Relax

It’s been a hectic week and I’ve been hard-pressed to find the time to blog. It seems that the pace always picks up quite a bit in September. Despite that heady sense of the return of busy-ness, this is a good time of year for me. It’s a kind of in-between time. The summer is over, so I can enjoy a reprieve from the press of potato and macaroni salad. And it’s still a few months to the national gorge-fest that takes place from late November through early January. There is that little blip at Halloween, but I’ve never been a big candy person, so I expect I’ll make it through that holiday just fine. This is a lovely season, perfect for long walks on cool and sunny afternoons, with few food temptations.

I’ve been noticing how much more relaxed I feel when there’s no major food event looming before me. That’s actually kind of funny. For most of my life, food was relaxation. I liked nothing better than to kick back with a big bowl of something gooey, all the upsets, the frustrations, the irritations of the day melting away along with the ice cream in my mouth. After all, who needs Valium when you’ve got Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia? You know. Chill, baby, chill. So to find myself dreading any situation that involves my former favorite foods, well, that’s a little weird.

How did food get so cozy with my notions of calm anyway? Even though it’s different now – food has become the antithesis of calm – it’s just two sides of the same coin. What I really want is to find a way of life that doesn’t focus so much on food, whether as salvation or damnation. Trading an obsession with eating for an obsession with not eating doesn’t seem like a particularly good trade.

But what other options do I have? For the time being, I need to be hyper-vigilant about my diet. I’m all too aware of the statistics about weight regain – heck, I’ve lived it – and I don’t want to undo all of my hard work because I feel a tad stressed out about eating sometimes. I keep telling myself that eventually it will get easier. I thought perhaps that would happen when I hit the one-year anniversary of reaching my goal weight. But it didn’t. Then I thought it might happen at the two-year mark. Nope. I’m approaching the five-year mark, but still I fret. What if I never get comfortable around food? Can I live a life of continual unease and still maintain this lower weight? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question.

But for now I will enjoy this little autumn oasis between seasons of gastronomic indulgence. Just don’t offer me any cider donuts please.