Time Flies When You’re Navel-Gazing.

I started this blog on May 13, 2007, as  way of forcing myself to be accountable to my three-month No-Dieting contract.  I suspected that without someone, even the faceless internets, knowing what I was doing (or not doing), it’d be easy for me to quit.  To diet again.  To hop back on the treadmill and stop the fattening as soon as that first pair of pants got too tight.

The only reason (and I really do mean ‘only’) I did not return to dieting is because of the community of body acceptance and fat acceptance I found out here in the ether  And I remember being so shocked that people were even reading what I was writing, let alone taking the time to comment, to buoy me up after a hard day  or to celebrate with me after a good one.  I felt so propped up by this community as I tried to figure out what healthy looked like for me.

Because let me tell you, after that initial high of not counting grapes wore off?  I wanted to diet a lot.  More than I even said.  Like, daily.

I was freaked out by my changing shape, freaked out by not knowing to the ounce what I weighed each day.  Again and again, as people “noticed” my weight gain, I found myself trying to put into words why I was making the choice to leave behind the socially-accepted body I’d worked so hard for.

I still dont have a good answer that doesn’t sound like justifying or, well, loser-talk.  Every answer sounds like I just wanted to eat malted milk balls and go out to dinner a few times a month.  And you know, a lot of it is that I wanted to eat malted milk balls and go out to dinner. 

Because the fact is?  Dieting totally works for me.  I’m a person who can lose weight pretty easily while still eating a reasonable number of calories (far more than, like, Weight Watchers would let me have) and working out a mere hour or two a day.  I can achieve a body weight that is BMI-approved.  I can fit into clothes at any store.  I mean, my body settled at 135 for over 5 frickin’ years, only requiring a bit of mindfulness in regards to my food choices, and would probably still be there now if I hadn’t decided to screw with things back in January ‘07.

True, to get to anything below 130, I have to get obsessive about food and overexercise, but to hang out around 135 and a size 8/10? I just have to eat one tablespoon of peanut butter instead of two on my English muffin.  I just have to run 30 miles a week and lift every other day.  I just don’t eat the second I get peckish, and instead ride it out to the next snack or meal-time.

Is that dieting?  Hell, I don’t even know anymore.  I do know that lately I’ve been really missing that 135, but the choices I’d need to make to get leaner sound restrictive and therefore…hypocritical?  I mean, not eating when hungry is going against the first rule of demand-feeding!  Not eating when hungry is restriction!  Restriction is Dieting!  Bad Megan for even considering!

I don’t know where I’m going with this.  I know it’s physically easier to run when I’m thinner because my body doesn’t bounce about quite so much and I feel…speedier.  And running at 135 simply doesn’t make my feet hurt like it does at 148 pounds.  While this hurts the most to admit, I know how to recognize my body at that size.  Even now, my brain doesn’t always understand the dimensions of this body; I often find myself trying to squeeze through too-small spaces.  I glimpse my reflection in store windows and can’t immediately recognize the chubby girl I see there.  I feel the terrain of my body beneath my hands in the shower, and it seems like the topography of a foreign land, all hills and valleys I don’t know.

I don’t hate it.  I don’t find it unattractive.  I just don’t feel like it belongs to me.

The truth is, I’d prefer to be 10 or so pounds lighter than I am now for practical and aesthetic (yes, that too, I shall not lie and say it’s all about function) reasons.  It’d take minimal effort to make the rather small changes to get me there.  Because right now, my intuitive eating sucks.  I eat past fullness routinely and snack when bored almost daily and my digestive system is jacked upbecause I’m no longer careful about fiber and vegetables and such because it sounds diet-y and I don’t want to be a bad intuitive eater and OHMYGOD JUST MAKE IT STOP.  It makes me long for the relative easiness of my old meal plans.

It sounds like I’m trying to talk myself into dieting, doesn’t it?  Maybe I am.  After all, most everyone around me is doing it.

Maybe I’m just tired of swimming upstream.

Comments disabled because I’m about 85% certain I’m going to regret this post tomorrow and take it down anyway.