Total Fatty

Here’s a little nugget to chew on. I was chatting with my diet-ditching coach Isabel Foxen Duke the other day, bemoaning my old “fat feelings” that cropped up after my yoga retreat.

I said something like “I know I know. Restricting my food won’t solve whatever it is I’m actually feeling. But the urge is real.”

She said something like “yeah. You know you always have that choice. You’re an adult. You can go back to dieting anytime.”

I laughed nervously and then said, without thinking it through: “yeah, but doing that would be just like when I tried to moderate my drinking. The year I started moderating/controlling my drinking is the year that shit really started to roll downhill for me. I felt so much crazier around booze once I started watching and managing it. And I drank way more. It spiraled so fucking quickly.”

Huh.

I doubt this is true for anyone else, but for me, I can clock my problematic drinking– the shit that scared me and felt out of my control – to the time when I started “managing” it.

And it makes sense as a lifelong compulsive dieter. I was putting myself on a booze diet, which meant that every time I drank from then on was my “last supper” drink before I had to get down to business and stop it. And unfortunately, because booze is addicting, the volume I drank messed up my brain chemistry and I wound up physically (or at least psychologically) addicted.

Weird.

Can’t turn back the clock now, but I wonder what might have been if I’d never tried to moderate. I guess I’ll never know. And honestly, it was probably a blessing in disguise to find myself in a downward spiral with booze.