I’ve wanted to make such a post, following my previous ‘explanation’, and it took me more than one or two days to put it together… but here it is. Warning, this is going to be long. Hence the time I needed to finish typing it.
During the past days, in between revising and the rest (fortunately I’m off work until the 14th!), I’ve been reading again some of my old entries here, and this gave me much food for thought (yes, pun intended).
First, I must say that at the time I wrote all those entries, it wasn’t an act–I really believed in it, I really thought I was understanding many things about me, my ways of eating, my ways of living, what I had to do to improve it all, etc. And those posts still stand as of today. I’m still aware that exercise breeds exercise, that the human mind is able to find pretty much any kind of excuse in the world to pop a quarterpounder in the mouth of its owner, or that my Inner Brat is… a brat.
However, I’m now coming to terms with a fact that may or may not seem a little sad. That of one huge trigger I hadn’t been able to get rid of, hadn’t even considered, hadn’t even be aware of at the time. That of boredom.
I’m not the worst overeater in this world, and I’ve very seldom gone on huge binges during which I could sniff 6,000 calories in one sitting. That’s probably what has prevented me from doing more harm to my body yet. Nevertheless, I do have a couple of triggers that regularly tend(ed) to plague me, and the worst of all–and the one that has caused me the most problems–is boredom. It was, and it still is. I know it.
The thing is, there was one huge boredom factor I had forgotten to take care of, and that was… my life. All that simply. My life as a whole.
It was nice thinking at first “I work part-time only and from home, this gives me plenty of time to exercise!”. But the truth is, I was bored. My job was/is neither the best nor the worst job, it’s just average–not too stressful, nor exciting. Average, paper-pushing job, in a way. Nothing to see, please move away, citizen. I could have tried to get another one. In fact, I did. But in the area where I lived, there wasn’t anything in my field of skills. I would have had to dive into a long daily commute again (which had almost sent me into depression before that), or move to another town for the whole work week, which would have kind of defied the purpose of living with my then-boyfriend. So I didn’t do it.
And my whole life was boring. Being in a huge house, all day long, alone with our dog (poor little one, I must have been bad company at times). Living in the country, to which I’ve never managed to adapt no matter my efforts and desire to do so. No hopes for a better career. No meeting new friends, because all there was in that village was a bunch of old people (no offense, but they don’t exactly like RPGs and comics) and the other things I like). The nagging feeling of my life being ‘finished’ before it had really started. Unconsciously, I would avoid contemplating what was left to me, but the truth was there all the same: I was setting myself for a housewife’s life, except that I didn’t want children (still don’t), didn’t want a house, and wanted a full-time job instead. After all, I did hold a License degree in History, and two years worth of training in graphic-design applied to advertisement matters. Was that supposed to go to the drain?
So I did feel my ‘clicking moment’ for weight loss. However, after a while, and in spite of maintaining regular exercise, I think boredom insidiously got the best of me again. I would overeat on raspberries and good cheeses instead of cookies, yet this was still too much. And after a while again, exercise started going down the drain as well. I didn’t even pay attention. After all… why striving for a nice, healthy body that nobody ever got to see, and for a life that was pretty much annoying and done with? It wasn’t something I could fight with simple “find yourself a garden activity or whatever else will keep your hands busy”. Since my life itself was the problem… there was only one solution. Which I have found now.
Somehow, 2006 was a first step in the right direction, when I understood that the stir in me about teaching, that had been lasting for more than one year, wasn’t a whim, but a calling. I had a goal again. It helped me not gaining more weight than what I had again piled on (I never went above 68-ish kgs at that time, though, but blah, was that a loooong relapse, not to say a collapse, even!). Then the stress of getting settled in a new kind of life in the city where I now live, then breaking with my boyfriend after more than 6 years of dating and living together, went on poisoning me–but here again, no emotional eating, no stress-eating, and above all, no boredom-eating. It’s not like my life is empty, right, between work and college. I’m in a city again. I’m a city-girl. I love it. I can’t be bored in a city, juste because it IS a city. This may seem dumb, but heh, it’s true. I know it, now.
(What did me in during most of the schoolyear, though, was the lack of time and money; life here is more expensive than where I used to live in 2005, and it’s only now that I’m getting the hang of the prices in supermarkets, that I’ve managed to find time to compare said prices enough, etc. There was also the ramen-eating student mode, and being convinced–again–that if I ate a pack of cookies for lunch instead of buying veggies and meat, I’d be able to save up money for more books. Which is, unfortunately, too true.)
I don’t know what the future has in store for me. Maybe I will relapse again someday. Maybe I will have lapses. No–surely I will experience lapses. I will never have ‘perfect eating’; I will likely always like bretzels and a couple of those things that I ’shouldn’t eat’. I won’t be able to cram in 2 hours of exercise every day during midterms and finals, or maybe not during the 8 months of schoolyear themselves.
But no matter what, whether I decide to get up again after a lapse and go is my own choice. And my life is full of promises again. And those promises, I want to meet them with a healthy, lighter body.
That’s all.
