thanksgiving break

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thanksgiving break Wednesday November 27

let's do a little timeline of my body weight:

• third grade: upset over parental divorce, and sparked by a number of other factors i will most likely never remember, i go from the string bean to being the pudgy kid. a pudgy smart kid. since grade-school kids rather annoy me right now, i'd have to say i would have been a real treat to deal with. a fat, smart kid who thought everyone cared about his knowledge. man, that's enough to make high school sound good.
• eighth grade: puberty begins to strike, and my build gets more manly and less boyish; naturally, this trims a bit of pudge.
• tenth grade: i date a girl named gina. she gets me a job at a pizza hut.
• eleventh grade: i work at pizza hut for two months, while holding a job at a chinese restaurant. gina dumps me. i am unhappy. i am stressed. i eat, and climax at 210 (or so) pounds. over winter break, i decide i have had enough. during the spring musical, i went on the three-day diet...for a month. coupled with singing and dancing nightly in the musical, i lost about twenty pounds to round out at just below 190.
• twelfth grade: i drop a little more, hitting 185.
• sophomore-junior year summer: i go to japan. due to strong determination, complete isolation (i chose when and where and how often i ate, no societal or social pressures to eat with a group impacted me), lack of funding, exercise, and good japanese food, i lost about 15-20 more pounds, to round me out just below 170.
• junior year, first semester: i get depressed. i eat out a lot. i gain back a little bit of weight, but i am still barely beneath the 180 threshold.
• thanksgiving break: every family member is pushing everything at me. temptation is unbounded. resistance is futile. the scale is tipping.

i don't wish to make anyone think i obsess about my weight, but that is your judgement after reading the rest of this. in fact, i am aware that it is quite natural for people to fluctuate throughout their lifetime. however, i also have a very interesting experience from japan -- as my mom once said (she visited awhile back): "there are no fat people in japan." excepting sumo, she's basically right.

the western approach says, "well, just look at what they're eating, for christ's sake, you've got raw-ass fish, rice, veggies, and yucky seaweedy things," and, yes, that is absolutely correct. and as someone who used to be a picky eater, and who has had "western tastes" his entire life, i adapted rather easily. and it was healthy. i never felt better.

the japanese like to pride themselves on the freshness and quality of their foodstuffs. even asako commented to me about how my water tasted bad, she even said that tokyo water tastes bad compared to that fresh, pure mountain stream of water that is ishikawa's water. i don't know about that, i mean, i had to boil my water in nishikawa heights this summer, and i can't say one way or another about it's taste...it's water. i guess i don't have the buds to judge the issue. anyway.

but really, even though i am full right now from dinner at my dad's, and lunch at the china palace, i feel sick. the sickness is not in my full belly, the sickness is within my head; it makes me feel fat, it makes me feel like this mass i can feel in my stomach is vile, evil, and working against what i want for my body...but then, at the next mealtime, i will eat up just the same, without giving thought to the amount, or when i should stop.

i am a compulsive eater. i always have been. i can stop myself if it is just me, but the holidays and times of general depression are too much, and after this little thanksgiving whatever we've got going on here, i'm going to turn it around and get to where i was at the end of the summer.

don't doubt it, either -- i made this commitment in may when i went to japan, and i didn't let anything stand in my way. now, i have to fight the battle on my own turf, where the temptations are greeting me on a daily basis.