Toto, We're Not In Kansas Anymore...

This whole "diet" thing is messing with my head. Not that it hasn't been messing with my head for years. Since before I can remember, really. Has it become such a complete part of my psyche that I'm never going to be able to get rid of it? I hope not... but I can't seem to get the mentality out of my mind, no matter what I do.

Diets are based on scarcity, restriction, and deprivation. They talk about accountability to some authority that isn't your own. They want you to spend your life counting, recording, writing it all down. It's all about the numbers, the scales, weighing and measuring, counting steps, counting calories, counting the minutes until you die...

Is this really the way I want to live?

I seem to exist in two states: dieting and waiting to diet. Dieting doesn't last very long, I admit. A few weeks. Months at most. I certainly haven't ever done it long enough to call it a "way of life" or a "lifestyle." Most of my time has been spent dreading the upcoming diet, shoving all those "forbidden" foods into my mouth I know I can't have when I'm dieting, and hoping that I'll get some fabled call from the governor at the last moment, saving me from the electric chair Monday - diet day.

I've done all sorts of "diets." I've paid lots of money to be weighed and measured, to weigh and measure my food, to listen to skinny folks who used to be fat talk about how they did it, one celery stick at a time. I've eaten loads of processed crap that didn't taste much better than the box they came in. Eventually, even Twiggy would get sick of miniature portions of freeze dried broccoli and salisbury steak.

I know what a "diet" is, I know what it feels like, I know what it looks like. I know what waiting to diet feels like - the sense of impending doom, the voracious journey toward restriction, the guilt and denial and avoidance. Is there a middle ground somewhere, or am I looking for the fairy tale? Is there a yellow brick road I'm missing?

This morning I watched Valerie Bertinelli get all choked up on my television and tell me that for the first time, she was going to wake up on New Year's day and not make a resolution to lose weight - because she already had. "That could be you next year!" she tearfully insisted. "So call now!" (And while you're at it, will someone please drop a house on Jenny Craig?) I thought, hmmm... I wonder if Valerie's going to be fat again next January, or if she's going to keep up with the whole "diet" thing? Is she going to still be eating red boxes full of fake food next year? And come to think of it... why is it we never see Jenny Craig? Is it because she got fat again, I wonder, after years of depriving herself?

Not to pick on Jenny. She doesn't corner the market on diets or anything - (not that she doesn't want to.) She's got lots of competition from Florine, Suzanne Somers (and whatever happened to poor Susan Powter who wanted us to all stop the insanity by signing on to her version of it? Did she get fat again? No, wait, I wiki-ed her... she's still around!) Jillian Michaels, and Denise Austin. And not to be outdone by the women, there are endless rows of doctors - from Atkins to Ornish - out there pimping their programs, too. And let's not forget Ho-prah's protege, Bob Greene, doing his thang. And poor Richard Simmons - one of the few I think who are truly sincere. And don't forget all those programs not necessarily associated with a face, like Medifast, Nutrisystem, Slimfast, South Beach, the Cavemen... etc. etc. etc.

A diet is a diet is a diet is a diet...

Unless it claims it isn't?

Ha. Right.

That rationalization works... until you fall off the wagon and you're not doing the program anymore. I was reading Cranky Fitness yesterday, who referred to Sarah and Weetabix at Elastic Waist debating about Weight Watchers' new claim that they're "not a diet."

Huh?

I'm sorry, that must be my bad ear, what did you say?

Weight Watchers isn't a diet?

Feh! Right.

And George Bush isn't an idiot...

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck - it's a big, fat duck.

Do you know how many people I know who have joined Weight Watchers and lost weight... and then gone off it and gained it back... and joined again and lost weight... and gone off it and gained it back...? Lather, rinse, repeat. This isn't a permanent solution any more than the others. It's designed to do one thing, and one thing only: make a profit. That's the bottom line with any of these diets. In fact, I'd venture to say WW makes a majority of its profit from re-joiners, not first time members. I could be wrong - but I bet I'm not.

I'm tired of diets... even those that claim they aren't what they really are. I don't want to buy or eat another box of crappy, overpriced, processed food. Why should I trust some outer authority to tell me what to do, how to do it, and what quantities I'm allowed to do it in? How is that any different than the rest of the sheeple yo-yo-ing up and down the diet scale and paying big bucks for the privilege?

I want to wipe the slate completely clean and start from scratch. Is there a deprogramming program for the diet programs we've been fed over the years? How do I get out of this maze of dead ends? Can I click my heels together and say "There's no place like home?"

Have I had the power all along, Dorothy?

Because when you let go of the idea of relying on someone else's authority... you have nothing but your own. Now that's some serious responsibility. And some serious independence.

Emotional Bypass

I am a walking couch-potato cliche, I know - a fat woman sitting in my living room watching Oprah and eating chocolate. The show? "Suddenly Skinny." How could I not tune in, right?

Gastric bypass - the thing I've been fantasizing about as a magic bullet - apparently bypasses the stomach, but it doesn't bypass the reason you were eating to the point of morbid obesity in the first place. If you can't eat your feelings anymore, what do you do? I've often thought weight loss surgery must act as some sort of catalyst, speeding up the process of dealing with the pain and fear and anxiety the compulsive eating tries to cover. Makes sense, right?

It had occurred to me, too, that perhaps you might find something else to be addicted to, if you couldn't use food to cope. But that's not the fantasy in my head. The fantasy is that being thin makes people happy - that it would make me happy. It's supposed to make everything okay again. Thinness is the "answer." Isn't it?

I didn't know, though, that it's really happening to real people out there. The reality of gastric bypass can mean the transfer of one addiction to another. From compulsive overeating to alcholism. From compulsive overeating to gambling or sex addiction. Just something else to fill the hole.

Carnie Wilson, the poster girl for gastric bypass, became an alcholic. It's seven years since her surgery, and she's been sober for two years, now. Yay her.

She said, "I can find addiction anywhere in my life. I was a born addict."

I listened to her, and I heard myself. I know I'm addict - but food feels like a "safe" addiction. It's legal. No one is going to take my license or put me in jail if I eat and drive. I need food to live, so I can rationalize a food addiction much easier than I can any other. Plus, I have a fat family, and can point to "bad genes" when it comes to my appearance.

But if I lost the weight, if I did something drastic like gastric bypass - what would happen to my addiction? Would I transfer it to something else? I'm totally not a drinker, I hate the taste of alcohol. But if I didn't have food - what would I turn to? Because I know I'd turn to something. I'd have to. What would I end up addicted to? Vicodin? Booze? What?

I said jokingly the other day that I'd rather be addicted to heroin. But... would I really rather be a heroin addict? Would I REALLY?

Carnie said, after her surgery, she started drinking, and when it got really bad, she woke up every day not knowing how she was going to stop.

But that's how I feel about food. I wake up every day not knowing how to end this. I have all the information. I know all the hows. My favorite saying by Maya Angelou, "When you know better, you do better," just doesn't seem to apply in this situation. I know better. But I can't seem to do any better. Why not?

The belief, when you go in for weight loss surgery, is that if you decrease the weight, you'll decrease the emotional pain. The reality is that when you shrink your weight without dealing with all those feelings, your pain increases. That's a paraphrase of the psychologist on Oprah today.


That's the stark reality.

And that's what I'm afraid of. That's the honest truth. I'm afraid of the pain I've buried under the food. I'm terrified of collapsing into an emotional wreck. The food is keeping me emotionally functioning (if rather numb.) Without it? I feel as if I'll end up a quivering, sobbing mass of jelly that they're going to have to pour into a straight-jacket and lock in a padded room for the rest of my life.

And I don't even know what the pain is - its source or its origin. And the truth is, I don't want to know. Losing the weight means not using the food to cover it anymore. Losing the weight means leaving myself exposed and vulnerable. Losing the weight feels like death - even though the opposite is also true as well. If I keep eating this way, I'm going to die. It's quite a difficult place to be.

The New Math

I can easily make excuses for myself.

Monday was the one year anniversary of my best friend's death. She died of metastasized breast cancer. I miss her very much.

I've been really, really sick.

But it doesn't change the fact that I haven't been eating like I want to. Well, I take that back. Clearly some part of me wants a Big Boy and fries and a hot fudge ice cream cake, because that's what I had for lunch. And that was AFTER I went to the allergist (and found out I'm allergic to both dogs and cats and we're going to have to give up ours) where I weighed in at a whopping 280 pounds.

Um... wrong direction, scale!

Now, granted, my period is due any minute now and I always gain five pounds before. Always. Like clockwork. So perhaps this is that five... which means I'm really down two?

Hey, it's the new math!

But instead of getting all down on myself and stopping on the way home to buy a load of junk food to binge on tonight, and a pizza to throw in the oven for everyone else... I came home and made a real dinner. Stuffed green peppers. Pretty healthy, as dinners go. With brown rice, no cheese.

Okay, so Harley was almost an hour late for dinner. Grrr. But that gave me time to fold laundry and watch the Oprah I TiVo-ed. Today's show was about obesity. Guests included people who had lost weight through diet and exercise alone. No surgery, no magic shakes or pills. Just common sense eating and getting off the couch. Seems simple enough, right?

It was a rather inspiring episode, I must say. Now Oprah and Bob are having a Million Viewer Challenge. So instead of six people to go on his diet (the six who were on today telling their success stories) Bob Greene wants a million. And apparently, you only have to pay *less than $5 a week to get in on the deal! Feh.

Talk about the new math! Yet another gimmick. *sigh*

Okay, so I'm not doing so well on my own. I can see that. But should I pay Bob Greene and Harpo Industries so I can fail and be broke? I don't think so.