The truth

When I stop posting, you can rest assured I've lost my way. You can also assume I'm spending lots of time hunched over my laptop or iPhone, reading about nutrition.

I realized today that the ongoing nutrition research, compulsive checking of my favorite weight loss blogs, and all the rest has become an addiction of its own. I'm a sugar addict, sure, but I'm also an information junkie. At this point, I think the latter is almost more problematic than the former.

Only today did I realize that I am scared to interrupt the constant incoming stream of information about food, exercise, and health. It's like I'm frightened that tuning those things out will lead to ignoring my food/weight/health problems and result in devastating weight gain. Another fear? That the final missing piece of the puzzle--the magic detail that will make everything fall into place for me--will get overlooked if I'm not constantly taking in new information.

The (not-so) funny thing is, I've been gaining weight while all this learning and obsessing has been going on. I have knowledge, but no results to show for all my reading and ruminating. Something has got to change.

I tell myself that I've learned enough to get going on a healthier track. I do okay for a bit, then I have a few bad days of eating, freak out that I clearly don't have the answers I need, seek refuge in the stories and research and views and programs of others, try to adapt to some of models I read about (trying OA, eating low carb, going paleo, whatever), hit a roadblock of some sort, repeat cycle. It's tiresome.

I miss having a life outside of this obsession.

Here's the other bit of truth telling for today: starting this blog has shown me, yet again, how hard I try to perform for others. I want so badly to appear that I've got my shit together; another part of me longs to be vulnerable and real and honest about how out of control my life often feels.

When I was getting things set up on Blogger, I sat down and made a little weekly schedule for my blog. On Monday I'm going to write about this, and Tuesday about this, and so forth. I wanted to go from not having a blog to having an amazing one that shows how awesome and determined I am, and I wanted it to happen overnight. When I got busy and couldn't create the kinds of posts I was envisioning right out of the gate, I opted to skip posting altogether. It's classic perfectionistic, all-or-nothing behavior and it invades many areas of my life.

Isn't a little post that simply tells the truth about what's going on better than nothing? And why would a person that has 100+ pounds to lose try to pretend that everything is smooth sailing all the time in Dietland?

Tonight, I'm admitting that I'm shipwrecked.