I Am Not A Diet Failure

I'm an emotional eater.

I can remember using food, specifically Butterfinger candy bars, as an emotional crutch as early as age 8. I would buy them at the YMCA after swim class on Saturday, stash them in my closet and then devour them in secret when the need arose. The need arose a lot.

Today has been really emotional for me. I have come to the realization that a relationship that I thought existed didn't because the other person is too ashamed to admit that there is something going on despite nearly a year of getting closer and closer. My weight loss to date be damned. The shallow opinions of mere acquaintances (not even real friends) means more to him than I do. It has been tough to deal with that realization. It is the denial of our friendship that hurts the most because that is what I had the most faith in. The worst part of it all is that he seems to believe that I should be okay with this arrangement, ready to pick up where we left off when it is convenient and safe for him to do so as if I am so deaf, dumb and blind that I wouldn't notice.

So I fell off the wagon big time! Well I didn't exactly fall off the wagon. It was more like asking the driver to pull over to the side of the road, come to a complete stop and allow me the chance to get off and make a well planned visit with old friends while waiting for me to come back and resume the trip.

I ate a HUGE breakfast. I don't mean slightly larger than normal, but a full on gorge fest. I ate meat (two kinds - bacon and chorizo). I ate eggs. I ate a whole lot of cheese. It was not pretty at all.

I slipped up. I fell down. Now it is time to pick myself back up again and forgive myself because it wasn't the first time and it certainly won't be the last.

I am re-reading PastaQueen's book, Half-Assed. When I read it the first time (around my 50th pound lost) I knew I would re-read it periodically in order to gain new perspective based on where I currently was in my own journey to lose half of me. Today was the perfect day to read the "I Should Know Better By Now" chapter. In it, she talks about planning to make and over indulge in muffins and feeling self disgust after she'd done it. But then she goes on to talk about how she isn't perfect:

I wasn't a 100 percent perfect dieter. No one was. If I fell out of bed, I wouldn't call myself a failure at sleeping. I'd get up and make a note to sleep toward the middle of the bed. My mother liked to say I was a work in progress. It was hard to progress if you were always perfect.

I am not a diet failure. In previous attempts at weight loss I've always been a diet quitter. But if I never quit, then I can never fail because failing is simply a result of giving up.

And in yet another bit of timely confirmation, Denise @ It's Not a Diet, It's a Weigh of Life... had a post today called Walking the Tight Rope.

In the WW meeting, we also talked about walking the "tight rope of weight loss" where you feel like you have to walk this narrow line of a diet and keep on plan, because if you fall off you just fall off completely and never get back on. Our leader stated that sometimes, you just got to get off the tight rope and take a different path worth walking that isn't so narrow and restrictive.

In the past that was me to a fault. I only saw that narrow line and didn't realize that there were different paths to be trod. So when I inevitably fell I would believe that I had to abandon it all because I hadn't been perfect. That isn't so this time. I don't feel this enormous pressure to stick to the thin line of perfectionism that so often fades because we can't even get near enough to see it properly. I know that I will mess up and I have to be okay with that. I can always start again.

I WILL start again.