Diet is...

My grandma has this magnet that looks like it was made in the '60s or '70s, and it's been on her refrigerator for as long as I can remember. It's a small rectangle of wood with a black background and a measuring tape painted across the middle. One side says “Diet is On,” and when you turn it upside down, the other half says “Diet is Off.” My magnet has flipped to the “Diet is Off” side. Low carb...well, it sucks, but the reasons it sucks are mostly due to me. For one, I like to cook, but I don't like to wait, and I don't like to do dishes. You get to do both in low-carb cooking. Also, it annoys me to eat something different than the rest of my family, because of the aforementioned dish-hating. So my patience with it was wearing thin, but the biggest reason I went off it (okay, maybe not the biggest, but one of the bigger) was that we spent all our money on a mobile home. Moving out means having to pay actual bills again, and since I was already getting tired of low-carb, now seemed as good a time to quit as any.

We've been looking for an apartment closer to Brandon's work and having little luck finding anything we could afford. I mean, seriously, we live in Nebraska. Prices near $1000 for a 900-square-foot two bedroom with washer/dryer hookups? Come on. But then we saw someone advertising a mobile home for free on a garage sale group, so we went and looked at it, then took it. Free was by no means really free, though, as you probably suspected. Free included a ridiculously high price for credit checks for Brandon and I ($70! I can buy a credit report WITH A SCORE for $6!), two months back rent plus one month's rent as a deposit, and, since we're in a trailer park and officially trash in the eyes of the world, ridiculously high deposits for all our utilities. Plus the fixing up that needs to be done on the trailer itself, which we will need a small loan for.

So anyway, there it is. And this is your notice that I'm going to start blogging about things other than weight or size acceptance or dieting or whatever. I think we all know, from the spacing of the entries, that I am at a bit of a loss when it comes to blogging about size acceptance. Tomorrow I shall have an entry or two with hi-larious stories, including one about how the previous owners of our trailer think that all doors fit into any doorway and how I fell through a rotten floor. I bet you can't wait, can you?

Yet Another Change of Plan

In the interest of full disclosure, I feel I should post this here: I am on a diet. Low-carb, to be specific, but not Atkins. (Screw induction, I'll eat as many vegetables and low-sugar fruits as I want to eat.) I feel a few ways about this: first of all, I feel a little bit like I've failed. Like I've become a person that just has to be on a diet because they don't know any other way, which, to be honest, is true. I've been on diets since I was twelve—I'm almost twenty-six now, so I've been dieting over half my life. I don't know how to relate to food normally; that's why I am where I am.

I also feel a bit defensive about this choice, and I feel like I shouldn't have to be defensive about it. I probably don't have to be, but since this is a blog, here I go.

I wholly support size acceptance. I do. It feels a bit hypocritical to add “for everyone else,” but there it is. SA should also allow me to not accept my size if it's not what I want for me. I am 80-100 pounds overweight, depending on which numbers you use, and I don't think that's anything to sneeze at. And since it took me twenty-some years to get to this point, logic dictates that it's going to take a fair amount of time to get to the point where I can relate to my body in a semi-normal way again. It's time I don't have. I have a family history of diabetes and heart disease, and I feel like I'm courting disaster, not only with my weight but with my eating habits. In a perfect world I would be able to see this and have some sort of epiphany which allowed me to immediately start eating tons of fruits and vegetables and very little processed food. It's not a perfect world, as we all know, so this is going to take some work. Obviously doing it on my own isn't working. Also, I feel terrible most of the time. I constantly have sinus problems, joint pain in my ankles and fingers, and stomach problems even when I haven't eaten for several hours. I can stand on principal all day long, but if I feel like shit when the sun goes down, I'm going to take some honest-to-God for-reals action.

So this is the action I'm taking. I'm going on a diet. I'm going to try to make it a learning experience and to break bad habits, like eating when I'm full or bored or eating nutritionally deficient foods. And yes, I still think dieting sucks, and I still hate being on one, but you do what you have to do. I want to be around to see my grandkids, and I don't want to be so out of shape I can't enjoy it.