Resolutions

It wasn’t until New Year’s Eve – when someone else mentioned her resolutions -- that I realized it hadn’t occurred to me to make any.

A chunk of my resolutions usually relate to diet or exercise or weight. I don’t want to mess with the first two, and so I can’t do anything about the last one.

Seven months it’s been without bingeing, overexercising, or restricting. Seven months in which I’ve eaten a lot more lasagna and – oddly, because I can eat anything – a lot less cake than I ever could have predicted. Until last Saturday, when a friend and I learned Britney Spears dance routines (my Christmas present to her – it was, as she said repeatedly, her “dream”), I tried exactly zero new workouts.

Some days have been easy; others have been ridiculously difficult. For the past few days I’ve been going through a hard patch, where – despite lasagna and peanut butter and spaghetti Bolognese in the same day -- I feel like I’m starving (something I’ve only felt very, very occasionally since the first month, when I felt it constantly). I’m trying to remind myself it isn’t always like this, though when I’m in the middle of it it’s hard to envision that it will shift. I’m not asking for suggestions about what to do about it – I know I can eat more, and sometimes I do.

And that, some days, makes things even harder. I know to dismiss the voice that suggests bingeing is the answer, but I have to entertain – or at least consider -- the voice that suggests more. I’ve started plenty of binges in the past having just a little bit more of something, and then being unable to stop.

There is an app I use on my phone to log days without a binge, and it makes a satisfying ping when you check in, which on hard days I do repeatedly. The ping is like the gong in yoga, or the chimes at the end of a massage I once had at an Indian spa. It brings me back to the present, back from spiraling out of control from the fear that things will always be this hard and that I cannot do this any more. And eventually – sometimes only with repeated check-ins within hours – it passes.

Seven months without a binge is longer than I ever thought it possible to go but not long enough to forget what it was like being unable to get through a day. And to be honest, I don’t want to forget. And so I will remember this: I would sit in meetings listening to people talk who had done what I simply could not, which is to put one foot in front of the other, one day at a time, and just not do the thing they really, really wanted to do. Jealousy would well up. Also anger: Why could I not do this thing? Why did one day seem so unbelievably long? (Frankly, when you want to binge, the 10 seconds it can take a cashier to fumble with your change can seem like a year too long.)

I would vow to do it, maybe after just one more binge. And I couldn’t.

I don’t know why I can do it now or even really how. But I’m grateful.