Addiction

I was listening to NPR in the car today and heard an interview with a 25 year old guy who's just written a book called Tweak, which is a memoir of his years spent addicted to meth, heroine, you name it.

It got me thinking about addiction and food as addiction. I've spent time with the good people at Overeaters Anonymous, and I just can't seem to get it. I don't know whether it's my own stubbornness and inability to admit that I'm not in control of my eating, but I just have a problem with sitting around for an hour at a time talking about how badly I want to eat a box of twinkies with other people who would tackle me for the box of twinkies, if there was one.

I just don't know - am I completely out of control? Do I need to give this whole food thing up to my Higher Power? Do I need to do the twelve steps? Where does personal responsibility come in? How much of this can I take responsibility for? If I give it up to a Higher Power, then doesn't that make me less culpable?

I am also thinking about what causes me to eat, and how it relates to my general issues in life. I have this thing where I feel like life hasn't started yet. It will start someday - the day I get my act together and decide what I want to be when I grow up, or when I get thin or any number of things like that. I feel like being fat is my way of hiding from the world - I'm afraid to put myself out there and really go for what I want because of what people will say about me being fat. But as long as I'm fat I also don't have to go out there and take risks in life because of what I think people will say about me. So it becomes this vicious chocolate circle.

I wonder sometimes what I'd be like if I was thin. Would I really try to make a career out of writing? Would I share myself more openly? Would I smile at people in the grocery store? Would I have more friends? I don't know. I just know that I don't like myself like this. I don't like not easily fitting into airplane seats. I don't like shopping in the plus-size stores. I just don't like any of it.

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On a positive note, now that the weather is getting warm, I'm spending more time outside, and I've been introducing practices like writing every morning into my life. And today I worked out on my steps. We live on a hill and there are 27 steps to get from our driveway to the house. I keep saying that if I could go out and walk up and down them every day, I'd be super fit. So I started today. I started out doing it 10 times. I'm not sure how long it took me - about 15 minutes, I think, but my heart rate got all kindsa crazy. Tomorrow I'm going to try for 11, and I'll also time it, and time my heart rate. It's been 30 minutes, and my heart is still pounding. If I could work up to doing it like 30 times a day, that would be awesome. And then I could do the stair climb to the top of the tallest building that they have every year in LA through my old gym. And I would be able to finish it. Especially since I'm doing this all at a high altitude with thin air. Imagine how fit I'd be if I could go up and down the stairs 50 times in thin air? God, that would be amazing. So that's what I'm going to do. 10 times today, 11 tomorrow. Go me.