Rant

Today I wanted to talk about discipline. Which is funny, because discipline is probably the thing I have the least of. Or maybe that isn’t true. Maybe I have too much discipline in all the wrong directions. I’ve spent years learning how to disappear from myself without actually going anywhere.

235 pounds. I keep writing that number like eventually it will stop feeling like a confession. It doesn’t. There’s something uniquely miserable about watching your body become a place you don’t want to live in. About feeling like you are permanently wearing evidence of every time you failed to take care of yourself. I know people will look at someone who weighs 235 pounds and assume things. Lazy. Undisciplined. Doesn’t care. I think that’s the part that hurts the most, because I care. I care so much that sometimes it feels like I don’t care about anything else.

How I look has become tangled up in how I think I deserve to exist. My body is the first thing I notice in the morning and the last thing I think about at night. It follows me into every room, into every photograph, into every conversation where I wonder if someone is looking at me instead of listening to me. It sits between me and other people. It sits between me and myself. My self-worth has gotten so thin that sometimes I wonder what would be left of me if I took my appearance away.

And somewhere along the way, food stopped being just food. It became comfort, punishment, distraction, reward, and secret. Sometimes I eat because I’m sad. Sometimes because I’m bored. Sometimes because I’m lonely. Sometimes because I don’t want to feel whatever it is I’m supposed to be feeling. Then afterward, I hate myself for it. There is this awful little cycle to it: wanting to eat, eating, feeling ashamed, promising myself I’ll stop, breaking the promise, hating myself a little more. Then doing it all again.

I don’t know if I’ve always had an eating disorder, or if I just slowly built one out of years of shame and coping and never knowing what else to do with myself. I only know that my relationship with food is not normal anymore, and neither is the relationship I have with my body. Food has become something I negotiate with myself about constantly. Something that can make an entire day feel either good or ruined. Something that can make me feel temporarily comforted and then somehow even more alone afterward.

I gained 100 pounds in two years. It sounds impossible when I say it like that, but it wasn’t one hundred pounds at once. It was one meal. One night. One excuse. One tomorrow. Over and over and over again. That’s the thing about getting lost. You rarely notice the exact moment you leave the path. You just look up one day and realize you have no idea where you are.

I think I’m somewhere in that moment now. Looking around. 235 pounds. A body I don’t recognize. A life that feels increasingly difficult to inhabit. And still, somehow, I want to find my way back. Not because I suddenly love myself. I don’t. I think that’s important to say. I’m not writing this from some beautiful place of self-acceptance where I’ve learned to love every inch of myself. I’m writing this because I’m tired.

I’m tired of measuring my worth in mirrors. Tired of avoiding cameras. Tired of clothes that feel like reminders. Tired of thinking that maybe I’ll finally become a person worth loving once I become thin enough. There is a part of me that has spent years believing that happiness is waiting at some future weight, that I will finally be allowed to exist comfortably once I become smaller. I know how cruel that thought is, but knowing doesn’t always make it disappear.

So I’m going to start small. Three or four meal plans each week. Meals with a calorie limit that I can actually follow. Less thinking. Less negotiating with myself. Less waking up every morning and having to reinvent the rules. I don’t know if that counts as discipline. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe discipline was never really the point.

Meal Ideas

ONE: 1,000 calories

breakfast – 2 eggs (180), low calorie tortilla (25), tomato (22), green beans (35)

lunch – 1 cup cauliflower flower rice (45), 1/2 avocado (120), tomato (50). 1/2 black beans (125)

dinner – lettuce (20), cucumber (20), red onion (22), tomato (43), 1 cup of chick peas (240), green goddess dressing (15)

TWO: 800 calories

breakfast – 2 egg bites (180), 1 banana (90)

lunch – asparagus (65), 4 oz salmon (185)

dinner – 1 cup cauliflower flower rice (45), fried cabbage (28), broccoli (40), 1/2 cup tofu (181)

THREE: 700 calories

breakfast – 1 pear (70), scrambled eggs/ egg whites (110), scallion (10)

lunch – 1 cup cauliflower flower rice (45), 2 bell peppers (80), 1 cup frozen veg (80)

dinner – shrimp 3-4 oz (100), asparagus (65), potatoes (110)

FOUR: 600 calories

brunch – tomato (55), cucumber (20), miso soup instant (50), seasonal fruit (180)

dinner _ lentil vegetable soup (210), 2 bell peppers (80),