ejshea.com – Erin Shea

I’m 34 today. I have to admit that I’ve been saying I’m 34 for months now, because I’ve officially arrived at a time in life where how old you are becomes a bit irrelevant.

But I’m 34 and while it doesn’t seem like a big deal, I like an excuse to make a list. Seriously, I love lists. Love them. I make several each day, for work, for our life, for events…my birthday shouldn’t be any different. And for someone who so loves making lists, I’m sorta amazed that I never make them for my birthday. And I’m going to pick 34 things to do, for obvious reasons, but they need to be things with heft since 34 isn’t a whole lot to do in a year. I should be able to hack it, right? Some of these will be altruistic, some of them totally selfish, a couple will probably be pretty lame.

So here goes:

The 34 Things To Do Before 35

1) Get pregnant. This seems like a gimmie, but yeah. And it probably shouldn’t be on a to-do list, but there it is. We haven’t been active in this pursuit since February – well, officially, ahem, wink wink – but I’ve got one more “Let’s make sure this is what it is” test and then we go and see an RE to start getting to the bottom of things.

2) Plant a garden in the yard. I mean, a REAL one. A serious one. I’m going for raised beds, serious plants. We have tons of room in our yard, and after watching Food, Inc., it’s hard for me not to be a little more proactive about where we’re getting our food.

3) Choosier food choices. OK, so I’ve said that Scott and I made a decision last year to spend our money on our food. We eat organic options when they’re available, and avoid dairy and meats with antibiotics…you know the drill. Most of this seems like common sense to us. But then, yeah, we watched Food, Inc. and the humanitarian implications that come with not being mindful of where we’re getting our foods? That was as deplorable as the conditions in which our food is produced. My goal is to spend our food dollars locally, organically and in-season as much as possible.

4) Finish another triathlon. I finished the Danskin tri in 2003. That was SEVEN years ago. I did a half marathon this year. The triathlon seems like cake in comparison. Of course I need to find a pool, but swimming is my strongest of all three sports. I’ve got till August 22nd. I’m all over it. I know this seem silly since I want to get pregnant, but I said the same thing about the half-marathon and had I let the chance of getting pregnant stop me,  I wouldn’t have done it. I’ll cross that bridge if I get to it. I also will need a new bike. Gah.

5) Do more yoga. I like who I am when I do yoga, even just 20 minutes worth.

6) Take a vacation with my husband. It’s been almost a year since we’ve taken a trip, which is no big deal, but we could at least use a weekend. Or a week in Cancun. Which is what we’re aiming for.

7) Continue to work on the obsessive stuff. It’s hard, but it’s worth it. In the few short weeks that I’ve been applying these practices into my life, I’ve already had so many lights flip on that I’m ashamed that I’ve been walking around in the dark this long.

8 ) Get better about returning e-mails. I don’t know why so many of you keep writing to me, as I suck as getting back to people right away. You’re all so kind and warm and generous – seriously. I blame it on being at a computer and two Blackberries all day. I get home, sometimes I just crash. Gotta work on this.

9) Send birthday cards. This also means 10) Obtain and write down everyone’s birthday.

11) Stop being such a nag. I am uptight and naggy. My poor husband, I don’t know how he handles it. I need to chill the heck out. If the bed isn’t made or the dishes are piled up, the world won’t end.

12)  Read our weekly Economist from front to back (mostly) every week. Sometimes that thing is just a behemoth and getting through it feels like a part-time job. Still. A woman cannot rely on the Trib, CNN.com, the NYT and Newsweek alone.

13) Paint and recarpet the three-season room and back porch.

14) Money managing. Now that we’re out of debt – sans that mortgage and a small student loan – we’ve got extra money that we’re putting aside. With Scott still being out of work, we’re obviously not putting away as much as we did, but we’re hopeful he’ll be working again soon. When that happens, I’d like to do something with our non-emergency money that actually makes us money. We have a couple of IRAs and my 401(k), but I imagine it’s time to do something a bit more aggressive. Or something.

15) Take a class. I need to do something after work other than just collapse and sleep. I still want to learn how to knit.

16) Sponsor at least two families at Christmas. Every year, through our church, Scott and I sponsor a family’s Christmas. There is no reason why we couldn’t do two.

17) Volunteer with Night Ministry again. My old job kept me from keeping that commitment and I had to quit. My new job embraces volunteerism a bit more warmly so there isn’t an excuse for me not putting this back on my calendar.

18) Catch the earlier train. I’m always at work before 9 a.m., but I could use about 20 extra minutes to ground myself for the day, before things get nutty. It means getting out the door 15 minutes earlier. I can find this.

19) Say “when.” I drink about once or twice a week. Mostly a couple of glasses of wine. Or a martini. But when I get together with friends, I have one or two more than I need. And so it’s not as though I’m getting sloshed or anything, but I’m at an age where one extra glass of wine, or one extra martini means I’m tired and slow the next day. It’s hard to realize that you just don’t metabolize alcohol the way you used to. I mean that literally. It’s hard and painful and usually means a lot of Diet Coke, something I gave up drinking with any sort of regularity a long time ago.

20) Remodel the bathrooms. Or at least tear down the awful wallpaper. The fixtures in our bathrooms are pretty cheap, and a big remodel will be needed for both, one of which will probably include a bigger remodel of the upstairs. Dare to dream.

21) Finalize will and life insurance. We need better life insurance. And a will that wasn’t done on a template on my computer.

22) Buy a new car. We just paid off our car, so of course I want a new one. It’s six years old, and it’s small, and my client is Chevy and I am in love with the new Equinox. And I’ve driven the total souped up version, which is the one I must have. I promised Scott, though, that we could wait until the Fall. It will be a long, hot summer.

23) Learn how to cook some new meals. I make most of our stuff from Clean Eating magazine, and anything that seems to go well together. Once a week, I should try something new. That takes some patience and skill.

24) More Glin time. The dog deserves more walks. I’m just saying. That big yard is great, but she loves a good walk.

25) Real bedding and linens. I don’t want to reveal the state of our towels and bedsheets. They’re fine, but perhaps it’s time to invest in a few more items.

26) Volunteer in the neighborhood. We just joined our local group, so this shouldn’t be too hard, but I really do want to meet some people in the area.

27) Go a week without spending money. I don’t mean on bills or gas or whatever, but on random things we just don’t need. 28) Give the money we don’t spend to a local charity.

29) Blog at least three times a week. We’ll see how this goes.

30) Hold my tongue. Oh, the gossipy mutterings that come from my mouth. So, so sad.

31) Make French fries. This seemed as good as any goal. Tastier, too.

32) Go on one of Margaret’s tours. Also bring people with me!

33) Finish using all of my Bikram and yoga pass classes. I have nine classes coming to me. This would help kill #5, too.

34) Relax. I take life way too seriously. Seriously.

I didn’t count a single calorie this week. Not even the ice cream. Or the grapefruits. Or the …you get the idea.

I feel like this is progress, considering a week ago the idea of not counting a calorie paralyzed me. On Monday I made the decision to just not track anything. Not how many calories I burned or didn’t, steps I took…none of it. It was freeing. I talked a lot more about politics with the time I got back. Though most of that talk was trying to understand the Tea Party movement and I’m not getting that back either. Still, much more constructive use of my brain power, I think.

But it’s all still not sunshine, roses and uncovering hypocrisy over here. Last night I had a bit of a meltdown because, well, not really sure why. I said it was because nothing fit and, as we were getting ready to go to dinner to celebrate my upcoming birthday, I wanted to look cute. Yes, there, I said it – cute. But the truth is that it wasn’t that anything I put on didn’t fit, as it did. I just didn’t like any of my options and that part pissed me off. I had an idea of what I wanted to look like and that wasn’t going to happen last night. I worked all day, so I didn’t plan ahead, and I could have whipped up something more presentable, but there wasn’t time and OH MY GOD NONE OF THIS WOULD BE HAPPENING IF I HADN’T GAINED 15 POUNDS!

Sigh. This is where the obsessive person’s brain goes when she’s used to blaming everything on her poor, defenseless body.

I got over myself, had a couple of martinis and some red meat and slept in this morning.

This week’s progress included:

Eating when I was hungry. This was a tough one since my schedule gets really wonky and jam-packed with meetings. It’s not like I can just go ahead and eat lunch at 2 p.m. because I am finally hungry. I think I am figuring out that I’m just going to have to let go of lunch and just eat when I can, and at my desk, because my job is what it is. I’m OK with that. Other than the lunch issue, the other “issue,” if it’s fair to call him that, is my husband.

He’s spent years now with me and my food issues, and one of them is me needing to eat when I’m hungry or I’ll go ballistic. The problem, of course, was not that I was as much hungry for food, but rather hungry for something else and food sated whatever it was that was making me angry. So of course  now I’ve conditioned him to tell me when to eat so that he doesn’t have to watch me spazz out like a child. So yesterday I worked all day, but around 2 p.m. I was hungry, but not terribly so, and grabbed some mixed nuts from Starbucks to eat with my skinny Cinnamon Dolce Latte. I felt fine. Scott, however, told me I needed to eat more since we were still a few hours away from all of that red meat.

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

“But you should eat,” he said.

“I will eat only when I am hungry and I am not hungry right now,” I said, firmly.”I trust that I know when I need to eat and so should you.”

He sighed and backed off.

We’ve been having daily discussions, he and I, about all of this stuff I’ve been exploring. I don’t pretend that it’s easy for him to understand any of this, but I’m lucky in that he’s so supportive of whatever it is I need to do. Just the same, he worries about me, and does his best, like any partner, to take care of me and provide for me. Scott views things through a filter of experience, and that experience has taught him to tell me to eat when I’m not eating because without it I go nuts.

Never mind that in those past instances I was probably not really hungry, so I just didn’t eat, which is no big deal. Instead of owning that, I’ve used how little I eat on any given day as an excuse to later devour everything in my path because of whatever happened that day that I didn’t deal with constructively, and if I don’t cram my gullet with something soon I might actually have to deal with whatever it was that was upsetting me, and probably get angry, and I hate hate hate being angry.

This isn’t exactly his fault, you know?

So yesterday, after Scott backed off, I went into the bedroom and tried to fall asleep. That wasn’t happening, sadly, and so I watched some TV. Screwed around on the computer. After about two hours, I was hungry. I had some granola. I fought the urge to feel guilty about it – an hour away from a special dinner, etc. – but it was hard not to think I was rationalizing being tired and unable to sleep, and therefore eating as a result, as opposed to actually being hungry. Could I have just waited? Probably. Did I suck down a pile of granola? No. Still…

I did the same thing earlier in the week, when we were still a ways from eating dinner and I was hungry. Had some crackers and cheese. Scott commented on me spoiling my dinner, and I said that I would eat when I was hungry and trusted myself not to spoil my dinner, whatever that means. Responding in that manner feels awkward and new age-y and a bit infantile, but it’s important to say it and to eat. Otherwise, I’ll just get upset and resort to kicking myself for being so weak as to want something to eat, what with dinner being so close. Again, the practice is about exorcising those voices and not make eating such a gawd-awful ordeal. All that said, I probably could have waited. I didn’t spoil my dinner, but then again, I didn’t finish it all.

Which brings me to the next learning…

Leaving something on the plate. This wasn’t a huge deal for me, but I still think I’m struggling with the concept of not eating till I’m uncomfortably full and not feeling as though I have to have portions the size of which would feed me for eternity. I don’t like feeling full, and yet I tend to eat to that point. Walking away before I get stuffed is a tough one, for a few reasons, all of which center on psychological reasons for obsessive eating:

1) Obsessive eaters tend to eat to fill some void. Full stomach = no void. Leaving before that sensation kicks in is a bit scary.

2) I have no idea how to eat. Some people put their forks down and pause and talk and enjoy other things. Usually my fork looks like a blur as it’s moving so fast between my plate and my pie hole.

3) I might never have BLANK for the rest of my life. This is part of diet talk, and all dieters know it. You think that because you shouldn’t eat something, say, ice cream, because of what impact it will have on your diet, the times you do have it, which tend to actually be more often than not, you eat it in copious amounts because tomorrow your diet will start, and you won’t be able to know ever again what real ice cream tastes like, and unless you deny yourself the ice cream you will die alone with a pack of wolves feasting on your fat corpse.

A lifetime of dieting has programmed me into believing that whenever I eat something particularly decadent, I don’t deserve it and need to punish myself with calorie restriction. Starting tomorrow. After I’ve polished off the rest of it. In one sitting. Stomach pain be damned.

I can have certain foods in the house, as I’m not that sort of eater. But sometimes I’ll get a taste for something – ice cream, tortilla chips – and instead of just having that taste, my brain goes berserk and before you know it I’ll have bitten the head off of the solid chocolate rabbit that’s been in our downstairs refrigerator since Easter. And I don’t even like those things. I stopped trusting myself a long, long time ago.

So this week will be more about practicing how to eat as though my emotional state was not dependent upon it. To be actively engage with the process – seriously, all of that seemingly stupid shit with putting my fork down and chewing, etc. I’m eating at tables now, and not counting calories, and having what I want when I’m hungry, so this should be a pretty decent compliment to what I’ve already been working on. Maybe not look at my husband and give him the “I am not hungry” mantra so much, and maybe just say no thank you.

In her book, Geneen Roth talks about how after you learn to eat those foods you’ve always forbidden yourself from having, you tend to stop viewing them as some holy grail. I think this process happens in tandem with learning to quit being so hard on yourself and doing only those things that make you happy because you deserve it. I’m finding that to be true. This is probably why there is a box of Kashi cookies in our house and I haven’t eaten one. I’ve had ice cream, and I’ve enjoyed it, and I really don’t want a cookie on top of that, even now that we have no ice cream in our house. This is all perfectly OK with me. My sister dropped off a mess of cupcakes on Friday. I had one after dinner that night, and I didn’t like it, and I haven’t touched the rest.

The fact that there are a pile of cupcakes in my house and I’m not eating them is amazing. I adore cupcakes. Turns out? What I really adore are cupcakes that taste good to me, when I’m in the mood for them.

I am starting to easily see how, as you start to clear all of this bullshit self-hate and doubt out of the way, you start to crave eating healthier things because it’s a way of taking care of yourself, as opposed to a way to keep a muffin top from forming. I like eating healthy, and do for the most part, but I’ve never viewed doing so through the prism of being nice to myself. Usually it’s just because I am concerned about the size of my behind.

This also is why I’m going to get back out there and start running again this week. I am officially beginning to miss it, now the weather is warmer and the sun rises earlier.  It’s time to answer the call and just go run, and not worry whether it’s far enough to burn X calories or to condition me for further miles.  I like running about four miles, and that’s it. So, that’s all I’m going to do.

I turn 34 on Tuesday. I feel pretty good about what this next year is going to bring.

So my old magazine shuttered its doors today.

I worked at Restaurants & Institutions magazine from 2003 until 2006, and my time there were three of the happiest years I’ve had in my professional career. Aside from the Peoria Journal Star, I’ve never worked anywhere else as long as I worked there. It helped that my best friend worked there, too.

It’s not right for me to be terribly mopey about a place I worked at almost four years ago – several people there I care about greatly still work there (see best friend), and its sister publication, and what they’re going through begs that I not indulge too much in what is really their pain. Just the same, it is the first place I worked at that didn’t make it through all of this, and because it was an experience I look back on with fondness, I am sad about its closing.

I learned how to appreciate really great food there. I met some amazing people in the local and national food scene – it is still a point of pride that I don’t watch Top Chef without having met and or interviewed more than a handful of big-name chefs on the show.

(David Burke was on Wednesday’s Top Chef Masters show, and I remember how I spent my 30th birthday having lunch at his place here in Chicago, and how we came to the table to say hello and wish me a happy birthday.)

More than anything, I grew up there, and the people who worked there helped me get through the most challenging and difficult period of my life. They put up with my shenanigans, when a lesser place would have tired of my depression and sadness. I found support and professional growth from my bosses and colleagues, and I do to this day.

It’s sad to learn it – and so many like it – couldn’t be saved.

I was walking up the stairs to our second floor Saturday afternoon and it felt like our house was hugging me tight.

I know what that sounds like, I do, but I can’t help it. As the sun sets it busts through the glass window blocks of the bathroom on the second floor and warms the sitting area outside of it. And I don’t know if it’s the carpet or the fact that the house is 86-years-old but there is this clean, warm smell that, when I hit the top steps, envelopes me.

Particularly noteworthy is that it was at this spot, minus the sun and smell and warmth, that Scott and I looked at each other and knew this was the house we’d make our home.

We’ve had many, many people ask us if we regret the decision to buy a home. This makes me shake my head so vigorously I worry it will fall off in the process. We love our home. I mean love. It is cozy, quiet and in good shape. It’s old and has character and has lots of light and friendly neighbors and, really, just everything we could have asked for. I feel like we’ve lived here for much, much longer than just a little more than four months.

I walk to work daydreaming about the flowers I’m going to plant. It dawned on me that I can plant a lilac bush if I want, which makes me ridiculously happy. We’re sprucing up the three-season room next month, along with the porch. Probably not much will go into this summer’s gardening – we’d like to live in the space a bit before doing too much. We have removed all of the ivy, and we’ll cut down the very ugly tree in the middle of the two bushes out front, and we’ll install flower boxes under the windows, but that’s about it.

This has been the best decision we’ve ever made. It’s a happy place.

A quick note to everyone who has emailed and left comments about my post:

THANK YOU.

Admittedly it’s still a bit nerve-wracking to bare that much, even after all of these years, but I maintain that it’s important to do. The bonus is the support and kindness I receive from you guys, and it means the world.

I got to meet Geneen Roth this week – she did a reading here in Chicago – and it was lovely. The thing that was striking about the reading was the conversation afterward, and the introduction of support for a “program” like hers. I put that in quotations as, aside from her retreats, I don’t know that there is anything traditionally program-y about what she’s talking about. Nonetheless, these life changes work best when you feel less alone – hence the success of Weight Watchers, I think.

Instead of getting support in the form of some idea of willpower and self-control, this idea centers around the idea of support for not dieting. It’s a revolutionary concept for women, especially for those of us who were conditioned to believe that there is something righteous and character-affirming about the torture that comes with being on a diet. Quite subconsciously, women who are seen as active dieters are treated with much more respect than those who don’t.

Unless you’re thin and don’t diet. Because then we just hate you.

Oy. We women are so awful to each other.

Here’s the deal: I support you in your efforts not to diet. I support you in your efforts to be nice to yourself, and not say those awful, self-doubting phrases that sap you of your creative energy and keep you from doing things that are way more fun, like having sex, going out with your friends or solving world hunger. Because I don’t think it’s too far off that if women stopped fucking around with worrying about the size of our thighs that we could have taken care of a whole mess of problems by now.

I support you in your efforts to learn how to trust yourself, to like yourself, to live a life that doesn’t include beating yourself up about food. It’s just a fucking cookie, after all.

After this week of actively beginning to apply some of these ideas to my life, I can tell you I have a few learnings:

• My body really just doesn’t like bread. It just doesn’t.
• I didn’t work out once – save for the three miles I walk every day for my commute, which I suppose really does count – and I got a lot of sleep and it was great.
• I wasn’t able to step away from my desk to eat lunch without the computer and clearly it’s a crutch. Next week, we’re going to try eating downstairs in the cafeteria.
• The idea of not counting my calories scares the shit out of me. I did it all week and I’m not really ready to break that habit for the moment.

Anyway, that’s it for this week. More next. Thanks again everyone. I really appreciate it.

I don’t know that it’s a secret that I’ve struggled with food.

As someone who was/is best-known for her weight-loss efforts and body image commentary, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there is more to the story than all that weight I lost several years ago. All that attention. All those races. All those … things.

(I’m not even sure where to begin here, at the risk of being – ahem – melodramatic.)

I’ve talked at great length about my food binges of the past – the sushi I would order in mass quantities, the candy bars I devoured – but I suppose since those binges don’t occur with the same gusto that they once I did, I neglect to mention them. That and I got incredibly tired of always talking about my weight, my body and what it all meant.

If I’m honest, it was a little less than two years ago, when I fielded what has been the final email/call from a national magazine that asked me, again, to talk about being the poster child for weight-loss bloggers in some fashion, that I just kinda broke. I no longer believed in Weight Watchers or corporate-sponsored diet plans …

…though I should admit it didn’t stop me from signing up again, a time or two, late at night, after a bowl of Ben and Jerry’s, because I was certain that I needed it again …

…I really hated the idea that all of this was about losing weight…

…because I still berated myself, daily, about my weight, and what a “fraud” I was, even when I briefly reached 138 pounds…

…as I was certain, sure as anything, that there was more to me than my body, and I had to start figuring out who in God’s name she was…

…even if simultaneously I kept thinking that eventually I would be thinner and it would all stop being so fucking hard…

…before it was too late.

And then there was the thyroid. Oh, the thyroid. It wasn’t until mine got all jacked up did I truly understand what I learned all those years ago, that it would change over time and I’d constantly live a life in service to monitoring it. And then I went and took a job where I was so stressed that  I ate 15 pounds of that stress onto my body.

I’m not necessarily bemoaning being 160 pounds because, you know, I do believe it’s just a number, but boy howdy do I hate seeing all of that misery reflected back at me in pictures. My face is puffy and stripped of much spark. My hair is dry and brittle, despite my best efforts. I don’t look like me at all. And I don’t feel like me either – tired, oh I’m so tired.

I don’t really know how I managed to train and complete that half marathon. I really don’t, because some days it’s all I can do to get out of bed I’m so exhausted.

Then we couldn’t/aren’t getting pregnant. And my husband lost his job. I could feel my brain get numb. In and out. In and out. Cope. Cope. Cope. Always the little coper, the little trooper. Move. Move. Move.

I ate…something, I don’t really remember. It wasn’t important. Or I drank a bunch of wine. I binged on something. Not with the unbridled manner of the old days, but does volume matter? The voices took over, the ones that give me permission to feel something and to cope enough to move along. Just as I did with the job stress. Just as I did as a kid when things got hard.

I got a notification that Oprah.com was following me on Twitter. Oprah.com had given me a shout out over their Twitter stream,  after I sent folks their way, and I soon got a notice someone else was following me, someone who seemed Oprah-esque, if you’ll excuse the term. The follower was Geneen Roth, and I remembered my friend Amy telling me how much she loved her work. I headed over to Oprah.com and noticed that Oprah says we all should be reading Roth’s latest book.

(It used to be my job to read everything Oprah says to read so maybe old habits die hard.)

I acknowledged before that job loss ranks with my largest fears in life. And while a couple days into Scott being unemployed, I was OK, and it was only later when Glin tried to dig out under the fence, to reach a racquetball next door, that something in me snapped a little. I think the fear of losing Glin was more than I could handle, irrational as though it may seem, but maybe not to a person whose first dog was hit by a car, whose other dog constantly escaped from the yard by digging under the fence.

I couldn’t keep coping coping coping. I just couldn’t, mostly because I wasn’t, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to without something giving somewhere. And I’d already been saying so many awful things to myself because the scale hadn’t budged, and because I’ve been so preoccupied and well…

I picked up one of Geneen’s books the next morning on my way to work. I read it in two days. I was tired of hating myself for things I couldn’t do much about. Every time I ran five miles, every time I made a salad, every time I didn’t do either, I just hated that I have this body that malfunctions on every level.

I can’t lose weight.

I have migraines every other day.

I have black hairs all over my face.

I wake up with stomach pains regularly.

My hair falls out.

I can’t conceive a child.

The shameful amount of time and energy I have spent hating my body is ridiculous, over something that my doctors have already said is not my fault. It’s just my body. And yet? I punish myself and make judgments about my character because I want a TLC Kashi Dark Chocolate Oatmeal cookie, or because since the half marathon I’ve only worked out three times a week.

And holy shit – I ran a half-marathon six weeks ago. I’ve fallen so far down a pit of self-loathing that I don’t even get excited or filled with pride for having done that. All I think about is how after all of that training I didn’t lose a pound, never mind that that sort of work and training rarely sees huge weight loss results OR that Lord almighty, I ran 13.1 miles without stopping or hurting myself for once.

I’ve always known and, for the most part, practiced a fair amount of love and care for myself, but in the past 18 months, there has been little of that. And I’ve found comfort in bad habits. One of the practices Roth discusses is the idea that we spend so much time trying to deny and punish ourselves, instead of trusting ourselves, that we sabotage ourselves in the process. Those oatmeal chocolate cookies? They’ve become such a huge thing for me. I love them. And yet? I will eat everything else in my path, but the cookie, because I don’t think someone who can’t lose weight should eat a cookie that contains 150 calories a pop. But you know what happens? Eventually, after all of that food, I can’t take it anymore and just eat the cookie. Followed by two more.

Should have just had the fucking cookie.

I am tired of telling myself I should eat grapefruit when what I really want is chocolate. And the thing is? I’m a healthy person, and I’ve learned what makes me happy is to be healthy, and because my entire body has turned into this nightmarish mess of screwed up hormones, I have stopped trusting myself and turned right back into dieting to control what, at best, can’t be controlled and shouldn’t. It’s OK that I’m hungry. There is nothing wrong with being hungry. It’s OK to want chocolate. What’s wrong is that I’m so incredibly sad and frustrated by what’s happened with my body that I don’t deal with that and love myself in spite of it.

Or maybe because of it. And then just have some chocolate. Because, you know, it’s just chocolate.

I didn’t want to not be present for what’s going on in our family right now. I knew it was time to stop some of this madness because these triggers with Scott’s job would just send me spiraling to a place I didn’t want to be. I knew the process would be painful and, for as much as I may have – ohmigod still do – wanted to use food to just numb this panic away, I knew it wouldn’t help. It didn’t when I was a kid and packed away 12 clandestine chocolate bars in a sitting, it didn’t when I was stressed out at work last year, and it won’t now.

I’m taking it day by day – do you know how hard it is for me to eat a meal with no distractions? Because this is one of the steps Roth instructs you to take, to eat a meal, sitting down, not reading or watching TV. Just sitting down and eating. For people who use food to cope or for comfort, this is radical and weird. I actually feel my palms get clammy when I think about it. This morning I was almost paralyzed by having to eat breakfast at my dining room table, instead of at my computer reading email and the paper, because the disruption to the thing that brings me so much happiness – eating and geeking out online – would have to part. It’s really similar to how I felt about writing when I gave up smoking. How would I ever relax again without a cigarette to guide me through?

I didn’t die this morning, or at dinner tonight when Scott suggested (because I haven’t been forthcoming just yet about this) we eat dinner at the table, but it’s still not easy. It means changing something that I take great joy and comfort in. Just the same, part of being present means being present while I’m eating and associating eating with, well, eating. I kinda forgot to do that at lunch, and I did bring my laptop to the table with me in the morning. Baby steps.

I’ve said this before, and I accept that I’ll deal with this my whole life, but I hate dieting, and I don’t want to get sucked into its lure again. It doesn’t actually help me lose weight, and it simply reinforces the idea that I don’t deserve to eat food, and Lord almighty is that ridiculous. Plus, you know, it doesn’t last. I want to focus my energies on things that are more exciting and fulfilling, and stop wasting my time counting calories.

I know what to eat and how much and what will make my body happy. I know if I’m not finding the energy to wake up every morning at 5 a.m. to hit the gym, it’s because I’m tired. It’s not because I’m an abject loser. It’s nice to be deep into a book (or five, because I have five of Roth’s books now) to remind me of that, to help me climb out of this hole I’ve dug myself into. I’m not worried about losing weight anymore, just about changing my relationship with what I put into my mouth.

The difference between the grapefruit and the chocolate is that there is no difference. Some days I’m going to want grapefruit, some days I’m going to want chocolate. It’s not more complicated than that.

For those of you interested in learning more about Roth and her books, I highly recommend beginning with When Food Is Love, but I imagine any of them are solid places to start. I’ve since heard from many, many people who have already read her on the recommendations of therapists and nutritionists. That said, I’ve also heard feedback that some people who are considered addicts don’t benefit from Roth’s work. So I guess I’m saying that your mileage may vary, read at your own risk, blah blah blah. For me, I’m finding her eating guidelines and general guidance to be incredibly helpful, but it may not be the answer for everyone.

I still highly recommend checking her out. Oprah will be featuring Geneen and her book on a show coming up in May.