Vanity vs. Sanity

It feels like I haven't done a real post in over a week.  Maybe it hasn't been that long, but it feels that way.  It's been a crazy busy week both at work and at home, and I just haven't felt like sitting down and tapping into the vast wasteland that is my brain.  Too distracted, too stressed, and very unfocused.

Then, beginning yesterday afternoon, Mother Nature intervened...a storm of just under Biblical proportions blew through our region.  Torrential rain, thunder, lightening, hail in places (not in my backyard - nimby!), all of which resulted in a lot of damage.  Trees down and on houses, cars and power lines.  Cars pelted and dimpled from hail.  Many occurrences of neighborhoods where one street sustained tons of damage and just a block over not much at all.  As so often happens, the National Weather Service "investigates" and swears on a stack of meteorology textbooks that there were no tornadoes.  Try telling that to my friend who watched 5 different windows in her house literally blow out.   She felt pretty traumatized being inside and watching as this played out over the longest 5 minutes she's experienced in a long time.

Across town in my neighborhood, we mainly got lots of rain, and many branches and trees blown down.  We lost power for 2 hours only, and then life returned to hot and slightly less humid normalcy.  But where Mom Nature intervened in my crazy overdone week was that this morning at 6:15, a surprise phone call informed that my work place was closed for the day due to a power outage.  NO WORK TODAY.  The summer equivalent of a snow day, only even sweeter because it wasn't anticipated or hoped for.  It was dropped in our laps.  And I've done everything possible to be a good steward of my unexpected gift!

I went to my morning meeting, came home after to pack up some bags for bloggers (sounds like the newest global charity effort), mailed them, and went to walk the 5 miles at Ridley Creek State Park.  It was glorious.  I used my ipod, which I haven't done for awhile, and the music added a festive feel to my walk, in keeping with this gift of a free day.  I was having such a good time walking and taking a few pics that I snapped a self sweat-portrait at mile 4.0.  (How crazy is that??) I even decided to give a wave to my bloggy friends.   Normally I'd look at this picture and hate the way I look with no make up, my hair all smooshed back by the visor, and several chins and fat arms evident.  But I decided to put it up anyway.  Vanity avails me nothing, and often keeps me from being fully honest and open about my occasionally imperfect self, which brings me

to my main topic today.

My food and eating have been pretty bad most of this week.  It's been a week of extremes - all good or all bad, and the bad has far outweighed the good.  Which has caused me to far outweigh my goal from last Friday to be at 200.0 this day.  (And I have to note...how surreal and perhaps horrific is it to have a goal of weighing 200?? Good lord..)  Where the vanity kicks in is that I honestly cannot bring myself to reveal my weight today.  Last week I was 204.1.  The week before 204.  This week was more.  A lot more, and it's entirely due to overeating and underexercising.  And not checking in with the scale.  Sure, it's a lot of water weight, but the baseline keeps rising.  A very bad sign.

I'm pretty disgusted with myself, but more than that, a little scared.  I understand completely that I have the capacity to weigh 500 pounds...that is how out of control my eating can get.  Vanity is the main thing that keeps me in check these days...I have a bad couple of days, the scale goes up like a saturn rocket.  I see the number, and pull it together for a couple of days until I'm back to a reasonable place.  But rather than using the reasonable place as a springboard from which to continue down the scale, it works to give me carte blanche to "relax" a little, which leads to relaxing a lot.  I've been in this cycle for weeks now, even though until this week my exercise has been increasing with the improvement of my knees.  Scale roulette.  I've talked about it before.  Many times.  Sorry to repeat myself, but my behavior is repeating itself, and I'm trying to honestly state my truth here. 

I see why many programs advise to weigh only monthly...so the scale does not become a factor in one's eating plan.  But when I know I'm doing bad with eating, it becomes necessary as a stopgap measure.  How crazy is this?  To weigh or not to weigh.  If I'm doing great and stringing together a lot of good days, I tell myself that the the scale's all important verdict will "motivate" me.  It has in the past, many times.  But at times it gives me the wiggle room that ensures I'm just going to yoyo up and down in a ten pound range, never making any real progress.   AAARRRGGGHH.  When I look at this, I see the wisdom of some of the rigid programs' rhetoric and philosophies.

In my daily AA reading this morning, the thought for today is:  

"One of the most encouraging facts of life is that your weakness can become your greatest asset.  Kites and airplanes rise against the wind.  In climbing up a high mountain, we need the stony crags and rough places to aid us in our climb.  So your weakness can become an asset if you will face it, examine it, and trace it to its origin.  Set it in the very center of your mind.  No weakness, such as drinking, ever turned into an asset until it was first fairly faced."  (from Twenty Four Hours A Day, published by Hazelden)

I really have food addiction.  Addiction is a progressive disease ands left untreated or acknowledged, it never gets better.  Only worse.  Guaranteed.  I need to face that I'm not just dealing with a simple lack of willpower.  And I do.  But hell, I've faced this for years.  Faced but maybe not accepted.  Oh, I've accepted my alcoholism, but my food addiction is a harder pill to swallow.  I don't like it and I don't want it.  But it's becoming increasingly clear that I really have it and that it's worse than it used to be. 

If I could carry on and stay at 204, as crazy as it sounds I think I'd do it right now.  But it doesn't work that way...each day the eating gets a little crazier, and that is not conducive to maintaining even a high weight.  Because addiction always wants more.  Whatever hole in my soul is being "filled" with addictive behavior continues to require more, and the backsliding, or in this case scale climbing ensues.  I was upset in early 2010 when I was hovering around 195 after having been as low as 192.  The bottom line has risen.  This has happened before.  It's how I hit my high of 234 a few summers ago.  I don't want it.  Vanity versus sanity.  Vanity keeps me from going to far over the top, but prevents me from fully accepting the seriousness of this in my life.

There's another concept in AA about having to hit bottom in order to finally come to terms with the truth about ourselves.  But the bottom has many levels - the elevator goes all the way down to death, with a lot of hell beforehand.  You can get off at any level.  When I was still playing around with drinking when I first started AA, I remember saying to a nice woman who was trying to help me, "Maybe I haven't hit bottom yet."  She gave me the spiel I wrote at the beginning of this paragraph, and then said, "You hit bottom when you stop digging."  I pray I'm there.