Weight Until Light
August 17th 2012 · 0 Comments
Totally absurd as it may seem, I have learned to be afraid, very afraid of …
The Cupcake.
Yes, those small packed yumbly-yumble-yummies are more powerful than this 6 foot tall 48 year-old fellow. To be more accurate, the two related dominant ingredients of sugar and flour render me powerless and my life becomes unmanageable in their sticky clutches.
Ridiculous though it may appear, that I should say that sugar and flour have me beat, I must still acknowledge when I am bested. Left to my own devices, I would be right back at the game again, trying desperately to believe I can eat “responsibly” that which my body doesn’t need and that my mind can get obsessed on.
That in the nutshell is the nature of my addiction. My body doesn’t NEED to have the “Evil White Powders” or EWP’s as I like to call them. We have to pummel the true nutrition out of the wheat and the beets, the various sources of the flours and sugars out there, to get to the sweet and tender essences that respond so well to cooking.
Various concoctions may taste like a dream, but they have only created nightmares for me because I can’t stop once I start.
I can’t eat like other people. I don’t have an off button.
On initial meeting, people are flabbergasted when they offer me a sweet treat or a slice of bread, and I say “No thanks, I’ve had enough.”
I got up to almost 300 pounds before I really hit bottom. My genetics blessed me with a weight loss that surprises people when they hear that I was that big. I know though, that I could go back in a heartbeat.
Perspective instructs me that while I did hit bottom that bleak January, that every bottom has a trap door, and that it’s just for today that I don’t “do more research.” My top weight was achieved near a decade gone, not long after I endured one night where I literally could not fill up on the various bread/sugar products that I had been ingesting since I was 5 years old.
I’ve been able to maintain a weight loss of 110 pounds, with the help of others of like compulsive mind.
No one could talk to me about my eating then. I had basically resigned myself for decades that I was just going to be fat, and that was all there was to it. In my last year of the binge, I did try to diet and exercise more. But diets were not for me.
I cannot control my way into health.
No, I had to surrender, and the only way that would happen was if I got the gift of desperation.
Sugar and flour gave me shortness of breath and chest pains that made me wonder about the health of my heart. It caused aching joints and mood swings, and magnified my sense of isolation and loneliness in this cold and unforgiving world. These two sweet enemies proved to be the convincers, much like in the story of a recovering alcoholic for whom the grape and the hops bring the message home.
Today, I pray that I stay stopped.
Does this speak to you?
By Mark Ziobro
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