New Year’s Resolutions: One Week and Counting

January 7, 2010

So how are those New Year’s Resolutions working out for you? If you’re still keeping them with a full week of 2010 under your belt then a tip of my hat in your direction. If I wore hats that is which I don’t because I look silly and slightly deranged in them. For myself, I gave up making New Year’s Resolutions as a New Year’s Resolution a few years ago and that’s about the only one I’ve managed to keep.

I spent a whole lot of years in churches that would traditionally hold a New Years Eve service that included a time when everyone would write out what they wanted to see God do in the coming year (a religious version of New Year’s Resolutions) and then we’d seal our note in a self-addressed envelope that the church secretary would drop in the mail to us six months later so we could see how God had answered our prayers and how we had followed through on the commitments we’d made to Him.

By the time I was in young adulthood the arrival of that envelope, addressed to myself in my own handwriting, was like a slap across the face, a literary reminder that once again I hadn’t done what I had been so earnest about doing six months earlier. Once again I was reminded that I’d failed to make any headway on the first item on every single New Year’s Resolution list I ever written during my lifetime. The wording was different from year to year but the intent was always the same.

1. I want to lose weight.

1. This year I will lost 50 pounds.

1. By next year at this time I will have lost 100 pounds.

1. I commit to losing weight in the coming year.

1. I promise that with God’s help I will get my weight and my eating under control.

One year I’d had enough of making New Year’s Resolutions that I knew I could never keep and so while everyone else was in church writing out their resolutions and commitments for the coming year, I was scratching out another kind of message to myself. Six months later when it arrived I tore open the envelope and read,

So, it’s now six months later and I bet anything you weigh more today than you did on New Year’s Eve, don’t you? When are you ever going to just accept that you’re always going to be fat? You’re such a failure.

No small amount of self-loathing in that little note to self. Ya think?

But it wasn’t just once a year I’d failed to live up to the word I made to myself. Every Monday was going to be the start of a new diet and this time I was going to stick with it, and sometimes I did stick with it. At least until Tuesday afternoon. Every night after I’d eaten Chinese take-out for four or a deluxe double-thick pizza with extra cheese and a half gallon of ice cream as a chaser and I was stuffed sick I’d swear to myself I was never going to eat like that again, and just to prove how serious I was I’d storm (or waddle as it were) into the kitchen and throw any food that remained (if any did) into the garbage can. But by the next day, after a small breakfast or no breakfast at all, and eating little more than a salad and a Diet Coke for lunch, I’d head to the fast food district of town and fill up the back seat of my car: a six pack of tacos from Taco Bell, two orders of onion rings from BurgerKing, and a half dozen Dilly Bars from Dairy Queen. Then I’d go home, eat it all, and feeling stuffed sick with self-loathing and food once again I’d swear I’d never eat like that again. But I would. Again and again and again. All the way to 325 pounds.

I haven’t lost 170 pounds because one year I made a New Years Resolution to myself to lose 170 pounds. There wasn’t a single ginormous last supper that made me so violently sick in body and spirit that I swore that was the last time and then I followed through from that moment on. My weight loss journey didn’t start on a Monday or on the 1st of the month or the 1st day of a new year. It began on a Saturday. May 8, 1999. I didn’t wake up that morning knowing I would always remember that date. I didn’t know that between then and the beginning of 2010 I would never again gorge on a fast-food progressive dinner, never order Chinese take-out for four for a party of one, or never lose myself in a half-gallon of ice cream or a two pound bowl of pasta and butter. When I backed my car out of the driveway that morning I didn’t know I would never be that heavy again. I didn’t know the next time I’d buy a car I wouldn’t have to have the driver’s seat soldered in place to keep my weight from breaking the steel joints. I didn’t know the time was coming when I’d stop waking up in the middle of night gasping for breath or fearing the pains that occasionally ripped through my chest. I didn’t know in a few short months I’d be wearing pants that zipped all the way up rather than being held in place with jumbo diaper pins and prayer. And I sure couldn’t have imagined that in a few years from that day I’d be wearing size 10 jeans and medium size shirts, walking a half-marathon, hiking through the Redwoods, or hearing my doctor say, “Anita, you are in more than excellent health.”

May 8, 1999 was the day that led to where I am today but I didn’t know it at the time.  I just knew I was going to go to a morning meeting of *Overeaters Anonymous that happened to be held in the back room of my favorite Mexican restaurant in town. I figured I’d sit and listen to a bunch of fat people talk about the diet they were on and whine about how much they missed eating ice cream and cake and cookies, and then at the end of the meeting I’d slip into the main room of the restaurant and order my usual double cheese enchilada plate with a side of chips and guacamole to go. Instead I went to the meeting and listened to thin and heavy people talk about having spent their lives eating like I thought only I ate and that they were grateful that for today they no longer had to eat like that. And at the end of the meeting, rather than leaving with the smell of a greasy plate of Mexican food covered in foil on the passenger seat beside me, I left with hope that at least for that day, I stood a chance of going to bed without being stuffed sick and ashamed. And I did.

That was the beginning for me. And there’s a beginning for you too. You just might know when the journey begins. But then again, maybe your journey already has started and you don’t even know it has or can’t believe it has.

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*Overeater’s Anonymous is part of my story but it might be part of yours. Instead it may be Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig or private therapy or a plan of eating that you find in a magazine that works best for you.

Posted in Body Image, Weight Loss