Chronicles of a Late Bloomer

It occurs to me that the two thoughts that have been bouncing around my head may be more related than I am giving them credit for.

The first is a buzzing halo of “hmmm” circling around a story I heard on the local news this morning. Apparently, a man was found dead in a parked car, on which sat a parking ticket. Investigators think he may have been dead when the ticket was issued.

The second thought is a general sense of gratitude and bewilderment about my current frame of mind. I have been thinking, in recent days, about how emotionally effortless this round of dieting has been, and wondering what makes it different from all of my other attempts. I have allowed myself to make 80% “perfect” choices and 20% “other.” Honestly, even my “other” choices are not nearly as wild as they once were; we’re not talking chocolate eclairs and ice cream sundaes so much as whole-wheat sourdough french toast that I make for company, or mango with sticky rice (my ultimate weakness). I’m hesitant to say this out loud, but I have — even on weeks where I didn’t focus too much on it — been able to consistently lose weight. It’s slow going, yes, but it’s consistent.

Now it occurs to me that perhaps these two thoughts are connected. I am beginning to think that all of the years I spent in working on myself — intensive psychotherapy to hunt out my binge-eating issues, journaling, painting, reading, trial and error, self-talk — is beginning to pay off. I simply don’t need food as I once did; although I need it physically, I don’t need it emotionally.

It’s still difficult for me to make time and energy for cooking healthy food. Honestly, I am tired of doing dishes and each time I pack my lunch in tupperwares, my dish duty quadruples. (Oh, for a dishwasher!) I struggle to find time and energy for official exercise, but I do make an effort to take the stairs and park at the far end of the lot. All in all, though, I am sleeping well and setting good boundaries and taking time to be careful with myself.

I guess the connection between my two morning thoughts is this: for years and years, I focused on the symptoms, rather than the causes, of my internal and external distress. In essence, I gave myself punitive parking tickets in the midst of a life-and-death crisis. Years later, all of that awful, slogging, introspective work seems to finally be bearing fruit.

We’ll see how this all holds up as I approach the 300-pound mark — a mark that I have never been able to cross in my adult life. But, for today, I am calm and at peace. It’s a nice feeling.