Monday, December 30, 2013

Futility, the pros and cons of expressing defeat

One stage, quite consequential in dieting, is the inevitable feeling of futility. If one has a genetic 'psycho-physical' predisposition to be fat... And you know who you are... You will feel defeated, on the bathroom scale of self-awareness, each and every New Year's Eve.

In your mind's now tearing eyes, you will walk through a dozen cycles of enthusiastic new beginnings... the Paleo Diet, Raw-Vegan, Low Carb, High Carb... Eating as a Pleasure, Eating as a Sin, Fasting for Penance, Fasting as a New-Age feel-good remedy... spilling out in a tangled web of impressions... swimming, cycling, walking, a whirlpool of sacrificial moments on the quest for less.

And then that inevitable sinking confirmation of defeat.  I have been this high before, fought myself down to a new exhilarating low, and then reluctantly watched the 'all too easy' weight gain back up the rudy scale. The bear climbed over the mountain. The bear climbed over the mountain, and what do you think he saw? He saw another mountain. He saw another damn mountain.

You can just climb so many mountains before tedium turns into disgust. So you feel the feeling. Futility pours its wicked scent from your skin, vaporizes in a foggy steam of discontent, and you resolve yourself to do better next year.

You don't know how, but you pledge anyhow... to try again. You had let go of perseverance, to fall back into gleeful decadence, and so now drenched in self-contempt, you take a shower under the purifying waters of again letting go.

Let go of hopelessness. Who needs hope anyhow?  Let go of all expectations. Feel the freedom to be without goals, and settle on being settled on being who you are. Post-futility, past defeat, uncomfortably aware that you are a fuck-up when it comes to maintaining your weight. Yet... comfortably aware that the opposite of over-weight is no weight at all.

In the celestial cesspool of after death probabilities, in which death is steeped in post-mortal weightlessness... angels and devils have no weight issues, and recycled Buddhists and Hindu are inevitably thin... Body weight is an issue only for the living.

Alive we are emphatically engaged in eating. And what we eat determines, in a greater or lesser extent, how long we get to live. So, like it or not, to live is to be on a diet. To eat well is to live a bit longer. Feel futile, if that's being honest.

Then go have a salad.