Sunday, March 23, 2008

Spring Salvation

This has been a long and emotionally challenging Winter.... as has been my conscious 'un-participation' in this blog. In fact, I came close to destroying all records of my struggle.

Firstly, instead of using this time to lose weight, I rebounded back to my highest weight ever. I seemed to languish in a self-destructive pattern of over-eating and avoiding motion, knowing full well I was manifesting symptoms of a depression. As my body manifested the sickly physical symptoms of obesity my emotional fatigue and social self-conscientiousness festered.

There are personal events that I might attribute this to, but that would be unfair, as I believe in 'taking responsibility for my actions' (and in this case in-action). Therefore I will take this time to try and analyze my behavior.

I began by genuinely attempting a raw vegan style cleanse. While my intentions and initial actions were both genuine and extravagant, flaws appeared and undermined my progress quickly. The pendulum swing between my 'Natural' cultural diet (i.e. meat and potato fast food, American raised in the 50's heritage) and the enviable ideals of the New Age 'Natural Vegan' diet, remains absurdly wide and profoundly ludicrous. I am unhappy on either end of the spectrum, and shaken even in the middle. I do not trust nor fully believe the radical claims of conspiracy and psydo-science professed by the left and intrinsically mistrust the established nutritionists and marketers on the right.

In my fantasies I hunger for a support group where I might eat in peace... yet what I love in most indigenous food cultures is less than what is best for me, and the dietary lifestyles of dietary scarcity, where I might again rediscover health and physical potency, all leave me feeling desperately out of sync. I feel inordinately hopeless and ashamed, having tried so many paths short of my goal. My website and personal history is a burial ground of failed methodologies.

There are moments in most days when I make a gesture toward moderation and pro-action, but these are all so short of what is needed. Thus the parallel to depression is obvious. I would so much like to fall into a pattern of healthful behavior, when what is really needed is a climb up into a precise long-term commitment, to what inevitably would be a brutally uncomfortable sacrifice.

A commitment and sacrifice which must span a longer time then I am presently prepared to make. Yet my survival depends on it... Witness the downwardly spiraling logic of the defeatist. How much I'd love to blame someone besides myself, to be swallowed up in a cult who would lavish me in supportive sensuality while purging me of all my addictive patterns. But instead I am being asked by circumstance to heal myself.

How tedious reality... how unmovable... how frightfully real. How the hell can I beat this looping mania?