The Waiting Game

Today is all about waiting for Mom's CAT scan results, which maybe will come today and maybe won't. But I feel like everything else in life is hanging on this, so it's hard to concentrate. But I need to just stick my head into some kind of work and get on with it.

But the good news is that everyone's weight is down today. Michael's back to his low of 498.5 (yes, it will be nice when we get a little more comfortably away from nasty 500 number), and I'm at a new low of just over 280, which I'm really psyched about because I'm actually losing something for a change, and it would be nice to see the 270s again; it's been a couple of years. Hip still bothering me, too... I'm getting a little tired of this; I figure it's just a rest and gentle stretching thing, but it's tedious and I still can't play racquetball, and my partner will be off to China in a week and then I won't be able to play until July probably. Which I suppose might be just as well.

And I'm thinking again about commitment and choice, about that endless and every day process of making the right choice for weight loss, the right choice for health. It's a full-time thing, most days. But it's the only way. I have this vague hope that one day it will become automatic... not having to talk myself out of the higher portion size that some part of me thinks it wants, stopping eating when I'm full, not eating when I'm bored. One day.

But that's what it's all about, the slow process of change, and anyone who tells you different is a liar. The trouble is the whole huge industry that's wrapped around the promise of a magic bullet for weight loss... and it's that industry that's partly responsible for the attitudes, for the idea that there can be some sort of quick change, change without effort. And it's filled will beautiful people who I will never look like, even if I lose all the weight that I want to. Genetically, I'm not them. It feeds people this drug of false hope and fantasy, and there's nothing that's so seductive as hope. Except maybe fear or paranoia... if anyone remembers the BerryTrim ads that they'd mail you... an apparently ripped-out newpaper clipping about the product with a handwritten note on it from an anonymous "friend"... so you could worry yourself sick about who thought you were so fat that you might benefit from this. Ugh. The whole thing just makes you want to take a long, hot shower just to rid yourself of the smell. It's not that there aren't good products out there and people who genuinely want to help, but the quick-change marketing gets in the way of what's needed most, lifetime change.