Last week I said one of the worst parts of February is people talking about how their diets are going, so let me lean right in to this particular circle of hell and tell you how my diet is going.
I don’t care for dieting.
It calls to mind a dark period in my early 20s in which I routinely ordered off kids’ menus, got bristly at proposals to go out for ice cream, and consumed metric tons of baby carrots. I set up an altar to my calorie tracker and offered it bowls of air-popped popcorn, sugarless gum, and the blood of virgins in exchange for a size 2 wedding dress.
I was super fun to be around.
Similarly, I don’t care for weighing myself, not only because it’s not conducive to starting my morning with a sense of radical acceptance, but also because it evokes the restless spirit of my long-lost Wii Fit.
If you’ve made good life choices and don’t know, the Wii Fit was a low gray rectangle, roughly bathroom scale-sized, that connected to your Nintendo Wii. It was designed to be the overlord of a comprehensive early 2000s fitness program, and so upon its firm surface you conducted everything from your cardio workouts to your balance exercises to your daily weigh-ins.
It also talked to you, partially in text and partially in a disarming Nintendo character voice, to render judgment upon the progress you’d made on the road to wellness.
And it was a fascist turd.
When I stepped on it in the mornings, it would emit a startled little, “Oh!” before calculating my weight. Every morning. As if it could not have anticipated, based on the previous two hundred mornings, what degree of pressure to expect on its frail polycarbonate skeleton each day. As if it had been designed for some other purpose, perhaps weighing baby chipmunks or piles of sawdust, and it was shocked anew to discover this behemoth hauling her crushing weight upon its body morning after morning after morning.
During balance exercises, it liked to ask me if I found that I often tripped or had problems staying upright. If I missed a day, it was ready with passive-aggressive nukes like, “It’s been awhile!” and, “You know, you’ll be more successful if you check in each day.”
We went on like this for almost a year and a half, until one day in 2010, when it went out for cannoli and never came back.
In spite of all this, I lived the calorie-restricting life again for a little while this month. I have to fit into some dress pants next week, and all the gentle yoga in the world wasn’t cracking the couple of pounds I picked up over the holidays. So I loaded up the Clicklist cart with the cantaloupe and the cucumbers and the thin-sliced bread that’s actually more of a limp cardstock, and I put back on my Apple Watch. And here’s the update.
I don’t buy it.
Now look, by buying it, I don’t mean that I don’t believe in the efficacy of counting calories. I have to, of course, because the stupid thing always works. The pants fit again. My face looks less puffy. I’ve probably stepped away from the edge of an early sugar-coated death, and now the celery is back in the trash can where it belongs.
It’s just that I don’t believe it anymore. I can’t hype myself up for dieting like I did ten or fifteen years ago, because I’ve fallen out of love with self-imposed suffering.
As I’ve written before, I used to love working too many hours, getting up too early in the mornings, adding too much incline to the treadmill, and saying yes to too many people. This approach, as I understood it, was the path of virtue, and I hung a fair amount of my identity on it.
I was not just the Overachiever, but the Oversufferer. Occasionally people would remark on how they didn’t understand how I could do all I did, how I could possibly be so disciplined and yet so uncomplaining, and I gobbled it up like the wasabi trail mix I no longer allowed in my house.
But I’m over it.
This week, as I stood in my kitchen smearing a wedge of Laughing Cow cheese product on an unsalted rice cake, I did so with discipline, yes, but also with the conscious awareness that this food sucks.
I can’t make myself believe anymore that yogurt is a dessert. Yogurt as dessert is patriarchy. Or plutocracy. Or both. Someone at Big Yogurt is resting his wingtips on a mahogany desk at this very moment, lighting a cigar with $100 bills, because we stood by as Boston Cream Pie was thusly desecrated.
I’m over dieting as a badge of good humaning. I still have to do it once or twice a year (because it’s hard to find good pants and I don’t want to buy new ones), but I’m no longer going to immerse myself in the delusion that it makes me a more successful person. It’s just a temporary inconvenience, part of the upkeep of this weird body that tends to want things that are not good for it, and I’m allowed to say that it sucks.
Oh, and if you also happen to be trying to get rid of a couple of post-holiday pounds this week, please keep in mind that dieting vacuums up your executive functioning like a freshly charged Dyson, so if you forget an email or a permission slip or your dog’s birthday, give yourself a break. And maybe some carbs.
HAPPY FEBRUARY.
