Bornfamous

Day Five

At least half of the battle, when you stop stuffing your face with carbs, sugar–and in my case, gluten–is figuring out what to do with all the time that suddenly looms before you. People who don’t have this problem will not understand, but it feels like waking up from a lovely dream to realize that you have to go to work now. Yes, that’s exactly it–plus a distinct sensation of alarm, like: “Wait a minute. I wasn’t expecting this. Hunger, yes. Withdrawal pains, sure. But not–gah!–Waking Up.”

My normal inclination is to do more of what I’ve been doing–sit here at my desk and obsessively surf the web for some mysterious “answer” to my problems, crochet, watch TV, and make a stab at writing more blog entries–but that’s a recipe for failure, I just know it.

If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.

Yep. Gotta change more than just my eating habits. Why is that so scary? Because it’s the unknown, I guess. I know what it feels like to be sedated by food: comfortable. Except for the awful aches and pains of simultaneously being obese, not moving and getting old.

But even that pain is familiar territory for me. What is on the other side of losing the weight and getting active? I’ve lost the pounds before–several times–but I never really committed to the completely new lifestyle that maintaining my ideal weight would require. That’s the unknown that scares me.

And now this new thought that never occurred to me: I have to wake up now. I have to be alert instead of groggy. Which means I’m becoming aware of all the time that stretches before me each day, and I have to do something productive with it or I will inevitably fall back into old, anesthetizing habits. This is what the experts mean when they tell you to Feel the Feelings. These are the feelings that come up–and I’m feeling ‘em, all right. Boy, am I feeling them.

Like a kid who doesn’t want to go to sleep at night, I can hear myself whine, “But I don’t want to wake up!”