Answers, for My Sake More than Yours, I Think...

I.

Are you angry because the author [David Kessler] glosses over the reasons people overeat, or because he doesn't offer much in the way of solutions?

Good reading, Susan. I was really furious and perhaps wasn't clear about this.

He all but calls sugar and fat addictive substances but stops at approaching them the way most clinicians would approach alcoholism. He stops short despite having spoken of people who feel out of control or obsessed by food, and writing widely about how sugar and fat stimulate the reward/pleasure/addiction/fear/pain regulator in the brain.

The reasons people overeat are as many as there are minutes in overeaters' lives. Tonight I would go out for Little Debbies because I was lethargic and tired today and didn't do any writing. (This post is supposed to save my ass.) Tomorrow morning I might go out for pancakes because I'm really tired of walking dogs and, hey, I need a little motivation.

In a way, I don't think the reasons people overeat matter. Everybody has to sort that out for themselves. But finding the reasons is not a eureka! moment. If I zone out on donuts in a land where no one can hurt me, all the reasons in the world aren't going to overcome that reward groove I've got going in my brain.

What I'm angry about is that he successfully describes sugar, fat and salt as an addiction but deliberately doesn't use the word or the techniques of the addiction model. He could have at least investigated it.

There was a lot of fascinating material in the book but I don't think anyone is going to lose weight because they read it. I do not feel that way about other books. People lose weight because of reading Atkins or Geneen Roth because they either give an inspiration of how to do it or why to do it.

II.
The God Thing

I'm a doubter by nature, although when I walk into a Catholic Church I immediately believe the wildest fairy tales. When I did my Third Step this time, I decided I would create a god who is at my beck and call. I won't ask him for anything. I demand it.

There is a dusk bird singing loudly in the gardens beyond my window. Daisy has loved me through the emotionally toughest years of my life. I will have very cold stewed apples for dinner. That's my personal, capsule-sized proof that God exists.

I want to yack every time I hear someone say "Goddess, grant me the serenity..." or refers to HP for "higher power". But there are some tangible things that are bigger than me, one of them being my desire to eat sugar, fat and salt. Electricity, my favorite thing (where would ice cream be without it?) is bigger than me. The Rooms and their success stories and support are bigger than me. Inspiration is bigger than me. My sponsor's 20 years of abstinence and affection for me is bigger than me.

So personally I don't have a problem thinking that there are powers beyond my own. And I don't have a problem squooshing them together and inventing a god that suits me.

Some Rooms are really, really Jesus-obsessed. I've been warned that the South is not a good place to go into recovery if you kind of think Jesus was prissy. Some are so new age that my blood sugar rises at the thought of them. Some have a good balance where the god thing isn't too heavy.

But I definitely get it that the God Thing can get in the way. I happen to take it for real, but not very seriously and not very zealously.

If it's what's stopping you from dropping into the Rooms, you can write sarcastic emails to me.

III.
Eaties and Foodies

Everybody seems to see themself in that post. There are moments that I'm a foodie, but when I am, I often want more.

Right now I'm ruminating on how abstinence makes me a foodie more often than I am when I'm not abstinent. I love what I'm eating when I'm abstinent, partly because I'm actually hungry and food is gratifying under that condition.

Goodnight, all. Dream of good things tonight!

If It Looks Like a Duck...

I. Am. So. Angry.

I've stopped in the middle of revising the eleventh chapter (don't get excited: I didn't dig into heavy revising until the fourth or fifth chapter & have lots of places marked to return to) to read a hot new book, David A. Kessler's The End of Overeating. The first half of the book focuses on the power of sugar-fat-salt in our diets and on the food industry which exploits those qualities. Good stuff, albeit in need of editing -- you'll have a lot of "Didn't I just read that?" moments along the way.

The last half explores how to get off the sugar-fat-salt "hypereating" that the U.S. has evolved into in the last 30 years.

Within the first 30 pages, Kessler presents a couple of colleagues with unwrapped fast food candy and bakery products. In discussing the affects of their sight and smell, one of his friends says "'...I cannot control my desire to eat them. I'm obsessing. I feel totally out of control.'" (p. 25) Throughout the book, people liken eating calorie dense food to the experience of a compulsive gambler who walks into a casino. He ends the book by talking about the aversion therapies used by those who treat smokers and compulsive shoplifters, and five pages from the end of the book he writes, "We can lead long and healthy lives without consuming alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs of abuse, so treatment for those addictions can be built around the principle of abstinence. But since we can't survive without eating, we need other strategies for changing our perception of foods..."

Did I mention I was angry? Actually, I'm shaking with anger.

He states early on that he's not talking about "compulsive overeaters" or "bingers" or bulimics, and yet he blandly passes by his colleague's sense of powerlessness and his friend's gambling simile. I really, really need to ask Dr. Kessler: If it quacks like a duck (or fizzes like a rootbeer float), isn't it possible that it's..."an acquatic bird of the family anatidae"???

I talk about 12 step programs for eating disorders all the time in this blog so if you're really adverse to the idea of them, first remind yourself that I have never recommended that anyone go to one. You are the only one who can decide to do that and the day you decide is going to be one of the ugliest days of your life. There aren't many people I'd wish that on.

Next, I advise you to stop reading this now.

Having established, in mind-numbingly over-technical, new-fangled language that made me go back to reread in the same way that a slice of pizza drives me to more pizza even when I hate myself for it (i.e., "incentive salience" = desire-driven, or "hyperpalatable," which means extra tasty and confounds my and Blogger's spell check) that industrial food stimulates serotonin production (also not in Blogger's spell check) and blocks dopamine receptors, he suggests a largely self-monitored cognitive cure.

To whit, did you know that a pint of Ben & Jerry's is a dangerous thing to bring home at night? Maybe you shouldn't eat ice cream. Maybe a diet of moderate portions high in protein, whole grains and vegetative stuff is what you should be eating instead of Big Macs...

By dressing up all the stuff that many of us have been writing about, talking about, doing stepwork over and reading about in swan's down, he's still turned out a duck.

Although fascinating in many parts, especially so to those who haven't dug around to find the heretofore obscurer studies on sugar addiction. At least he's brought half of it out into the clear light of National Public Radio.

The other half is that if neural pathways change over time because of the disproportion of mood-changing neurotransmitters affected by what I eat makes it hard for my brain's pleasure centers to get going from anything except sugars and fats...then I've got an addiction that works exactly like cocaine or heroine or speedballing or booze. And like them, it's degenerating because I need increasingly more to keep my buzz on. (Or off, in the case of serotonin.) In the end, after having taken my life, it will simply extinguish my life.

And I don't see him suggesting self-rehab for that.

Nota Bene: I told my sponsor about this post and she, too, was outraged. She called Kessler a quack...

OK, maybe it's just funny in the moment after a long day of trying to fit serotonin, dopamine & endorphins into as little space as possible...

The Martha Beck book looks interesting & yes, I, too, am glad whenever an expose of the food industry comes out. He does some fascinating work with industry consultants.

One of those Days...

It started yesterday. I wanted to give my morning dogs a work-out & I ended up being out for three hours with them. I barely had time to have snack (cottage cheese & a pear) before I was off to take care of Italian greyhounds. I crashed when I got there. I was suddenly so, so tired...& I had more dogs to walk.

It's my first week back with the full compliment. My foot barely twinged.

I decided to catch up on Facebook a little & took one of those "Everything About Me Quiz" quizzes. I'm fond of Facebook. I've found friends from grade school there & people I was scared of in high school who've turned out to be very cool. I know what my nieces, nephews & cousins are up to. I've made some friends.

But the quiz got me. I answered one of the first statements, "I am________." "Brilliant."

I believed it, too. But a half hour later I was kicking myself for not remembering the names of all the characters in the Palliser novels & nothing about biochemistry. I revised, in my head, that I'm brilliant at what I'm brilliant at. Sometimes I feel brilliant.

I should not have put that sentence out there where everyone can see it. I posted a bunch of new pictures kind of in the hopes of burying it. The statement haunts me.

When I get tired, I get cranky, & when I get cranky I either turn it on myself or on the world. I wasn't sure, as I dragged Daisy back from Henry's house last night, that the world would escape my anger. All I knew by then was that I hadn't gotten hungry for lunch until it was too late & that I was now starving. I also knew I didn't want to stand there & prepare anything. I ordered out. The meatloaf had gravy on it. I scraped it off as best I could & Daisy loved it. I took her for a quick pee-walk & went to bed with Conversations with Other Women in the DVD player.

I set myself up well for today -- tired, stressed, feeling a fake, no writing done, too big a dinner & a really depressing movie that made me think about things I'd rather not think about.

So I pour some milk into my coffee mug at ten minutes before seven this morning but it chugs out. F---. Gone sour. Coffee without milk. Uck.

I step on the scale. Up 1.8 pounds. My rice takes twice as long to cook than it should, thereby closing my option of getting to the store before breakfast & dogs. Then I cook the rice just long enough that I can scrape all the rice out but have to soak the pan. I now have a sink full of dishes to come home to.

The dogs were my reprieve, along with washing my hair & finally chopping a head of cabbage for my salad mix. I stood up from eating lunch & promptly tripped over my feet, nearly crushing the dog AND my knee & spraining the two smallest toes on my right foot.

Which is nearly mended from a fracture.

I'm starting to turn it on myself.

I'm afraid, I tell you, to go out in the world now. I have to walk Henry & go get essential groceries. Many things could happen. I could say any number of stupid things to myself. It's one of those days.

What Am I???

This is the most wrinkled weekend in New York City. We all knew we were in for the usual April blast of unseasonably warm weather but we couldn't quite believe it. I think everyone had to dig into boxes and bags to find something to wear & no one did it in time to actually iron. It will be 87 degrees today but by Tuesday we'll have highs in the 60's -- & mornings in my down coat which I want to throw away.

Because I'm on the street a lot, I get complaints every day about the cold. "It's cold for April." Well, no, I say. Easter two years ago fell in April & I wore snow boots to dinner & there was snow on the magnolias. "This is unbelievably warm weather for April" & I think of how every year, we have a heat wave & the movie theaters haven't gotten their air conditioning running & all the flowers pop out at once.

It's most distressing for people like Us. Not only are our bodies now much more public, but we have to go through summer clothes for what fits.

For my part, this was an exceedingly pointless waste of time because I had one three-quarter length white t-shirt still in its virgin bag & a pair of linen pants in the closet that I only remembered after opening four vacuum-sealed bags, creating an enormous stack of wrinkles & having to try a lot of things on. I looked OK until we got to the barbecue & Daisy jumped up on my perfect white shirt with garden-muddy paws. (Shoes continue to be a problem because my foot is still slightly swollen & I'm wearing a nifty thingie that compresses the metatarsal bones. It's not cumbersome but it's one more filler between me and whatever hard-soled shoes I have for summer. I had to wear my wool Heflingers.)

I'm sticking too close to a plateau of 240 for my comfort right now, although I have forsaken my scale again after a couple of days of disbelief that I didn't weigh a little less &, finally, a two-tenths loss yesterday morning. That way madness lies. Still, I'd love to lose enough weight to have a field day with all those bags. (And the bags buried deeper.) My winter Rat Clothes -- how I designate my dog walking duds -- are pretty droopy after 30 pounds but I'm not quite into the next size down in my summer clothes.

I wonder if my body is resisting leaving 240. I'm pretty good for a 30-pound loss but have traditionally in the last few years stalled out there & then regained it & some more. I'm desperate not to do this again. In revising Angry Fat Girls, I hit a spot about why I can't settle into Fat Serenity & it was a bolt of electricity I needed.

Or maybe my body, having lost 30 pounds, simply needs time to rest & reorganize.

& then let's remember that I've had three weeks of favoring my right foot. I began walking Hero last week but the biggest walk is the better part of a mile to Henry's. Not only did I feel last week that my foot wasn't ready for four miles, but the last several blocks are brick and cobblestone streets, very picturesque but scary as hell for someone who, every six months, is obligated to trip over nothing & skin her knees.

Until I started walking Hero again -- almost two miles round trip before excursions -- I was having a hard time with dinner. I wasn't hungry, which made me not want to mess up the kitchen or go to any trouble. At the same time, I want to eat. It didn't feel natural not to. Had I simply gone to bed without supper, I'd be having 800-calorie days & that's just stupid.

A dangerous spot for someone like me. H'mmm. Convenience. No convenience foods are good for me. Sweet immediately sounds right. So I'd go out & get Fage yogurt & have that for dinner. It's delicious, abstinent, calorically on target, expensive, & very very dangerous.

I've come to the conclusion I can't have yogurt in the house for a while. If I'm going to have it for dinner, I'll have to walk the three or four blocks to get it.

I'd like to blame my yogurt habit for this stall-out as I pack up most of the clothes & hose them small enough for storage. Many of those clothes fit but many more need me to lose another ten pounds. But I don't think it's only the yogurt. I think it's a whole lot more wrinkly & complicated than that.

Day 72, by the way. 30.2 pounds lost. Anything between 20 - 22 is fair game.

Tuesday Nights with Daisy

I think I'll post over at Psychology Today about the photo question. For anyone who didn't see my response within reader responses here, I'm not sure why they chose that photo except that recent photos of me have been pretty terrible. I'm not referring to my weight in saying that, but to my camo rabbbit fur flap hat & wind-scoured face, the Wattle from an angle, very low light.

As I'm sure you can identify, it's a little weird to be obese & ask people to take your picture. Right now I don't have anyone I trust that much and have access to. I recently lost a friend I hugely enjoyed but found in the end to be mercurial & one-sided. She decided a friendly offer was either poaching on her territory or showed up her work style & hasn't really spoken to me since.

I'm going to pause here to say, briefly, she took the winter photos of me. The sorer point is that I sincerely apologized, although it had to be one of those apologies backed up by a silent "you feel that way," had no intention of taking her client, haven't had any inquiries from the client despite frequent meetings on the street. On my side of the equation, I'd been noticing for a while now that she had me looking up phone numbers and making calls for her from home, felt free to stop by during my work times to use my computer, borrowed a favorite shirt she hasn't returned, called at least once a week & begged me to cover her at work, & owes me a tiny amount of money.

Have I been used?

I didn't mind it because I love her company -- she's one of the few people who can make me roar with laughter. But with all the leaning on me came a false intimacy. She never asked me to have supper with her or took me up on my offers to bring dinner to her house. She called other people to see how they're doing but she called me for favors. It wasn't a friendship & I absolutely cannot see that I did something so bad that she should end it.

The worst of it is that I know her well. I know that she is her own revenge. Her wild quests for happiness are dramas she plays out to distract her from what's really going on in her life -- going on or going wrong. I knew this & I listened to it. I was a fair friend. It hurts to see her around once or twice a day & know she's heaping blame on me for something that was innocent &, if I were the devil incarnate, fruitless.

So I digress. I'll have to find someone to take a decent photo of me for PT. You've seen all the recent ones & have to agree they don't show me in a professional light.

I'd post a photo of my own over there except all the site does is insert the name of the photo, making it gobbledy-gook.

I'm waiting for my Klonpin to kick in so I can sleep. I'm slightly afraid to have idle hands until I'm sleepy -- dinner was good (chopped broccoli, salsa & 4 oz. of chicken) but I'd love something sweet. Better to be busy.

Daisy is fast asleep in the pillows after an unproductive walk. Tuesdays are the horror of dog owners' lives. New York takes recycling pretty seriously & Wednesday is recycling day. Paper in clear bags, plastic & metal in clear bags, garbage cans & bags. At 2 o'clock in the afternoon things get pretty Dickensian on the streets as people with grocery carts, billowing bags or shopping carts park themselves across from the big apartment buildings and wait for the maintenance men to bring out the plastic/metal bags. They then go through them for deposit-back cans & bottles. Each has their territory. A wizened Chinese lady sits on the stoop next door to my building & Daisy goes berserkers when she sees her, partly because the first time she saw her it was raining & the woman was standing under the small awning of my front door. She speaks no English so it was this big deal to convince her move away long enough for me to haul my bucking, barking dog inside.

It reminds me of the bone & rag pickers of Victorian London.

Nights are the dogs' glory, however, because there are so many bags out, all of them smelling of other dogs' pee, lo mein containers, milk cartons & rotting chicken. Daisy has to lift her leg at least two times on Tuesday night & is so distracted by the bags that she forgets to take a dump.

I've consulted with Lee Charles Kelley about some of Daisy's more violent & unminding tendencies. The first thing he has me doing is a change of diet, which was too yang. It sounds a little weird but apparently the stool hardener in lots of kibble brands encourages aggression. I like seeing what she eats -- a scant half cup of kibble & a half cup of chicken, carrots, broccoli, apples -- always the chicken with a changing roster of yin foods. She's obsessed with her new diet. I mean, she always licked the pan, but now she skootches it all over the room. I should be feeding this to her by hand, outside amid the distractions of wizened Chinese ladies & jolly but intimidating mastifs, but the weather has not been kind to me so far.

I think she's been a little more tractable. I'm talking to her more, trying to chatter the focus on to me instead of her enemies (which include blown-over garbage cans &, famously, snowmen). But Tuesday nights are another challenge altogether & I feel sorry that she's going to be uncomfortable tonight. I'll kill her if she wakes me up to go out for a poop.

Life... It's happening, even when it's small.

The Cruelest Month

I just noticed that I have four coats hanging on my door: the down coat I long to throw out, with the ripped pocket and pulled off snaps, my rain coat, which I'll need tomorrow, a windbreaker and a nice rose corduroy jacket which is one of the few purchases outside of shoes I'll make for the foreseeable future. I need them all this week & see no point in hanging them up in a more orderly manner.

That's April. Four coats & nowhere to go.

An inch of rain is expected tomorrow. I'm still waiting for my foot to mend & waiting, mostly, for these nifty wraps made for fractured metatarsals to arrive. I've been taping my foot and it helps, but it's bulky and I have no footwear that will accommodate tape, the need for a hard sole and rain. I'm still stalling on going back to the dogs but I need to get out. The less I have to do, the less, I'm finding, I can do. This has to do with my social anxiety as much as my productivity & it hit hard this weekend after two weeks off from being out & around. Daisy & I boarded over at Mally's house. Mally is a goofy big black Lab & he has two cats, one of which is failing & needs medication & IV hydration, a skill I've now added to my resume. I also had greyhounds to go in & tend. I managed all the basics yesterday -- walks, food, pills -- then crawled back into bed by 10 & fell asleep soon after to dream those light-sleep dreams in which one visits everyone from one's past, waking at 5.

I knew I was abstinent when, after going through the same basics of walks, food, medication & a what should have been a quick stop at the grocery store (the deli people had no idea what they were doing; I could feel my foot throbbing & swelling as she twiddled around for the code on my gazpacho salad), I was walking back to Mally's scolding myself for my nervous breakdown & thought, "Tomorrow will be better" & I knew it actually would be.

Still, I lost a day of my life. My home meeting -- working on Angry Fat Girls -- spending time in the honeyed sun that promptly gave way to sweatshirt & coat weather, of which I missed more because I nearly did the same thing today. I simply couldn't handle three places to be AND work. I wanted to eat through it. My exit from that instinct was to sleep.

Sleep & read Amy Dickenson's The Mighty Queens of Freeville. I know Amy slightly; she's the daughter of a good friend from graduate school. It was a melancholy read because I haven't been back to Freeville in a very long time. I called my friend this evening, which is another miracle of not eating through my anxiety, & she asked when I was coming up that way. I think I will have to rent a car & make an Upstate Progress, like Queen Elizabeth bankrupting her counselors -- to Ithaca & Freeville, to the sanctuary where my dog Roger has gone to live, to Lake Placid to see friends from one of my past lives.

It got me thinking, The Mighty Queens did, about sisterhood. I've always found it hard to be friends with women who have more than one sister. They have each other & some door of friendship is closed because of that. My cousins are all multiple-sister families & I always felt left out to a greater or lesser extent. My closest cousin was a good friend but preferred sleeping with her sister because my feet were too cold. I look at my history of friendships & I see that most of them are with women who were the only girl or quite separated in age from another sister. I don't know that there is a winner or a loser in this divide but I know how it feels to be the unsistered. My mother got to be a pretty wavery person in my life as well so it occurs to me that I didn't have a lot of girly role models or practice. This is not a big deal. Merely the ruminations of w-a-y too much sleep, a good book, "Memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain."

It has been one of those weekends I'm glad I'm single. Who would put up with a two-day coma interrupted only by cats and dogs, a memoir & TBS romantic comedies of the lowest order? The other night I was limping home from Key Food, my eyes fast on the uneven flagstone sidewalks that are my current terror, & I overheard a child ask if "you are doing any regattas this year". I had to roll my eyes as he answered that he was going to Philadelphia the next weekend & would be out at his beach house soon after. They passed me & I was dismayed to see a curvaceous, kind of booty girl with fluffy curled blond hair walking with a bald stoutish man. She went on to ask what flowers he had in the country and he talked about lilacs & she trilled how much she loves flowers.

It was The Wasteland on a first date. I was infinitely grateful to be dragging chicken breasts and broccoli home rather than craning over a first date conversation. Daisy looked particularly charming after that bit of voyeurism.

Life is going to be more & more like that as the weather limps toward tolerable. I always seem to be on the street but in the winter not so many other people are. When I walked out that evening, I caught sight of myself in my new rose-colored corduroy coat & thought, "Whoa...When did that happen?" My romance with the scale has ended so it's just me & abstinence & I was surprised to see a much sleeker shape in the hall mirror. To see the change for myself is shocking -- I have so little idea what I look like. But it gave me the courage to pull out a better shirt than usual, a size smaller than I'd dared in a long time, & it fit, although my last pair of jeans that remain at liberty in my apartment are a ways away from that. You win some, you lose some. This weekend I decided it was a win, & dangerous emotionally when I was out of my house & away from my stuff. So I slept. Then called my old friend and finished the dogs & cats for the day & jotted this meander down, just to stay in touch.

There's plenty of Cruelest Month in here if I were to look for it. Like "Where's Waldo". Day 67 & I don't know what I weigh but I'd like it a lot if my foot healed.

Scissors, Paper, God

I had a box of them. Mary Poppins, with Jane and Michael, Samantha from Bewitched, the perfunctory bridal party so many girls in the early 60's had. On and on. I can't remember what others were there but, unlike my limited Barbie collection (didn't Barbie cost an astronomical amount of money in the `60's?), I could actually perform The Sound of Music with my paper dolls because I had enough of them.

Then I discovered my mother's wrapping paper and starting making clothes for them with whatever didn't reek too much of mistletoe.

It would not surprise you to know, then, that I still love cutting things out of magazines and catalogues.

The point of the Third Step, which is the same for all 12-step programs ("Made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the will of God as I understood God") is to first make some decisions about God or a higher power and then cast one's fate to it.

My sponsor and I have had several conversations now that have hinged on me playing God. The first was my rage at having relapsed. The second came up in a conversation about how to approach the Dreaded Fourth Step ("Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves"). "How could I have two crazy bosses in a row? It must have been me." After the first go-around of being so angry at myself for relapsing, I caught myself. Who am I to say it was me or it was them? Who am I to say I was naive and unable to establish an adult relationship with either of them? Those are judgment calls. Is someone who will tuck her nightgown into sweatpants and run out to the deli in the rain really in a position to make judgments about herself, let alone anyone else?

Let alone my fondness for paper dolls.

I'm sure I've written about my Catholic School Girl Concept of God, which is best sung to the tune, "You Better Not Pout". My sponsor is all too familiar with it. I've tried a buddy God I called Ralph for a while. I've tried to integrate myself back into the Church. I've tried various saints. And then I relapse. Or feel crummy about wasting my life with online games. Or watch a marathon of America's Next Top Model, God save me.

When I first went into the Rooms, I made what is known there as a "God box". It can be anything -- a paper bag, a shoe box, a jar, whatever. The idea is that when something Big happens (a fight with a friend, a resentment, a decision to be made: whatever troubles the waters), you write it down and stick it in the vessel of choice. I, of course, saw this as an opportunity to play paper dolls.

That God box, made from an oatmeal container 11 years ago, is dusty, faded, fraying and heavy. I really want this abstinence to be a new beginning so part of my Third Step was making a new God box. I had the good karma box for it -- the box from the Ralph Lauren Romance perfume my father gave me for Christmas -- and stacks of unread magazines and catalogues. It was time to go to work.

It's been an interesting and sometimes moving several days because of it.

My first God box was about my relationship with God. The new one is about 1) God's relationship with me, and 2) proof that there is a God. Swan Lake, for instance, is proof of the Sublime. So are the Rockies that are my soul's cradle. Venice, flowers, my sense of being from Somewhere, the Hubble Telescope, Barack Obama, the fierceness and love of bears, Jane Austen -- proof. I'm sorry, my Agnostics, but these aren't random items for me.

Then there's the matter of God's relationship with me, which has been missing since the days I used to hold hands with guardian angel, probably pre-First Confession when God gets wicked on kids. "Be Yourself -- Everyone Else Is Taken," God tells me. "Love is patient, love is kind," he assures me. Buddhas laugh; a wounded angel is carried by ordinary boys; a black Edmund Gorey Lab carries a banner that says, "We belong together."

The project got me humming The Mills Brothers. I wasn't surprised when the chorus of "Paper Doll" echoed my sense of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately.

I'm gonna buy a Paper Doll that I can call my own
A doll that other fellows cannot steal
And then the flirty, flirty guys with their flirty, flirty eyes
Will have to flirt with dollies that are real

When I come home at night she will be waiting
She'll be the truest doll in all this world
I'd rather have a Paper Doll to call my own
Than have a fickle-minded real live girl

I'm interested in seeing what the compassionate, monogamous, cheerleader of a God will do for me.

Oops.

This is not my foot.

It's not my foot because the labeled fourth metatarsal of my foot has a stress fracture, known as a march fracture. I've been walking around on it for a while -- which is why it's called a march fracture to begin with -- thinking I'd done something to my little toe again until I noticed how swollen my foot was and started poking around to see where the tenderness is. A consult with the `net and my father has confirmed what I can't quite bring myself to pay someone else to confirm only to be told what my father told me: wear a stiff-soled shoe and stay off the foot.

I can, however, wear the stiff-soled shoe and I've taken the week off from dog walking, which is a lurching, pausing, pulling six or seven miles a day.

My manuscript is open in another window, as well as a new document to begin outlining it in order to see where I can impose more of the story line. I just walked Daisy and my foot's throbbing a little. I have better sympathy than usual for my former AFG cohorts who have knee problems. I'm not used to picking and choosing what walks I can take and regretting running into a good friend on the way back from Key Food because we lingered and talked.

Right now I'm avoiding that outline. I think Angry Fat Girls is a more important book than Passing for Thin. It's reality whereas PFT is true for so few women. But it's been a painful book to write and isn't my foot enough pain???

Well, no. If, in fact, I pay someone to diagnose and possibly treat this, I'd better keep working through the soul-pain since I'm not making any money off the foot-pain.

It's one of those times that I feel like I did at my highest weight and was so debilitated. It makes me feel like I weigh 340 pounds. Weirdly, I had more of a social life then. I fought the pain my back, legs, feet were in. But I also fought the physical pain with food and fought for a social life with food as well. I'd come home from seeing people feeling inadequate -- inadequate because I so disliked myself and inadequate because I couldn't taste the food we may have eaten together and certainly didn't get, for me, adequate amounts. I'd stop by the all-night deli and have my real meal at home in bed. In some ways, eating after socializing was also prolonging the pleasure on the literal gut level.

Maybe it's not so weird that I've become skittish about leaving home and mixing with the world in the last few years. I've been in the food most of that time but I've lost my innocence about what I do with it as well. I haven't learned enough about being a myself in public to be relaxed about it.

Emphasis on "being" because I act like myself but am not, quite, myself in most settings.

When I was a young poet, Dick Hugo asked how it was that I wrote such precocious poems. I told him that "I" didn't. I had a sort of role I slipped into that got me past my tongue-tied-ness; I acted up a storm of confidence in putting pen to paper.

It's an apt description of me in social situations as well.

How much does it have to do with weight? Everything and nothing. Obesity debilitates some of my confidence and a lot of my genuineness because I have to act harder to get beyond the place of crumpling outsiderness and self-flagellation that being around people stirs up.

I'm not sure why I'm writing this or where I'm going with it. Bea responded to my last post about using fat to absorb the slings and arrows and I immediately thought, "I use food, not fat, to do that." There is an Easter brunch my closest friends are hosting and my hostess called last night to discuss what she was serving that I can eat and what she could make for me instead. I told her I'd bring stewed fruit and a salad, things I can eat. I don't think I resent making the offer or having the conversation or being the imposition...but I'm aware that this is the first party I've gone to since getting clean and I'm going to have to act graciously, consciously, soberly -- and possibly even funnily and interestingly.

I'm exhausted already. I wonder if my plaid dress fits and if I have hard-soled shoes to go with?

I think this abstinence is going to include chucking some stuff out. I can feel the radiation of blame from my friend over the situation that arose last week and I have a certain proactive response to it that refuses either to be her target, if it comes to that, or to have the self-pity fest I've held at other ruptures in our acquaintance. On my side of the street, I've tried hard to be a good friend. Period. What I did in my efforts doesn't matter because they're score keeping. I'm sticking with "I've tried hard to be a good friend". If sniveling is required to be forgiven, then chuck it.

Holy Week.

What an ironic time to be working toward finishing my Third Step and outlining my book.

Emotional Weight Lifting

If I make it to midnight today, and there is a reasonable chance that I will, I'll have seven weeks of abstinence and a guesstimated loss of 26 pounds.

I say all this for a couple of reasons.

My home 12-step group, the meeting I exert myself most habitually to get to, has shifted personality over the years. I've heard a number of down and dirty bulimia stories since going back. There is nothing more gutter-drunk than bulimia. I respect their struggles and recovery enormously, and much prefer those stories to people who are complacent about their weight.

However...

I don't hear anyone sharing a day count or anniversary that mentions weight loss any more. I am disturbed by this so much that I spoke about it in my three minutes last week, bawling as I did so. I don't like the lack of sisterhood in my endeavor or the lack of discussion about the particular brutalities of obesity.

So I'm sharing my weight loss. I'm also sharing it because, as you know from The Great Wattle Disaster, there is a long period when you're working your way down from big numbers that one can't see one's weight loss. A dress size might be 20 or 30 pounds, and I've been wearing pretty much the same stuff as I did 8 weeks ago. Lots of elastic sweat pants and shirts bought big to begin with. Even my corduroys are elastic waisted. There is, for some months yet, a ways to go before I'll really see it -- in the mirror, on my labels -- for myself. So the scale is not a bad thing, especially when I'm not trying to get away with anything.

You know. Too much corned beef: will it show up on the scale tomorrow??? As though when I step on the scale, instead of a number, a big red brisket will be on the dial.

That's a great phrase We rely on, isn't it? Will X show up on the scale? Wonderfully absurd in the absurd idiom of weight loss.

I mention the seven weeks, which sounds tidier and bigger than 49 days, because of something my sponsor said in regards to a painful episode. "She's in her disease."

I was a little taken aback, not because my sponsor was wrong but because who are we -- she and I -- to differentiate between someone who's eating at will and my mere seven weeks of [really pretty good] behavior? How can seven weeks make me "sober"?

I've been thinking about what I haven't eaten my way through lately. Revising Angry Fat Girls, which is a painful process because it's an acutely painful but loving book. A lot of irritation with human beings when I'm out with dogs. A lot of flack in response to the last Lab Lady posts I did for the Brooklyn Heights Blog. Working every weekend and being very tired from the cold. A flare-up with someone who tends to drop me every couple of years that has me wondering if it would be better to end the friendship which gives me some of my greatest pleasure but is entirely at the whim of my friend.

This is nothing to the daily pressures and fears I faced when I was an agent and abstinent. How did I do without klonopin, I wonder? How will I get back to a place where I don't have a nervous breakdown about going to the grocery store or to walk the dogs, let alone get myself to a movie?

Maybe I've been handed these small bumps in the road as emotional dumbbells. What I've learned about myself in these seven weeks is how emotionally fragile I am. Confrontations devastate me, even when they're the sort someone else would shrug off. I'm prone to emotional exhaustion -- the flare up with my friend cost me two days of writing.

And I am very bad at speaking up for myself unless it's in rage. I defend my dogs but not myself.

I've lucked out. It was my turn to go see my parents but my brother has a conference coming up in Las Vegas and will take my turn. A dear friend has canceled a visit in May. I won't have to drink water at the rice pudding shop in Little Italy. I even ended up wit too many dogs on my slate to go to the St. Pat's bash that is a tradition. My life will not have been interrupted through these wobbly times when food is still a real option. I'll have to face it in June and July, but not in the first four months.

I wish there was a way to exercise emotional strength and appropriateness, the way one can press iron or go to yoga. I mean, one needs the strength of weight lifting in order to, say, carry a toddler, and one can get that strength in advance of said-toddler. Why isn't there a way to do in-advance push-ups regarding, "I feel taken advantage of" or "Please listen more carefully to what I'm saying"?

Maybe prayer, meditation, medication, chi help in situations like dog rage, but I'm less certain of their efficacy when pulled out on the carpet for misbehavior or mistakes, for being dumped by a guy, fired from a job, death in the family, loss of friends, travel and all the rest of the junk that goes into being human.

The only real difference I can see between seven weeks of abstinence and being actively in pursuit of pasta is that I take more of the punch than I did two months ago.

And, of course, the scale. ;)

And Then, Suddenly, It's About the Weight

Day 40 here but it doesn't feel like it. My experience of my 12-step program is a toss-up between the food, the abstinence & the weight loss. It's supposed to be about the abstinence & most of this God-granted spell has been. Then, Monday, a friend took a picture of me.

& don't you DARE say "What a great smile". I look like a no-neck Stay-Puff Woman. All the days and all the pounds were suddenly for naught as I looked at the wattle hanging off that stranger's face.

Whomp! I'm in how-long-till-I-can-fit land, close allies with how-much-will-I-weigh-when-I-see-so-and-so. It goes from, "Gee, I've lost at least 18 pounds" to "I have just under a hundred pounds to lose." Another ally: "I can do without my fruit and grain at breakfast."

I had a slip last night, which was preventable. I had corned beef in the crock pot and it smelled wonderful. I was also waiting for Go-Geek-Go to come and do things to my computer. I waited. I waited. My stomach growled. He should be here any time. I waited. I felt weak with hunger. Daisy cottoned on to my nervousness and began barking every time the building's front door opened. I waited. At 7.30 he called. He'd taken the wrong street name down & was somewhere on 6th Street in Park Slope. We decided to get together this weekend & I was left bored, with no work done, cabbage that had to be added to the crock, and I was starving By the time I ate, I was on the verge of being out of control. I ate too much. and woke up this morning in that remorse we all know too well.

I had missed part of breakfast yesterday because I was late for the dogs. When I weighed my corned beef for lunch just now, I realized I may not have eaten as much as I thought I did. I did my usual four or five miles yesterday. It's not that big a deal.

But it is. It is because that's not how one eats on my food plan. I could have had a cup of yogurt and a fruit to tide me over until the work was done and I could have dinner. But I didn't. I blurred lines yesterday and I don't like it.

That was AFTER I uploaded the photos my friend took of me. Coincidence? I'm not sure.

I had a good reminder of what I am this morning, however. If you remember, I compare my compulsion to my tender feet: they just are, and either I tend to them or I walk around in pain.

Yesterday, my feet were killing me. To avoid stepping on the balls of my feet, I contorted myself until my lower back and a ham string were also out of whack. I'd shaved my feet less than a week ago so I was pretending it wasn't the callouses on my corns. Like, what's the big deal? My callouses had thickened more quickly than usual and I was in pain. Still, all day, denial.

I hobbled behind Daisy at 7.30 this morning, wincing from my hamstring and my feet. "This is STUPID," I thought. I desperately needed some groceries but they became less a priority than running a tub of hot water, soaking my feet, putting in a brand new razor blade and shaving the callouses. 98% of the problem was solved.

Just as having had an approved snack last night would have almost certainly prevented too much dinner.

I had an email from a colleague this afternoon about how she can't lose weight at this time. I've been reporting my weight losses to her because she's part of the AFG publication team. I wrote back that she would when she was ready & that I'd done this when I was ready.

I also wanted her not to use my current success against herself. I've felt this when friends wre losing weight and I was gaining. And I wanted her to know that for the big pay-offs of my food plan, it's hard work. It's shopping and preparing. It's communicating with my sponsor. It's writing. It's meetings. It's step work and praying. I'm only a C 12-stepper but this is a program that demands work that is inconvenient and hard to fit in. I don't recommend it unless someone can put it at the very center of their lives.

So, danger averted. I didn't binge. I would not look better if I'd weighed my meat last night. Everything takes time. I've done well by dogs so far today & God's in his heaven. No scale for a couple of days. I want to enjoy my jammies that now fit and fit comfortably, and the jeans I wouldn't have dared put on a month ago. I want this day to be Enough and Just Right.

Woman Seeks God

The second step of the twelve is "Came to believe a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity". This step means finding a god one can work with. I've done various treatment of God but this time around I decided to place a personal ad on Craig's List under Missed Connections. Fifteen hours later, I haven't received a response, but it was a really interesting & revealing exercise because a) I had to sell myself, b) in essence, I asked God for a life. Should he be willing to give me one, of course the only possible reciprocity is to {gulp} give mine to him.

As goofy as all this sounds, I'm kind of moved by what I've done.

***

Seeks God – female – 52 – Brooklyn

Me: female, tall, zaftig but losing weight; dark hair graying; navy blue eyes; best smile; great voice. Fabulous sense of humor, talented & successful writer, Labrador/reading/movie/ballet-loving, earnest. I give the best presents & always remember birthdays. I have enough money to live moderately. I love my parents and my family, and they love me back, even though I confuse the bejesus out of them. Dogs like me. I have a lot of friends but none locally who will motivate me to get out & do stuff. I like tchotchkes, especially things that remind me of my childhood, & tend to buy too many books, movies, music & Barbie dolls. Very passionate. Prefer mountains to the ocean & want a hiking-camping companion.

You: beats me but my Catholic childhood tends toward male. Tall, strong, magical, warm eyes, best smile, great voice. You must have the perfect sense of humor that also accommodates mine, be as rich as, well, God. Inspire me to write & relieve my fear of it. Give me best presents & remember my birthday -- especially that I don't feel 52 & that it's a sore day for a kid who is adopted & feels congenitally unwantable. You must make me feel wanted, necessary & loved at all times & so well that I will return same. Be my best friend & teach me how to have fun. Suggest a movie or massage or season tickets at NYCB & I'm there. Indulge my weaknesses but not my dis-eases. Of the latter, you must slowly but certainly relieve me. You are passionate about all things, worlds, people, plants, animals & space dust, but you are most passionate about me & will teach me how to use & enjoy my passions. Help me plan & go with me to the Cascades, Fatima, the Rockies, Prague, Ireland, Yorkshire, Cambodia, Venice, Budapest, Krakow, Bath, Nova Scotia, Gettysburg, Transylvania & New Orleans. Be so much fun & so into me that I forget my jealousies, lost opportunities, vanished friends, the dead, the men I still have a sore spot for. Shield me from insults, fear, giving too much when I have too little to give. Hand me energy drinks when I need them and read me to sleep at night.

Willing to relocate -- you must be as well.

***

The code I had to type in to publish was, interestingly, “go Dolores” – Dolores means “sadness”.

***

I must add that I had this brain wave during a melanch0ly dog walk after two days of living someone else's obsessions for a good cause. I will have failed to accomplish what she wanted, which was to get a dog a home instead of back to the shelter. I was walking with all my own adoption issues, praying for the dog, feeling extremely lonely & abandoned to the inevitable flack that comes with writing for brooklynheightsblog.com.

At the end of the long block that these thoughts & feelings filled, Daisy began to play tug-of-war with her leash, which drives me crazy & very dangerous. I felt too weak to hang on to the leash & I stumbled slightly. She immediately let go & poked her head between my legs in what we call the tunnel-of-love, in which she threads through my legs for a butt rub. She was very concerned about that stumble (she gets hysterical when I actually fall).

We met A. outside my house & chatted about what's going on with her & with this dog. At the end of the conversation she reached out & rubbed my arm in what I can only describe as a gesture of warmth. "I needed that," I said. "I know," she answered.

God is in the small things.

Day 37 = 5 weeks. I think 5 weeks sounds better that 37 days.

Some Things

Bank Mergers
My bank, which had free everything but wasn't the most stable institution in the world, merged with a Big Bank last year. This has created some inconvenience for local customers because we've had to re-configure our ATM cards in order to transfer money between accounts and can only make deposits to a human teller.

This is a problem for people like me who have a hard time getting to the bank during working hours. I've tried taking a dog with me but each one I've experimented with has not at all liked the revolving doors and one was scared of the fancy mosaic tile floors.

& fancy the bank is! I'm not an expert on architecture but I think it must be art deco, judging from the chandeliers. I've never banked anywhere with chandeliers.

This is what I find hilarious about it, however, and if I was that bank's nibs, I would hang large meaningless posters or paintings over them.

Engraved high above the north door:

Society is built upon trust and trust upon
confidence in one another's integrity.

Tell that to Congress and the A.I.G. executives who are willing to give back half their bonuses which would still be 6% of the bail-out they've received so far.

Over the south door:

Commerce defies every wind, outrides every
tempest and invades every zone.

Anyone want to pass that on to the line workers in Detroit?

The bank, whether Victorian, Edwardian or Art Deco, was obviously built in the days when the United States was Young. It does not feel Young these days.

Why Seattle?

As many of you know, I was born and raised in Western Montana. My life as a New Yorker has ceased to exist and I am increasing irked by the tininess of my apartment, the entitlement of Brooklyn Heightsers walking down the street and my loneliness. Lately it seems like every walk I do with the dogs reveals yet another hole in the pavement or sidewalks, as though Brooklyn in breaking up.

I want to move West again. I want to be near my family. My hometown, despite being a college town, is too small for me and my ghosts. There isn't another town in Montana I would want to live in and I realize that I probably wouldn't be happy unless I'm in a city. That pretty much gives me Portland, OR, or Seattle. I have more friends in Seattle and more close relatives at hand than I do in Portland, and as a compulsive overeater I find myself to be a burden, to other and to me. I feel better thinking my neediness will be spread around.

Either city is fabulous but Seattle feels homier, possibly because I've lived there before. I want an easier life where a dollar will go a little farther than it does in New York and where Daisy and I will have a chance to get out in the woods and lakes on a regular basis.

When I first started to lose weight The First Time, I had those three dreams: to be thin, to fall mutually and sanely in love, and to publish a book. Love is not under my province, but I got the other two. And it was part of my downfall. I might have wanted stuff but I had no dreams. Seattle and the novel I'm working on are the first dreams I've had in all these years. They are part of my motivation for abstinence, working, waking up.

Eleven years ago I didn't know that I need a dream to keep me going. I'm so fucking relieved to have some again that it's like being able to breathe clearly.

Did I mention Seattle is a coffee-drinker's paradise?

More of the Magic of Abstinence

Day 34. I bought a digital scale because my eyesight isn't good enough to distinguish what's going on with those vague two-pound increments. 250 this morning, just so you all know. I'm going to replace the plastic tab over the lithium batteries, wrap it up and put it away. My sponsor and I have agreed I'll weigh once a month, although she hasn't told me when that month starts...So I can have a little more insanity until she lays down the Scale Law.

I'm waking up more consistently at 7 a.m., despite what kind of day I had before. I bought an HDTV and new VCR/DVD unit because mine were really really dead. I've been loving watching a movie in bed at night. I actually have the attention span to do it for some reason. Abstinence often makes me hyper but I seem able to give in to my new toy.

It's a 22"-screen, by the way. We are NOT talking home theater here.

I've been busy with dogs and find myself unable to think ahead to what big thing I can cook and live on. It's enough that I get food in the house for a day or two right now. I'm living on salads for two meals a day for the time being. Sesame seed oil at noon, olive oil at night.

I'm dying to have one day truly off from dogs and cats. That could happen the first weekend in April. But my busy-ness is paying my state taxes for 2008. I try to keep that in mind.

Just some things. That's all.

30 Days

Today is Day Thirty of no flour, no sugar, weighing & measuring my meals. There are some things on my mind that I want to share about it & there is the little matter of my step work, which might be easier to do as a blog, in bits, as things come to me.

The first step of the twelve is that "We admitted we were powerless over ___ and that our lives had become unmanageable."

I learned that after having something like four or five days clean without hooking up with my sponsor or going to meetings. Late Friday night I got a call on my cell phone. I had to heave myself up out of bed & go through the machinations of retrieving the message in order to shut the damn thing up. It was a call from one of my clients about a missing pair of earrings. Had I seen them? No, sorry. I went back to bed & the phone rang again. She had found them. I'd been taking care of her dogs for over a week, it was finally over, I'd gotten to bed abstinent & then it wasn't over. I ripped off my nightgown, put on my clothes & went to the deli.

The next morning I found I'd fallen asleep in my shirt & that my nightgown was inside out, such was the hurry I was in.

I got myself to the meeting the next morning & the first person I saw stood up, hugged me & I sobbed, "I can't stop." My sponsor came in late & headed straight for me & again I sobbed very quietly, "I'm in so much trouble."

The inside-out nightgown -- the couple of clean days over in 20 minutes because of a phone call -- the days before I'd stopped bingeing when I took my Entenmann boxes over to the dogs' apartment building to put them in that recycling rather than my own building's...

Yup. Got that.

In many ways, however, I think it becomes apparent how unmanageable life is only when you stop using. The irritations I've written about lately are evidence of this. One's emotions wake up & there's no guarantee that they're going to be the pretty ones. I think the first time I had 30 clean days together I felt excited & curious. The last couple of times I hoped I'd lose a lot of weight & get to qualify (speak for 15 minutes or so) at a meeting & be a star again.

This time...

I dunno. I'm not excited about it. I'm not terribly hopeful about getting thin or being a star after so many resounding disasters. I feel...I feel like I'm showing up, that being abstinent is being on time, having my homework done, being prepared. It's not about being a rule follower as it is a feeling that this is the right way to live. & I WANT this abstinence. For thirty days I have not looked for a way to not have my cake & eat it too.

I also feel like every day of abstinence prepares me for the next hurdles -- publishing Angry Fat Girls, moving to Seattle. Part of it is being thinner but part of it is that I've smooshed abstinence together with walking toward my future. Every day I ask myself, what have I done to move to Seattle? There are a finite number of answers. I made some extra money. I reinforced a friendship there. I got rid of something I won't have to move. I wrote words someone might pay me for. I was abstinent.

I have weary days on which I don't have the wherewithal, after battling my dogs or for my dogs, after screaming at the agony of whatever is agonizing, after a snowstorm, to write or weed through or whatever.

But I was abstinent.

Bottom line.

So while I've been cranky & weepy & sometimes downright foul in these 30 days, wondering exactly where these mood swings come from, I've been able to say each day that I've taken a step toward the Puget Sound.

Which is one [small] aspect of getting some control in my life even when my emotions are anything but orderly.

Another thing about these 30 days that has given me a sense at least of method in action is the work of being able to be abstinent -- the shopping, the chopping, the steaming, the crockpotting. I have a sense of accomplishment when I put a bag of salad I chopped in my tiny refrigerator, & a sense of what I'll be eating next.

I'd forgotten what it was like to be very hungry & have all kinds of chatter in my head about what to eat, only to have all those voice stop when I walk myself through an abstinent meal.

My cravings aren't gone but they're under better control than they've been in a long time.

I WANT WANT WANT this abstinence. I want it. I need it. I deserve it. I will yank it out of God's hands if I have to.

But that's a whole `nother step.

Oh, yeah: I'm fuzzy on how much weight I've lost but it's somewhere between 8 - 18 pounds. My favorite jammies, which I was afraid to put on, are loose & comfy again.

Let It Go! + Curry Recipe

It's no wonder I struggle with weight: I can't let ANYTHING go.

Yesterday morning I took Daisy over to Cadman Plaza, one of the nice things about Brooklyn Heights. It stretches on forever & has an astroturf playing field, a running path, lanes of lime trees, nice plantings in warmer weather. I took up a position in a lane of trees -- off the turf, as required, off the running path, as is polite. She began to bark wildly. A father with two young kids, a toddler + razor bike, a post-toddler riding his bike on the astro, was standing some twenty feet away. The boy hopped off his bike & started to bawl at Daisy's barking & running. A ricochet off a tree sent her scuttling under a bench to retrieve it, at which the boy began to scream.

"Would you leash your dog, please?" the father said. "This isn't a dog run."

"Actually, it is a dog run," I told him. "From 9 - 9, dogs are allowed off leash."

"Where does it say THAT???" he demanded.

"Just read the signs."

It was over that quickly & if he looked around that moment he would have seen twenty dogs flittering around the park. I did not sayy, "Just read the signs that include a rule against bikes on the astroturf," for which I'm both mildly sorry & mildly proud of myself. I didn't swear or raise my voice. But I wanted to stuff my correctness down his throat. I wanted to tell everyone I saw what had happened so they could tell me how right I was & how bad he was. I wanted him to apologize.

If you want to hate people, walk a dog.

Or live in a thin-walled studio apartment next to the Loathsomes, neighbors who scream about FDR while playing Trivial Pursuit at 11 p.m. on a Friday until I got so frustrated I yelled out, "Hold it down." My bell rang, Daisy went into a barking frenzy, I stumbled up out of bed & my neighbor was at the door, which Daisy slipped through & tried to go join their party. "Are we being too loud?" "Yeah." "Sorry." "Sounds like Trivial Pursuit?" "Yeah," he laughed.

I got what I wanted -- a reasonable decibel level -- but did he HAVE to rile Daisy up, haul me out of bed in my flannel nightgown, & thus waken me further & make a nuisance out of my previously peacefully sleeping dog?

The point here is that I am still seething over this shit. I want to let it go. So what? I mean, I have writing to do here, a recipe to share, a desk to dismantle, laundry to do.

Early abstinence, my friends, is a time of housekeeping. I struggle to get as much of the food as I need during the week into the house & prepared so that tiredness doesn't send me to the deli or dialing for expensive take-out, & it's a nervy, prickly time when lovely character defects show up.

This is why I do not play competitive games or take IQ quizes on Facebook. I want to be right, & that means someone else must be wrong.

Ick.

*

OK. Moosewood's Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant Eggplant, Red Pepper & Spinach Curry, adopted for my food plan (low on oil) & the crock pot.

Place 1 medium eggplant, cut into 1" cubes into a colander. Sprinkle with salt & give it a swish every once in a while in the next 20 - 30 minutes to sweat out the water.

Into the crockpot goes:

1 large Spanish onion, chopped
2 red bells peppers, cut into 1" cubes
1 T grated peeled ginger root (or powdered ginger, if lazy or budgeting weirdly)
1 T ground cumin seeds
2 t ground coriander seeds
1/2 t turmeric
1/8 t cayenne
1/8 t cinnamon
1 T s/f peach jam or applesauce

Rinse the eggplant and shake the water off. Add to crock & cook on low for 6 - 12 hours.

A half-hour to an hour before you're going to eat, add:

10 oz. spinach
1 T lemon juice.

You really want to wilt the spinach more than you want to cook it. When I made a second batch, I added about four carrots I decided I didn't want to live here any more. You always take liberties.

The spices have the following properties:

Ginger: helps digest high fat foods & breaks down protein, making it good for digestion which is probably why it is helpful in controlling nausea, morning & motion sickness. It is also thought to be good against arthritis.

Cumin: good for dementia-fighting power.

Coriander: along with cinnamon, it help regulate blood sugar. It also fights headaches & depression.

Cinnamon: see coriander above for its obesity & diabetic-fighting pwers. It is dense in manganese, iron, calcium, Vitamins A & C, & fiber, which protects the heart and colon. The calcium and fiber bind to bile salts, which neutralizes the salts' damage to the colon. When the body has to replace the bile salts, it has to break down cholesterol. It is a strong antiseptic with microbial and clotting fighting powers. It demonstratively improves cognitive functioning and motor speed and is an immune booster.

Turmeric: a immune booster and anti-inflammatory, it is cancer fighter and also reduces the chance of gallstones.

Cayenne: a source of Vitamin A & a strong appetite suppressant/satiety-booster. It's also a depression-fighter, stimulates circulation & the digestive process. It not only makes you feel full faster but helps burn calories.

Cardamom: good for heartburn & stomach problems, which may be one reason why curries are survivable.

So the moral of this post is -- you tell me.

Breathing

Yesterday was a bearcat. I knew it by 10 a.m. when Daisy and I walked the mile down to pick up Henry. As we approached the corner, crowded with garbage bags and early morning worker bees, I saw a Welsh springer spaniel approaching.

"Don't be scared," I soothed Daisy as I shortened her leash. "It's OK, you don't have to be scared." She lunged anyway & the owner of the spaniel yelled at me about controlling my dor or what is the matter with her or some damn thing. He'd heard me talking to her about being scared & made no attempt to sidestep us or simply ignore the lunge. "I'm sorry," I called over my shoulder as I struggled to get Daisy away from a bag full of bread someone had dumped on the sidewalk, "I'm doing the best I can."

But I broke down in tears by the time I turned the corner, leashed her & went back to pick up the 20 rolls that had spilled all over the place. I cried intermittently the mile and a half to Hero's house, although by then it wasn't about being yelled at. I was crying because I lost six years to compulsive eating, & 42 years before that. I was crying because it's Not Fair that God gave me this disease of addiction and of depression as well.

I did a smart thing when I got home. I turned off my computer, stuck the DVD of the first half of the first season of 30 Roc in my new thingie, sat down with Daisy curled up against me & disappeared into this OK sit-com.

A good crying jag must release some hormone, one that leaves one limp for the day. I was exhausted by 11.30 a.m.

That was the Pity-Me part of this post.

I must now say a couple of things that directly attack my right to self-pity.

The first is that I am feeling every which way at any given time (although yesterday just left me depleted). I'm not medicating with food. I'm walking through my break-up with my lover. I have no words for how fiercely I WANT this abstinence. I WANT it. I WANT it. But breaking up is still hard to do.

The second is that I was walking my three-mile morning walk without Naprosin or any other pain medication. I've lost enough weight to be more pain-free than I've been in a long time.

The third is that I watched 30 Roc, then watched TV that night. I've lived in silence for years, unable to sit still long enough to watch a video or TV show. I didn't know my television was dying until the presidential debates. Some power of concentration has come back & it's a welcome guest.

OK, the next part of this post is enlightenment. I told my sponsor about how wretched I'd felt that morning & how I'd taken the day off, which she thought was a very good reaction. Then she reminded me of the 12-step axiom:

"You have awareness of this disease, but as long as you keep saying `I'm so angry at myself for relapsing,' you're playing God. Awareness, acceptance, action. You've got to accept that you're a compulsive overeater."

We ended the conversation & I went back to bed with Daisy, who was being therapy dog par excellence last night. What did she mean that I had to accept my disease? Wasn't I, every time I measured an ounce of chicken or went to a meeting? How could I move beyond my anger, at myself, at God? I'd relapsed, no one pushed me into a pint of Ben & Jerry's. How could I not be angry at myself?

As I was ruminating on this today, I stepped on a rock right on the ball of my foot. I have terrible, deep corns on the nerves in the balls of my feet. A podiatrist explained that they're too deep to remove & not curable because I have one toe that's too long & one that's too short. I can shave the callouses down & that helps a lot, but stepping on a rock will always make me wince smartly.

I've never blamed myself for my feet. I've never blamed God for them. I've never blamed myself for smoking (or only a little) & I don't blame God. I don't blame either of us when I get a cold (although I blamed him when my intestines got all tangled up & I had to have abdominal surgery) or it rains or my eyebrows need waxing. (I blame myself & my weight for being tired and achy, however. The examples I've given are really accurate). I shave my feet, enjoy my cigarette, take Thera-flu, complain a lot, put on my raincoat, make an appointment or let them go.

I decide whether to take action on stuff I'm stuck with or leave it be. But I don't rant at myself or God about them.

Compulsive eating & depression are painful. My feet are in pain. Compulsive eating & depression are physical facts about me as much as the way my feet are made. They just are. They aren't my fault. An addict will go back to her substance when she doesn't want her sobriety & when she doesn't take the actions to keep it from happening. & my best shot of conquering or riding out depression is not to eat sugar & flour.

I got it, finally. I have funny feet, two diseases, navy blue eyes, long fingers, am right-handed, am a spendthrift & like 19th century British novels.

It's who & what I am.

Day 21. Time to go make a salad with 1 cup of garbanzo beans, it being Lent & all.

We Plan, God Laughs

I didn't realize until this morning how much shame I could confess here.

The Bat Cave has very poor lighting. I have a large flashlight that I use at least once a day to read labels or find shoes. Lately it's been in steady use as I've worked on getting my new television & DVD/VCR hooked up & comfortably running. So I blame this on poor lighting.

Oh, & on me, of course.

I blew up during last fall's depression & Christmas madness at my parents' house, so much so that I was literally off my scale, which ends at 250. Last week I was finally at 250. I breathed a sigh of relief. I couldn't tell my sponsor how much I'd lost -- 10 pounds? fifteen or twenty? -- but I had succeeded, at least, in "fitting" my scale.

It was an achievement.

This has been a hard week. I'm cold all the time. Taking Daisy out means fitting her little booties on which is just this side of aggravating. I'm not just walking dogs, I'm climbing through the snow they love to explore. My computer needs a physical & a knee replacement. There's garbage everywhere because of human laziness & because we haven't had the Sanitation trucks for two pick-up days. The dogs are darting after food & after those first pristine hours of heavy snow, the world is pretty ugly.

I haven't gotten any writing done. The time I had for it yesterday I spent looking for a gentle, English-speaking geek who could help me out.

I haven't gotten any writing done. Some kind of deadline for the revised Angry Fat Girls is looming but we haven't settled on one yet. In the meantime, I have a sort of forward to write for it & I haven't gotten any writing done.

I mad. Pissed off. Angry. Resentful. Peevish. Sullen. At myself, the weather, time, obligations, human frailty.

(In the larger picture, the line above is a miracle. I'm feeling these feelings. I have names for them. I've experienced them a lot in the last ten days or so and I've ridden them out. A month ago I would have been feeling them and simultaneously thinking about when & what I could eat to make them shrink. They feel very big to me simply because I don't have the shame & chemical dousing of eating to reduce them. I'm rather proud of my brattiness.)

In that state this morning I thought I'd give myself some good news. Today is Day 19 & my food has been very clean & I'm always walking so I knew that something would have happened since last Thursday.

It had. I'd misread my scale. It ends at 260 rather than 250. I've either gained eight pounds from the number in my calendar last week or lost two pounds if I hadn't been such a dumbass as to not know how her own damn scale works.

I wanted to write about the Indian vegetables I crocked this week, or about how, as the Big Book says, "God is doing for [me] what [I] cannot do for [myself]". Instead, I guess I've just done a small treatment of Step 1: my life has become unmanageable.

& I feel like a fool. A very fat fool.