I got weighed when I went to the doctor's office on Friday. 170 lbs. Kind of bad, but I was expecting much worse. Time before that it was 159 lbs. So 11 lbs. of fat heaped on my body, actually less if you adjust for the weight of my shoes. This is the kind of fat you recover from, not the 300-lb. body that if you lost 100 lbs you would still weigh in at a husky 200 lbs. I guess I'm blessed with a high metabolism. Even though I ate a bunch as a kid I wasn't fat, and even though I have been on basically a continuous eating binge for almost a year I have gained 90 lbs., not 200. Not that I'm proud, only relieved that it's not more.
I look down and my belly is a half moon, a doughy mass, a middle-aged man's beer gut. It is a flabby spare tire. It is my pain that became flesh, it is the ugly side-effect of my constant self-medication. No, it's not an addiction. Yes, it is. Instead of coming home drunk at 4 am I buy myself a box of cookies and a pint of Ben and Jerry's. I don't cry anymore now that I've found my friend food. You, dear friends, loaves of bread, boxes of cereal, Whitman's samplers.
It is a constant reminder that I'm not attractive, never have been, and now it is almost guaranteed that I never will be. Well, who needs men anyway, since they're all jerks.
Eventually, when I've run out of things in the apartment to eat, I realize that there's not enough food in the world to cure what I have. Not even chocolate. When my stomach is filled to bursting with food, and I've eaten more than my mind and body can possibly bear, I don't feel better about myself. Amount of food is not directly proportional to amount of well-being. It's a curve, and once the optimum point is surpassed, it all goes downhill fast. OK, OK, I'll stop. Yes, Monday morning, OK, I'm not going to have any junk food, I'm better than that, I will just walk right past that vending machine because I'm turning over a whole new leaf. I exercise for an hour a day, the optimum amount as determined by health and fitness experts. It works until I get tired of being a holier-than-thou dieter, until I decide that the feeling of eating a candy bar, no, more precisely, that feeling of freedom that comes with knowing that I can eat as many candy bars as I want, is more thrilling than that feeling of self-importance that comes from starving myself. I'm only human, you know, and that feeling of eating without restraint is downright intoxicating. I've done this time and time again over the past year. You can feel sorry for me, or not, I don't really care. As far as addictions go, it's not too bad. It doesn't really hurt anyone besides myself, I can do it alone, and it's fairly cheap. Side effects are few, maybe a few pounds and high cholesterol, but otherwise it's safe and fast and effective.