule my life and I don't think I should be a slave to calorie counting because that only makes me more miserable.  But I feel miserable anyway because I've shifted my eating habits so sharply and stopped exercising almost completely.

And I've gained six pounds.  It's not great but also not as horrible as I was thinking.

I do feel different.  I always thought of myself as one of those people unaffected by things like sugar or caffeine.  I can drink two cups of coffee before bed and fall right to sleep.  I can eat three candy bars and not feel hyper in the slightest.  I can exercise and eat right and not feel better.  Or so I thought.  I think my senses are so dulled that any change, significant or not, isn't always noticed.  But since I've changed my eating so drastically these past couple of months, I actually can feel a change.  I feel like total crap.  When I was doing better, dieting and exercising, I didn't feel fantastic.  But I think I did feel less like crap, if that makes any sense.

The truth is, the cravings never go away.  Even though I've been able to control them, they don't stop calling to me.  And maybe that's why I don't ever feel better.  I'm always fighting the temptations and that in and of itself is exhausting.  Despite the success, I'm still starving.  And I don't mean physically. 

I feel better about myself now that I'm thinner.  I feel better in clothes and I do have more confidence than I did.  Despite that, I'd still rather come home to a box of cake donuts.  My new body doesn't feel as good as biting into a pizza.  Maybe I say that because I still don't have the body I want.  Maybe when I'm flaunting six pack abs, I'll change my tune.  But at the end of the day, I just want to eat.  Nothing feels as good as eating does.  Nothing has been able to take away my sadness like food.  But somehow, I'm able to override that desire to eat because I know, ultimately, it's not taking away my sadness but compounding it.  Naturally, it's easy to forget all of that when you've had a bad day and you know there's a pie in the fridge but that's when you have to be strong and realize you are not depriving yourself but helping yourself to be better.  You are worth more than a pie.  The pie will go away in moments but the pounds will last.

Losing weight isn't hard if you don't have an unhealthy attachment to food.  Lay off the chips and walk more.  It's simple.  It becomes infinitely more complicated when you have to deny yourself the one thing that makes you happy or the one thing that can blot out all the blackness.  No one wants to hurt unnecessarily.  Why be in pain when you can just slide some food in your mouth and have all the trouble melt away?

Even though it's infinitely more complicated, it is not impossible.  I am proof of that.  I can't say I'll never regain the weight I've lost because I might.  But I know I will lose it again.  I've done it several times before.  It seems keeping the weight off is often the hardest part.  It's not a journey that has a destination.  There is no goal.  There is no last day of dieting or final day of exercising.  It's ongoing.  It's forever.  It will never end.  It's a lifelong struggle.  But that shouldn't be a daunting fact.  It doesn't mean you'll never have ice cream again.  It just means you can't have it right now.

But it will get easier.  It's hard for the first couple of weeks.  And magically, you've reset your head and it's not as hard anymore.  And you want that candy bar and at first you could rip someone's head off for just a bite but eventually you look at it and you think it would be nice to eat it but it's no longer worth taking someone's life.  And one day, you realize you can have that candy bar and be done with it and you're good and you don't want another one for a while.  You're satisfied.  And you won't feel guilty.  And you'll carry on.  You'll learn the value of moderation.  You'll learn to respect yourself more and you'll feel more confident knowing you won't give into temptation so easily.   

We all have a devil on our backs and it wants to drive us into the dirt.  I've found myself face down more times than I care to admit.  But I get up.  I wipe off my face.  I keep going.  I stumble and stutter but I also strive and sprint toward the satisfaction I know I, and all of us, deserve. 

The path used to be muddled but now I can see it laid out before me, complete with hills and valleys and bear traps and I can't see any way around them but I can see a way through them.  You flinch, feel the sharp teeth dig in, and press on through the pain.