V-Hold

I feel like my life is still in the v-hold of fine tuning.  Those of you from a younger generation will have no clue what I'm talking about.  When I was a child, televisions rarely had crisp, clean picture clarity, and there were two knobs on the back of the tv that adjusted the screen.  They were so far back that my arms could barely get to them, and my face would be stuck to the side of the television set as I strained to reach.  My sister and I would work as a team to fix the picture on the screen. I'd turn the knobs, and she would tell me when to stop. 

The first knob you'd adjust was the v-hold, or vertical hold, because sometimes the picture on the screen would move up and down or just start looping as if it were on some sort of cylinder that was spinning.  Once you got the v-hold steady, then you could move on to the finer tuning of the horizontal hold - that was what brought clarity to the picture. For those of you who are so young that you can't even picture this, there's some information (thankfully) on Wikipedia about v-hold, cathode ray tubes, and all that joy of years gone by before flat-screen televisions and plasma.

But here's the point: the vertical hold was the first thing that had to be adjusted.  You had to get the picture to stop spinning before you could fix it.  My body is on this cylindrical loop - and I realize now that I haven't made the proper adjustments to my attitude and discipline to move on to the finer tuning. In order to attain a proper v-hold, I have got to figure out what I want from this body - from this life.  I thought that weight loss was a simple mathematical equation: 1lb = approximately 3,500 calories.  Through a combination of calorie reduction and exercise, I did the math to figure out about how many pedestrian miles I would have to log to lose the total amount of weight I want to lose.  I didn't understand when I undertook this... this - reconstruction - what I wanted from it, other than the obvious desire to get off of the meds I currently require for Type 2 diabetes.

My sister sent me a book yesterday called, Women, Food, and God by Geneen Roth.  I generally prefer more of a bullet-point approach to self-help books, but this one takes a winding path that I am delighted to find that I enjoy. 

Here's the passage from the book that really got me thinking last night:
"...compulsive eating is basically a refusal to be fully alive. Those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can't stand it any longer, we binge."

Here is an absolute truth about me that is at the very center of all the ripples in all the waves I've created in my life: I hate emotional conflict.  More than anything in this world, I hate it when people fight, I hate it when I disappoint people, and I hate being disappointed.  I have virtually no conflict resolution skills... I appease; I do not resolve.  I have a borderline autistic personality when it comes to big emotions - they make me miserably uncomfortable, and I don't know how to express them in a "normal" manner.  It's like being lactose-intolerant with emotions - I don't have the necessary enzymes/tools to digest stressful situations.  I need a handbook to reference for appropriate responses to various struggles in life.

The book asks us to go back as far as we need to go in our memories to recall a time when everything was okay in our lives - when it was a pleasure to wake up and have the whole day ahead of you - when hope lived and nothing was wrong per se.  For some people they can't recall a time like that, and I am blessed because I can... but it was a loooong time ago.  A lot happened between 1985 and 2011, and I imagine I'll be spending some seriously introspective hours trying to piece out how I allow those things to affect me moving forward.  I'm also going to be looking into books at the library that directly address conflict resolution techniques, because it's clear to me that my only pleasure came from eating because it was the only pleasure that I alone could control.  It required no permission or denial from anyone else, so the only conflict with eating came from the easily-shushed inner voices.

It was published in the New York Daily News last week that a recent study shows eating fatty foods produces the same response in your brain as marijuana.  Here's the article.  Sadly, the research is being done so that drugs can be developed so that we, the helpless human race, won't have to do the hard work to stop ourselves from over-eating.

I don't want to dismiss weight-loss surgery, because I think that for some people it truly is the best available option.  People who will further damage their bodies by exercising - I think it's a godsend for them.  But I think a lot of the people who have had it feel like it was their only option, and they feel like it was a shortcut.  Because for most people it is a shortcut.  I did not gain 140lbs of excess weight in a short amount of time, and I didn't gain it by nibbling a bit more than I should have.  I gained it over 26 years, and I feel good about earning my new body the hard way because it will give my body a chance to move with me as I slim down... and it will be easy to maintain when I get to my goal because I won't have gotten to that goal through trickery or deprivation.  I will attain my goal by simply being healthier.  The weight of my body will reflect my daily decision to choose better health over inactivity and poor diet.

I believe in personal accountability, and I am accountable to my daughter and to myself.  I owe my child the best possible parent that I am able to be, and I owe it to her to try to be here for her as long as I am able to be here, because life is hard!  And if your mom is a good mom, you want your mom there to help you through the tough times.  I have been blessed to have my mother with me to help me raise my daughter.  Especially when she was an infant, I needed my mother to be there.  I want to be there for my daughter in that way.  I've taken it for granted that I have control over that.  For a long time I just assumed that I would live at least until my seventies.  Well, I did until I found out I was diabetic. And I am accountable to myself for having the life I dream of and making it as live-able and enjoyable as I want it to be.

This journey is making me brutally aware of the choices that I make, whether actively or passively.  It makes me sad to realize how many things were my decision to make that I just surrendered to the universe for no good reason.  It is important to actively choose happiness.  I may not be there yet, and it may be a couple of years of working through the cause and effects of 1985-2011 before I really figure all of this out.  But for now, anyway, I know that the path to happiness starts every morning on my treadmill, when I choose to return to the body I gave up on so many, many years ago.  It feels like having my face pressed against the side of the tv, struggling to reach around to the back: uncomfortable, but necessary for the end goal to be attained.