223.4 (Nothing pithy to add to that...)

What to say here?  Not much, really.  After the hospitalization and mondo-depressing near-instant balloon-up from that whole deal (roughly 11 lbs in 24 hours!) this feels like the penultimate victory.  Since I've begun counting calories and logging food with MyFitnessPal, I've lost nearly 20 lbs (which I should do by the end of this week).  Yeah, it was a hard twenty, and has taken me about as long to drop it as the previous forty or so, but that's as it should be.

Diet and exercise are the ONLY WAY TO DO THIS.  PERIOD.  I still wince from time to time when I think of how bloody long it's taken me to understand that.  But I do now.

Food is so different a thing to me now.  It used to be the go-to.  For everything.  Happiness, sadness, ecstasy, depression, relaxation, stress, you name it.  But now, food is sustenance.  Doesn't mean that I don't still enjoy eating, and it doesn't mean that all the old habits have been banished, but it does mean that something in me has changed radically.  And that's good.

I enjoy my food even more now.  I savor it.  I eat it more slowly.  I try and be much more mindful about it, and how I eat it.  I'm still a damn fine cook, and still can whip up a fancy-assed this or that, but I'm even more happy that I like--really like--simple foods.  Gimmie a well-made burrito and I'm happy.  A perfectly made BBQ bacon cheeseburger?  Just leave me alone.  I'm busy.  I buy the highest quality ingredients I can afford.  For example, even though it's about 50% more expensive, I only buy Angus beef, mostly because it's grass fed, and as far as red meat goes, I eat it really very sporadically.  I eat a lot of chicken breasts.  Good thing I really like chicken.  I grill out on my smoker about once a week, and make a week's worth of stuff at a time, then simply reheat it.  Grilled flavor all week with only a day of work.

In the morning, I've started making breakfast burritos with two eggs and two slices of bacon, refried beans and queso.  They're really filling and give me a decent dose of energy as I leave to go work at the Zen temple I'm helping renovate.  Another lesson or two I've learned.  I really need to eat breakfast if I'm going to go do anything substantial, and that includes walking more than about a quarter mile.  That breakfast routine has also helped with the constipation/irregularity issues.  Again, I feel dumb.  It's taken me how long to figure that out?  Regardless, lesson learned.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get the steak fajitas made...

227 (The New Frontier...)

Well, it's official: I've never weighed this little in my adult life.  I have an old driver's license from back in the late 80's that lists me as 260lbs.  Back at the beginning of high-school, when I was playing freshman football, I remember weighing in at 230lbs.  15 years old, 5'9" and 230.  I should have been ashamed then.  Actually, I was, but that's a different matter, I suppose.

Frankly, I don't have much room in my life for shame.  I find it a really counter-productive and useless feeling.  It doesn't really bring out good things.  Admitting when you did something or someone wrong?  Good.  Wanting to make things right?  Good.  Shame?  Meh.

Frankly, shame has actually helped perpetuate my lack of weight control.  It has perpetuated and exacerbated the feelings of helplessness and worthlessness that have kept me turning to food for comfort, the tiny feeling that comes from not being able to do what others apparently have no trouble doing, and that's staying in control.  When it comes to addiction, shame really does more damage than anything else.

More than anything, I just feel kind of dumb.  Not in a hyper-critical way.  More in a "Wow, I get it now.  How did I not see this, not grok this, not understand this all this time?" sort-of way.  Be active, eat properly and in the right amount, and weight just kind-of falls in place.

It's not that this is effortless.  I've actually worked rather hard--diligently, even--to get here.  But I've had to do so to un-do the badness that excess has wrought; to get back in alignment with my body.  It makes me wonder what life would have been like were I to have simply grok'd this back when I was young.  That's just as it goes, though, I suppose.  20/20 hindsight and all that.

Anyway, the work continues.