Sunday, May 20

Not My First Rodeo

Okay, so orphaning the daughter is out, which means pizza is...off the table. To coin a phrase. If I'm going to get thin, and live to a healthy hundred and six (there's a target age for ya!), I have to change the way I live.

Crippled athletes lying broken in armchairs around the world are proof that exercise isn't going to fix me -- not permanently. My friends Kirstie Alley and Sarah of York are living proof that Diets-You-Pay-For don't work. I'm planning to outlive both these broads, so I have to find a way to change the way I interact with food.

I've actually had this epiphany before. Four years ago I was a moo-cow, and discovered one day that I couldn't shop my own closet.

I'd been reading about vegetarianism, which lead to reading about veganism, which lead to reading about raw food. The names Frédéric Patenaude and  Victoria Boutenko kept popping up in my research.

I read Boutenko's book Raw Family, and Patenaude's Raw Secrets, and was hooked. I cleaned out my fridge, found a food dehydrator with a thermostat on Craigslist, and loaded up on fruits and veggies. It was on.

All the Married Ladies,
All the Married Ladies
And I was hooked. My family wasn't so keen, but I soldiered through, and within six weeks lost 42 pounds. I felt great (I still didn't get any more exercise than walking up a flight of stairs to use the toilet) and I was looking pretty good. Resigning from the 200 Club was a great day.

In September of that year, while I was hovering in the 190s, I even taught a class at a women's retreat on making smoothies.

But the thinner I got, the more the negatives started coming:

"If you lose too much weight, you'll get sick."

"You should try this...Oh, you can't. You're on that diet."

"What are you going to do about Thanksgiving?" (I hadn't thought about that.) "And Christmas?" (Yikes. Holidays? Everyone will be disappointed in me if I don't eat what they eat!)

In short, I got weak. Not physically weak. Physically, I was feeling better than I ever had.

Nope, I was mental water balloon. Poke me, prod me, stick a pin in me...or offer me Halloween candy.

Yeah. Halloweeen. Oh, just a few piece of corn candy won't hurt. "It's corn. It's practically vegan!" I told myself.

A little bad news here, a little non-support there, a few candies now and then...a little this, a little that, a little bit of "I'm not even sure I have a goal here," and before you could say Merry Christmas, I'd been lead carefully down the road to hell.

I was still incorporating raw food into my daily life, but before the New Year rolled around, I was off the wagon. Still a believer, but no longer a practitioner.

2 comments:

  1. Oh! Oh yes! I completely understand those comments from other people. It is amazing how intimidating losing weight is to the people around you.

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    1. And yet...I think sometimes that I am utterly oblivious to the world around me. I never notice when people gain weight, lose weight, color their hair, get glasses, shave their heads, pierce their ears... The normal bits of everyday life, I simply don't see. (But if your soul turns dark, I see that right away. Tears in your eyes, a goofy smile, the look of loooove... Those things I absolutely notice!) But being intimidated by someone else's weight loss? I just cannot wrap my head around it. I'm odd. I see that.

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