The Hardest Part of Learning

is letting go.

Old habits live long lives of desolation, regret, and misery. I scrawled down a note yesterday, “the fastest way to misery is to keep remaking the same decision over and over.” I think I’m right.

I considered for the last three days and the first part of this month to spend some money. I have the savings. I got the savings via fear. If I got any extra money, I’d sock it into crypto. Throwing money into crypto, mainly Ethereum, and praying it’ll take away all my worries about money in the future, worked.

Well. It is working. Kind of. I’ve worried more about money ever since I started saving money. When I first got on social security disability, I ate money. I gave my dad custody of the accounts. I thought for sure if I had control of my money I’d spend it all on food. I spent it all on food anyways.

After I decided to transfer my accounts to my ownership, it got much, much worse before it got better. I always had the desire to save money. I remember telling my therapist, “I spend all my money for the month I can on food by the end of the first week.” Her suggestions and talk were ineffective. My desire for the big binges was overpowering, obsessing. Money wasn’t important, food was.

All my life I wanted to lose weight. My mom told me to, and I wanted to. I hated the idea of being ‘the fat kid’. I never liked myself. I never liked the fat on people. I wanted to be better, and able to move around easier.

It wasn’t until I moved out of my mom’s house into a transitional living program that the idea occurred to me: I could google how to lose weight. My grandpa did attempt to deliver a weight watchers guide to me when I was younger in hopes I could understand it. At the time, I didn’t care about weight loss seriously, and I had no interest in culling my eating.

I wasn’t even asking the question until my twenties. A question that could even bring about a positive result. I wasn’t even looking for an answer until my twenties, and it took years of listening and learning from the internet to get my emotional attachment towards food unhinged, enough, that my health improved significantly.

In the interim I tried a lot of things. Trial and error, this book, that article, this eating plan. Everyday I thought I would magically wake up tomorrow and the rest of my life would be clean healthy eating.

I couldn’t see my own patterns. When I began journaling, for months, I could see and complain about my poor results as far as weight goes. Weight became the primary puzzle on my mind. I’d have others bouncing around, my despair about my weight even many long years of research into my own condition and how it might be remedied continued to wear me down.

Most of the time I asked the wrong questions. They gave me answers that lead nowhere towards weight loss. What I needed: a system of eating that I genuinely felt excited and committed towards. What I had: desire for more more more. I was emotionally bought in to the binging, the hunt in the grocery store for brand new food combinations, the pleasant thrill of three a.m. Meijer trips, the engulfing rush of a bunch of food, the period afterward full of guilt. It’s exciting. Exciting, and for the future, a foreboding act.

If only I could have both the binge and the health. The gods decreed it you get one or the other with my body, and with the amount I sought. The diminishing returns on pleasure lead me to get more and more food, with whackier and whackier combinations, until I found myself going on my ER visits of pain and opioids.

I had to let go. To win against the puzzle of weight loss, I had to loss my desire to binge, gain my desire to eat sane portion, sacrifice my wanton grocery store hunting for the next novel food combination, and accept that choice, again and again. And I still need to. Everyday.

When I’m down, tired, frustrated, or craving a little excitement, a whisper thought will crawl through my mind saying, ‘let’s go. It’ll be alright. We’ll survive this. It’s just for today.’

And I tell that thought that I’m going to do something else, anything else, because I know the cost, because I’m afraid, because I remember how it feels to be stuck on stuck, trapped in a web of guilt and regret.

More than the food, I want to free of that self-judgement. I want to be free of health problems. I want to know that I have power over myself.

And writing this out, I feel like binging. Typing this out, the very act, has me down and out. My WHOOP is looking poor these days. Low recovery, low HRV, and I’m thinking food food food. I’ve been on a bad streak since the fifth. I hunger.

Will I let go? Will I take the choice I’ve chosen so many times and play the good kid and eat my vegetables? Or will I hold onto to the past, in the present, yet again, through a block of cheese?