I promised to keep you posted about my progress to lose 25 pounds by Christmas and win $1,500 from my friend First Wife. YAWN! It is so cliche to be an American woman trying to lose weight. If food is an addiction and I have belived that it is and wished I could just give it up all together. In fact, I have recently felt panic when it came to feeding my baby real food for the first time because I felt like a drug addict that HAD to feed her babies just a little of the drug that I am abusing. I have wished I were addicted to something I could go to a posh re-hab center to over come. I have wished I were addicted to something sexy and racey and different. I have hated that I really am just an average woman of above average proportions from Middle America in her Middle years of life. Living in California promised to cure me of the Middle America part, but I live in the Middle America part of California in the Bay Area. There are no racey, sexy edges where I live. Just rows and rows of manicured hedges.
After reading James Frey's A Million Little Pieces (which I reccomend) during a 3 day juice fast, I don't think there is anything racey and sexy about the edge anymore. It is horrifying. As someone who walked a fairly straight line in life, I guess some part of me thought that the people who did drugs were more exciting, braver, bolder. Something I took away from this book that I have never known is just how scary that lifestyle can be and that they are just afraid as we are. It is sort of like when you hear people say that snakes are just afraid of us as we are of them. I wonder if snakes are afraid of each other too. Maybe people who live in that lifestyle are just as afraid of themselves as we are of them.
I wonder if I am being judgemental or taking one book at its word and sweepingly generalizing. I confess to living a fairly sheltered life. I walked close to the edge with a few friends and/or abusive boyfriends and a family member, but I have never actually been to the edge. The only edge I have been too is inside of me. That makes me a little edgey to be around at times but it does not make me wordly. It does not make me interesting. In fact, I am no longer interested in myself tonight. I am bored bored bored.
Ok, that is another cliche, a middle aged bored housewife. YAWN! At least I am not desperate. Things are going very well for me. Lucky is not interesting yet. A sick part of me sort of wishes I were desperate, that is close to the edge. I thought I was desperate to lose weight. I thought that I would read A Million Little Pieces the brilliant, graphic, poetic account of a man's life in rehab and all that led up to it and in my highly suggestable way would totally identify with it. I thought being on a 3 day juice fast would put a fine point on the experience. (It didn't. It just gave me a headache and diahrea which made it harder to concentrate). I thought I woudl come away with a sense of connection with the dark side of addiction and what it takes to break the cycle. I didn't.
What I came away with instead, was the awareness that I have it pretty good. I have it darn good. If the biggest complaint I have are the lumps where my babies lived that don't bother anyone but me and my only health issue is a degenerating back that I inherited, and a bored restless feeling because I am home with my children all the time, then I really need to get over myself once and for all. I think the biggest obstacle to my productivity and creativity is that I think I have a biggest obstacle. It's like when after years and years of waiting for the other shoe to drop, I suddenly realized that I was wearing the other shoe.
(I am not sure how this all works out to be anything worth posting or reading but hey, you get what you pay for and so far, I have not been paid monetarily for this silly little thing I do. I do love doing it though and I hope that somebody loves watching me do it. I think it is the beginning of something more along these lines eventually. Even in this I am lucky, I know what I love to do and have found some space and time to do it in).
But back to my rehab or more accurately my de-flab, I am quite certain that a three day juice fast is not supposed to end in ice cream and a handful of candy but I feel lucky that I had the self control to do a 3 day fast (and pass up every single thing at a party) and a choice about what to eat when it was over. I feel lucky that my problem is one of abundance and not lack. I feel lucky that I have been given the time and space and a sound enough mind to figure all this stuff out. Although I will continue to work on my weight ($1,500 is a lot of money to me, but even without the financial incentive it is a fun challenge and a worthy goal and once again I feel incredibly lucky to have this fun friend giving me this fun reason to get healthy) but more importantly I will continue to work on myself and the fact that I feel like I need to continually work on myself. In other words, I am going to start getting out more...getting out of myself! Thanks for reading my blog. I feel better now, do you?
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