Constant Craving

I had a little breakthrough yesterday.

I've been back on the program, losing weight again, and I have this idea that if I behave "as if" I'm a 240-pound man, if I make choices all day long in that vein, I'd be doing pretty well. The thing I realized, though, is that at any weight less than I currently am, I will be hungry. Not starving. Just a little hungry, probably a few times each day, probably for the rest of my life. There's all sorts of diets that claim to eliminate hunger, but honestly, if you're restricting calories and volume, even if you're eating a good, healthy amount, five little meals a day, etc., there's gonna be a little hunger from time to time.

And that's - okay.

I realized with a shock yesterday that, as an obese man, I'm used to having a disconnect between my body and my brain. My unstated, until now unconscious goal was to have no feedback at all from my body, because I carried the idea that any feedback at all was bad, was telling me something was wrong. My goal is to have no hunger, no muscle ache from physical activity, no shooting pains in my chest (now that's probably a good one to shoot for), no aches in my knees, no thirst, no desire, no nothing. I lived my life in a constant state of zero feedback, and tried like hell to immediately quell any communication that might try to occur between body and brain. Hunger was the perfect example. I would fly into a panic mode if I needed to quench my thirst and there was no water around; if I felt hungry and there was no food; if I felt pain and there was no ibuprofen. When my body sent up a message, it was like a red alert went off, full blast, and I jumped to respond. STAT. Emergency Room time. Fix it. FIX IT! FIX IT!!

So yesterday I was a little hungry, and I was a little bit achey from the increased activity of swimming every day (when I say "swimming" I mean cavorting in a stately way in the pool, not laps or anything like that), and instead of trying to immediately fix the hunger and the acheyness, I let it be. And as I let it be, I thought, "Hmmmm. Feeling hungry [definitely not starving] means that I probably didn't overeat, and that I'll lose a little weight. Feeling achey [definitely not in agony] means that I probably got some exercise and I'll be a little stronger, a little more limber tomorrow. These are good feelings to have. These are not alarms going off - these are just gentle messages, a little feedback from body to brain to let me know things are good."

Why have I panicked in the past when I felt these things? Why did I not understand that they were signs that I'm doing right by my body? It isn't my body objecting to its current situation, it's my body letting me know that I'm on the right track.

Bear with me here, because I know the tendency is to day, "Duh!" But there are big pieces of how-to-be-normal that I just never got, that were never demonstrated or explained to me. Fundamental things, kindergarten-level things.

This morning I remembered a scene from Notting Hill where the dinner guests are all trying to earn a treat (don't remember what - dessert?) by proving they're the most pathetic person at the table. And Julia Roberts, who's playing an actress, says, "I've been hungry for 15 years." At the time I thought, "How awful!" in a pitying, yet envious way, because, I mean, she may be hungry all the time, but she gets to be Julia Roberts, ferchristsake. But I couldn't imagine it. My life has been an exercise in avoiding hunger, some sort of huge fear of it.

I used to joke that I was fat because in a past life I must've been a concentration camp victim. It's like my inner Stevie just had to to push down the hunger. But really, it's from when my mom died, when I was seventeen. Hunger and grief got all mixed up for me (they're both "emptiness," a hollow feeling deep inside, a fluttering). Less than an hour after she died, I was stuffing a vending-machine egg salad sandwich down my throat, barely chewing, just shoving it down, and then another, sobbing and stuffing. I gained a hundred pounds in the year after she died. I went from 225 to 325. There's no question I was consoling myself, trying in vain to fill up the grief emptiness with food. Of course, I always had a problem with food, but it wasn't so terrible a problem when I was 225. No question, it became a terrible problem with those additional hundred pounds.

So here I sit, thirty-plus years later, still confusing the two? Still so afraid of hunger because - why? Because I'm afraid of a pain that I correlate to the worst emotional pain I ever felt in my life? Do I think that if I feel hunger, I'm opening the door to feeling the grief I felt when my mom died? Thirty-plus years of comforting myself . . . and the side effect is a lifetime of self-punishing pain. I swapped immediate grief for temporary comfort, only to give myself lasting pain. Not the wisest of choices.

So what brought this on?

Well, a few years back there was a gay version of The Bachelor which was called Boy Meets Boy. I just got the whole series - six episodes plus bonus footage - from Netflix (don't you love Netflix for being able to do that, see an entire season of a show back to back? Love it!). I had seen it before, but this time, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. A "shouldda couldda wouldda" moment: the thought that if I hadn't had this monkey on my back, maybe I could have been one of these guys, an attractive gay man in my late twenties or early thirties, fit and handsome, looking for love. Hopeful. Meeting other nice guys. Dating. Having sex. Having fun. Going on trips together. Long romantic walks on the beach, yadda yadda yadda. A relationship. A partner.

I'm not much of a regretful person - my motto is, "You live, you learn." I've made choices, like everyone else, that I later came to think didn't work out quite the way I'd hoped, but so be it, I made the choice with all the information available to me at the time, and if it turned sour, well, I probably knew there was a risk of that happening, so what the hell. But being obese is a choice I didn't ever consciously make, it seems to me, and yet I chose it hour by hour, day by day for decades, foolishly, painfully, regrettably, and the regrets I have about my life which stem from being too fat to have tried for a love relationship, too fat to have felt comfortable at a party where I might've met someone, too fat to even try to be attractive, too fat to pursue one of the most normal, fundamental drives a human being has - to be with someone . . . it just twists me up inside.

So then I thought, well yes, it's too late to be twenty-five and thin and attractive and meeting people and maybe falling in love. But it's not too late to love myself. I can be fifty and attractive and well-groomed and yes, a little hungry, a little empty inside, but willing to take the chance that although the hunger may feel a little like grief, knowing that the hunger is my body saying, "Thanks for doing the right thing by me."

If I understand it like that, I can consider the prospect of spending a little part of every day hungry for the rest of my life as a good thing.

"Thank you, Stevie's brain, for making choices that let Stevie's body be better."

"You're welcome, Stevie's body. You're very welcome."

The lines of communication are open. Let the conversation begin.