| Week of 12/29/2016 - Featured Blog Post
B is for Building Something Better
Okay, here's the truth. Over the last few months, in that place on your SparkPage where you can type in your status, I would type things like, "After several days of eating well and exercising, I feel great!" Or "Not overeating or drinking alcohol for several days has given me a spring in my step."
Those statements appearing sporadically on my page were all true. Every time I happily wrote such words, I had been doing great on nutrition and exercise and was feeling unbounded hope. But there was a clear pattern. I would do very well for several days (usually four or five, sometimes only three), and then the magic would disappear. And the subject and tone of my feed would change abruptly. "Worked in the yard today," I might write, or "enjoying the cool weather over here," or "going to visit mother-in-law at her nursing home tomorrow." All the while having an offstage free-for-all. You would never see on my feed what was really happening, which was "sat on the sofa after the others had gone to bed, watching news about the 2016 election, drinking beer and eating chips and for dessert ice cream or maybe a loaf of frozen banana bread." I was lying by omission.
What my friends almost never saw on my feed was what was happening when the subject shifted away from nutrition and fitness, the times I wondered why I was still present at SparkPeople. What was my rationale for being here when I could not even maintain promises to myself for more than three days in a row? The way I often felt this past year made me understand why sometimes someone will suddenly vanish from the SP community, usually without saying goodbye. They will shockingly delete their accounts without warning, or they will leave their pages up but cease all activity and leave messages unanswered. At first, whenever this happened--the vanishing into thin air of someone with whom I had felt close and in some cases had had affectionate daily contact with--I would naturally wonder, as I am too quick to do, if it was my fault. Had I said something offensive or hurtful that had made them decide to leave? If their pages were still up, I would go back and see if I'd said something unintentionally insensitive. Or maybe I had paid too much attention to them and creeped them out?
But from my own complex feelings over the past year, I've come to understand that the more likely reason for someone's abrupt departure from SparkPeople is that she is no longer motivated to lose weight and wrongly sees herself as a failure. If I can't even take care of myself, she might think, as I have thought, then surely I have nothing to give to others and it's embarrassing not to meet my stated goals in such a public forum, so I might as well disappear from the scene. Just as some of my treasured SparkFriends have faded away, I have been tempted to do the same. With lowered morale, I have imagined leaving. Whenever I think it through, however, I feel grief at the idea of leaving behind my precious friends who are still here, of missing out on the almost daily contact and giving up the fun and fulfillment of following my friends' stories and having them follow mine. So for a while I considered compromising, trying to get what I thought I wanted by writing this: "Buttonpopper1 is giving up trying to be healthy but would like to stay here and keep being friends because I would miss you too much if I left. I'll just focus on stuff not related to weight and fitness."
And that would have been okay, I think. Nobody here judges people for not losing weight, and everyone is welcome, no matter the magnitude of his or her BMI.
But lo and behold, I have been Sparked with new motivation, and the knowledge that I can't go on the way I've been living, or not living. I can't explain why this is happening at exactly this moment--maybe a whole bunch of conscious and unconscious reasons--but it is suddenly so very clear that overeating has played a huge role in my inability to live life to the fullest. Overeating has made me lethargic, fearful, moody, irrational, forgetful, apathetic, angry, regretful, and withdrawn. Overeating may not have the same negative effects on everyone, but I can say unequivocally that it has lowered the quality of my own life, both physically and spiritually. I am ready to change, to build a new and better life.
I've never built anything bigger than a bookshelf (which was hard for me, ha ha), but I've seen big buildings going up, and it is a magnificent process that makes me proud to be a part of the human race and envious of architects and engineers. As a non-expert, I'll tell you one thing--it would take more than a lifetime to finish a building if every few days you tear down the part you've just completed. That's what I've been doing, and I realize I'm going to have to put a stop to this construction/destruction game. I'm building a new way of taking care of my health, and this will be a big job that will take time and bring about steady progress, as long as I don't quit or destroy what I've already done. No more willful destruction. That just doesn't make any sense. It's time to get the place built and move on IN.
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