Header

Heh.

I bet you weren't expecting a title like that.

But as every pop-psychologist worth their syndication rights would say, we only do these things to ourselves because we get some sort of benefit from it, however twisted that benefit may be.

I like being fat because it's easier to blame everything on my weight than it is to take responsibility and face up to my emotions.

You know the sort of thinking I mean.

"Oh, I'd be so much more [insert desired state here] if only I wasn't so fat!"

"Everything would be so much [insert desired state here] if I could just lose weight!"

I'm here to tell you, I lost a lot of weight and nothing changed. Well, it was easier to buy clothes, but I was still me with all my emotional denial in an albeit slimmer body.

Now, don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting miracles when I got slimmer, but what I hadn't counted on is how much I was using my fat as literal insulation from the world around me. It was protecting me from having to take responsibility for my feelings.

When I lost weight, that protection was gone.

I was literally naked in the world.

And I couldn't cope.

Being fat stopped me from having to feel things too much. I could suppress my feelings with food and deny all the pain and heartache that came with them. I shovelled packets of biscuits, chocolate, chips, take aways, you name it, down my throat so that I didn't have to feel.

Anxiety? Nothing a packet of Shortbread Creams can't fix!

Sadness? Ooooh, seafood pizza with that lovely oily garlic sauce will take care of that pesky emotion!

Fear? Doritos coming to the rescue!

Fat was just the price I had to pay for denying it all. And, for a little while at least, it was worth it.

Being slim was nice and all, but not if it meant I had to feel. Nothing tastes as good as being slim feels? BULLSHIT.

These days, I totally understand addicts and people who self harm. Anything, anything at all to stop the hurt. Physical hurt? That's a piece of cake (literally). Emotional hurt? Please, bring on the physical pain. That I can cope with.

But now I've come to a point where the fat and the food isn't helping so much anymore (not that it really did anyway). I've come to a place where I'm not afraid of hurting anymore.

Hurting is OK.

We all do it.

And it ends.

That is what I was most afraid of. If I didn't squash it down, it would just keep flowing through me, a never-ending river of emotional pain.

Hurt ends. And we survive. It's OK to be sad. It's OK to be afraid. I don't need to react angrily to it all and cram food into my face. I can just be with it and feel it and ask the people around me to support me while it's happening.

I don't need to be alone, sheltered from the world in my fat suit.

I'm still learning this. I know there will be days where I will self-medicate with food. It's an old coping mechanism for me and to think that I can abandon it completely is foolishness. But I'm getting better at recognising what I'm doing and, instead of denying it all, digging to the root of my feelings, even as I'm scoffing chocolate.

Who knows, maybe I'll even stop before I finish the whole bar.

Irony is a mailout from Weight Watchers arriving in my letter box a day after I start blogging here again. But the good news is that this is day two of sensible eating and water consumption. Go me!

Happy New Year.

I'm back.

And this really is the hardest blog entry I've ever had to write.

Wow. Where to begin?

Well, as my previous entry, 7 months ago, hinted at, I had come to a realisation. A big, scary realisation.

For me, weight loss has very little to do with diet and exercise.

It's literally all in my head.

These last few months have been among the darkest I've ever experienced. I have had depression more profound than I realised was possible. I lost myself for a while there and it was easier to just disappear off the face of the earth than it was for me to remain connected.

Of course, in retrospect, that was the worst thing I could have done, but it was the only thing I could do at the time and I need to respect that.

I also need to respect what I did in those intervening months. As my therapist kindly pointed out to me, people going through what I did often turn to drugs, alcohol or self harm. At least I was only eating.

The good news is that therapy is proceeding well, I'm living the life of the chemically enhanced to help that, and I'm finally ready to start tackling the real reasons that I've gained weight. The real reason my 'friend' in the previous entry is doing the things that she's doing. The real reason I'm doing these things to myself.

I don't know if I'll be doing Weight Watcher's again. While the weekly discipline of the weigh-in was motivating in a way, I don't know if I'm ready to face that again yet. There's a lot of shame and self-hatred swimming around right now, and a well meaning comment from a weigh-in person could be enough to send me spiralling again.

Right now, it's just baby steps. This week is about water and remembering that a portion is not a steak the size of a toddler. That's all. No exercise unless I'm feeling particularly inspired. No salads, no low fat this or that. Just portion control and water.

And if I fuck up, that's OK. Just recognise that I did and move on.

I've missed you all. Viscerally. And I'm glad to be back. But I'm bruised and fragile and I'm not at all sure how this is going to pan out. I've gained half of what I originally lost and that hurts. My winter wardrobe is completely beyond my reach at the moment. My underwear no longer fits and the summer heat is so much more ghastly with an extra 15kg (33lb) on board.

I really don't like where I am physically right now, but that can't be my inspiration. I need to learn to love myself no matter what size I am and respect myself enough to take care of this body I inhabit. That's what will stabilise my weight. Not diets. Not exercise.

Self respect.

That is my key to being a healthy weight.

Although fat-free, anti-depressant corn chips would help too.

INT. AN INNER CITY CAFE

TREE is sitting at a table, staring at a glass of water. She looks nervous, like she's about to do something that she feels very uncomfortable doing. Her eyes dart to the door whenever somebody comes in.

The door is flung open, letting in a gust of cold air. HER FRIEND has arrived. She could be TREE'S identical twin, except she's 30kg heavier. She walks in like she owns the place, casting a hungry eye over the cakes on the counter. She approaches TREE'S table.

HER FRIEND
Sorry I'm late, sweetie. But getting to this place! I had to WALK! And you know how I HATE walking! Couldn't you have picked somewhere closer? Something I could have caught a tram to? Never mind, sorry I'm late. Did you get a look at the cakes? Mmmm, yum!

HER FRIEND bustles around her seat, peeling off her coat, arranging her bag and generally making a fuss. TREE stares at her glass.

HER FRIEND
I mean, what made you pick this place? Although it will be nice to order a coffee and a big slab of cake. There was lemon tart in the window. I know you like lemon tart.

TREE
(quietly)
I don't want any, thanks.

HER FRIEND
No lemon tart? But you love lemon tart. That's not like you. Ohhhh, I get it, you're holding out for the Mars Bar cake, aren't you? With a lovely hot chocolate with marshmallows in it. Heh.

TREE
No, I don't want any, thanks.

HER FRIEND
What, you on some kind of diet or something? Bah! Diets schmiets.

TREE
I'm not on a diet. I just don't want any, thanks.

HER FRIEND
Don't be ridiculous. Of course you do. The cakes look fabulous. We'll both get a piece, how about I get the lemon tart and you get the Mars Bar cake and we share? How's that sound? Where's the damned waiter? I'm perishing here.

TREE
(coldly)
I don't want any.

HER FRIEND
Well, what on earth are we doing here then?

TREE
We need to talk.

HER FRIEND
Talk? Happy to talk. Although I don't know why you dragged me all the way out here to talk. We could have done that at your place. I could have brought over some Tim Tams or some Shortbread Creams and you could have made us chai and we could have talked for hours. Ooooh, and some Mint Slices and Doritos, I know you're a fiend for those. And some Cherry Ripe bites. Why don't we do that now? We can swing by that supermarket on the way and pick it up. That's a great plan. We'll grab some nummies, head on back to your place and talk about anything you want.

TREE
(through gritted teeth)
We're going to talk here.

HER FRIEND
Sweetie, what's wrong? You sound so stressed! I know, we'll go get some videos and a pint of Baskin Robbins Cookie Dough ice cream and have a lovely girly night in. We'll order pizza, that seafood one with the garlic butter melted all over the top. Wouldn't that be fantastic? Wouldn't that make you feel SO much better?

TREE
No. It would not make me feel better. I want to sit here and talk.

HER FRIEND
(sighs heavily and rolls her eyes)
Fine, fine, Miss Party Pooper. What is it you want to talk about? You know, there's a donut shop just up the road, how about we go up there instead and have some chocolate iced donuts. You LOVE chocolate iced donuts.

TREE
STOP IT!

HER FRIEND
(blinks)

TREE
Enough! I can't do this anymore!

HER FRIEND
(puzzled)
Can't do what?

TREE
(gesticulates wildly)
THIS! You! Me! This whole relationship! I can't do this anymore!

HER FRIEND
I don't get it. What do you mean?

TREE
You and the food. Always with the food. Always looking to food to make things better.

HER FRIEND
What's your problem? Why are you so angry at me? What have I done wrong?

TREE
I can't keep using food to solve my problems. You keep wanting to solve my problems with food. It's not healthy for me anymore... I can't keep...

HER FRIEND
(outraged)
What, you're dumping me? Is that it? You're abandoning one of your closest friends like that? After all I've done for you? Jesus! I have been there for you, day and night, seven days a week, for as long as you can remember! I helped you through EVERYTHING! I took care of you, I got you through, I gave EVERYTHING to you, and this is how you treat me?

TREE
I acknowledge what you did. You helped me when there was nobody around to take care of me. But...

HER FRIEND
But what?!

TREE
But it's not helping me anymore. It's hurting me.

HER FRIEND
Oh, I take care of you for all these years and now you decide I'm not good enough for you? That I'm responsible for all your problems? You ungrateful little bitch. I can't believe what I'm hearing!

TREE
Please, I don't mean it like that. Yes, you supported me through some really difficult stuff. And I appreciate that you did that. I really do. I needed you for that.

HER FRIEND
But what, now you don't need me anymore, you think you and your fancy, schmancy new eating habits can make it on your own? Well, let me tell you, you'll be back. I just know it.

TREE
(quietly)
Yes, I probably will. It's going to take a long time to learn not to rely on you like that. You're a huge part of my life. You've had a huge impact. But I've got to move on. Yes, I'll come back to you, but each time I'll be one step further away.

HER FRIEND
(breaking into tears)
But I LOVED you! All I wanted to do was take care of you! To take away all your hurt! To make you feel good! I LOVED you!

TREE
Yes, I know that. But in doing that, you were hurting me.

HER FRIEND
(weeping piteously)
I would NEVER hurt you! I loved you! I just wanted to take care of you! How can you abandon me this way?

TREE
I don't want to abandon you. You are the strength I never knew I had. But you can't keep supporting me with food. We have to find another way.

HER FRIEND
(snarls)
What, you think you're better than me, huh? That you've outgrown me? Why should I change? Why? Let me tell you something, missy. Believe me, I know you better than ANYONE, probably better than you know yourself. You don't have the strength to do this. I know you. Hell, I AM you! This is just a phase. You think you're stronger than me, but you're not. I know you're not. I know where all your buttons are and I know how to push them. A word from me and you're halfway through a family block of Cadbury. One nudge and you're ordering chicken schnitzel sandwiches instead of salad for lunch. Hell, you can be in the middle of making dinner and I'll have you spooning peanut butter straight out of the jar.

Tree
(looks at HER FRIEND sadly)
Yes, you can. But why would you want to do that to me? Why do you want to control me like that? Why do you want to hurt me?

HER FRIEND
(silence)

TREE REACHES FOR HER FRIEND'S HANDS AND HOLDS THEM TIGHTLY.

TREE
I need you to be my friend now. To really be my friend. For this not to be about control and abuse and hurt. I need you. I need you to support me, but in a positive way. In a way that doesn't hurt me. OK? I need to be able to make choices about how I behave and eat and take care of myself and not be controlled by old behaviours and baggage.

I need your help to feel good, really good about myself. But it can't be about food. Can you help me do that? Please?

THE CAMERA PULLS OUT, LEAVING THE TWO OF THEM STARING AT EACH OTHER SILENTLY OVER THE TABLE TOP.

It's time to call in the men in the white coats to get me fitted for one of those nice huggy jackets with the buckles down the back.

Why?

Because I have completely lost my mind.

The last couple of weeks have been really tough for me. Appalling eating, infrequent and uninspired exercise, you name it. And, for the life of me, I've not been able to figure out why.

Then the delectable Kimba summed it up perfectly for me. I read this on her blog (I hope you don't mind me quoting you, sweetie):

I have a confession, I don't think I'm going to have a good weigh-in result this week. Because I've felt my focus sliding a bit. Not a lot, but my exercise hasn't been as intense, my eating has been slipping. I've allowed a few too many 'slack-arse' choices, and I shouldn't have. I know that it's psychologically got something to do with achieving my last 2 big challenges/milestones, and thereby subconsciously thinking I can take a bit of a 'break' and let up on the intensity/strictness.

All of a sudden, lightbulbs and alarm bells started going off. It was quite startling.

Why?

Because, somehow, in my crazy brain, the 27.5kg (60lb) I've lost managed to disappear quite of its own accord, without any effort on my part. Like the magic weight-loss fairies showed up overnight and I woke up three sizes smaller.

For some reason, that amount of weight seems so immense, it is impossible to believe that I lost it all by myself. Don't even get me started on the fact that most people cannot believe that I even had that much to lose, that's another subject for another day.

Somehow, all that effort and all those days of eating right and walking and doing all the things I needed to do to slowly peel off the kilos vanished. I'd done it. It was easy. Now I was free to slack off, eat as I pleased and lounge around the house all day.

As I posted in Kimba's comments, I'm clearly smoking crack.

All I have to do is read back over this thing to see what it took to get here. It wasn't easy, it was bloody hard work and I had to work for every single gram of it.

What I was doing then got me to where I am now. What I'm doing now, will get me right back to where I started from.

I'm lazy. I can't be bothered losing all that weight again. So I need to get back on the wagon. I need to remember how hard it has been to get here and how good it feels to be here. I need to think about how much better it will feel when I get to goal.

I need to remember that my new jeans are not compatible with regular trips to Baskin Robbins.

I need to remember that good eating and exercise is what has got me here, not magical weight-loss fairies (although how good would that be?!). That is now my life, these are the things that need to happen every day for me to get where I want to go and stay there.

You think insane asylums have good gym equipment?

Ugh. So about that plan. The part with the sensible eating and the exercise.

Yeah, about that...

Last night was a complete, freaking disaster.

I was low. Really, really low. Subterranean low. Low beyond the reach of exercise, handfuls of St John's Wort and receiving a beautiful watercolour painting from a dear artist friend of mine after a lovely girly lunch.

I fought it all day. I tried to rationalise my way through it, that there was no reason to feel blue, no reason to feel so horrible.

And all I could think about was eating Doritos and Mint Slices.

It was like a cartoon in my head, little triangular bits of corn and cheese or little round chocolate biscuits dancing in my head, singing a siren's song of comfort. "Come and eat us! Come and eat us, Tree! We'll make you feel better! We'll make you feel goooood!"

Rationally, in my head, I knew eating that stuff would not make me feel good. It would fill my tummy, which would trigger that old, programmed-in sense of comfort, but it wouldn't last because logically I know it's not really making me feel better and it's not doing me any good health-wise.

My cravings laughed in the face of my logic and mocked my rationality.

I'm pretty sure it was hormonal. The timing is right.

I snacked on vegetables. I had a handful of sultanas and pine nuts to try and satisfy the sweet cravings and get some protein in me. I had dinner (delicious honey soy chicken skewers with stir fry Chinese vegetables and rice) to try and shut the cravings the hell up.

No dice.

So I let the cookies tell me what to do.

It doesn't help that we have a corner store across the road from us. So it's not even like I have to walk far to get this sort of junk. But across the street I went and bought a family pack of Doritos, a pack of Mint Slices and, just because they caught my eye as I prowled the store, a pack of Cherry Ripe Bites.

I didn't eat it all myself, my husband kindly helped, especially by eating most of the Mint Slices, but I still woofed down half a family pack of Doritos, four Mint Slices and all but four of the Cherry Ripe Bites.

Did it give me any comfort?

Hell no.

I just felt over-stuffed and sick afterwards.

I'm not going to beat myself up about this. Yes, it was a disasterous night of eating. But I learned an important lesson.

This stuff is NOT going to make me feel better, emotionally. It's going to make me feel ill. It's going to make me unhealthy. And it's going to make me unhappy.

I'm kind of glad I did it, just because I've not had a junk food binge like this since February, and I needed to learn the hard way that binge eating and eating junk just makes me feel sick now. The next time this happens, I can remember how upset my stomach was and how it hurt from being over-stuffed.

I'll remember and instead of eating, I'll call someone or run a bath or do something else to make myself feel cherished and special and better about whatever it is that's bringing me down.

It sounds so stupid saying this, but I didn't get to be over 100kg (221lb) by being smart about food. Doritos don't love me. Mint Slices don't care how I feel. Cherry Ripe Bites don't even have a shoulder for me to cry on.

Food will not help me. It will fuel me and that's it. I need to help myself and I need to let myself be vulnerable so that others can help me too.

All my life, it's been easier for food to be my friend than to be vulnerable in front of others. This is a hard habit to break. There are going to be stumbling blocks along the way. But I will learn and I will move on.

Still feeling blah this morning, but I've chatted to some friends and I'm about to do some pilates and take a walk. Today, I'm not going to let a cookie tell me what to do.

I have decided that leftovers are the ultimate evil.

I usually cater meals very carefully to avoid leftovers. Because, really, what are leftovers for other than eating at a later point? A later point when you probably don't really need to be eating them?

We don't celebrate Thanksgiving in Australia as there was a distinct lack of starving pilgrims, Indians and the other necessary ingredients. But since my boy is a 'Merkin, we celebrate it in my household.

I made a lovely lunch for the pair of us yesterday. A tiny little roast turkey breast roll, enough vegies for two, macaroni and cheese (pre-packaged stuff that I would not let into the house on any other day), some fresh bread, a pumpkin pie I made with my own fair hands (and a pre-bought graham cracker crust and pumpkin pie filling from a local shop that imports US food), apple pie, ice cream and aerosol cream (something else that's usually never seen in my house, on pain of death).

Despite my best efforts, there was still a chunk of turkey, some of the bread, a huge bowl of mac 'n cheese, 3/4 of the pumpkin pie and half the apple pie as well as most of the aerosol cream left afterwards.

Now, I also have fabulous salad stuff in the fridge along with a host of delicious, sensible things I could have for lunch today. But no, what did I do? I ate the rest of the turkey on the still fresh bread, buttered of course, and started shovelling in cold macaroni and cheese straight from the bowl until sanity intervened.

And let's not forget the morning business meeting with my American partner who just had to have a slice of pumpkin pie because he forgot it was Thanksgiving yesterday and hasn't had pumpkin pie in ages. And what sort of host would I be if I didn't join him in having a piece? And would you like aerosol cream with that?

I could not resist the siren's call of the leftovers. I just could not help myself. I left perfectly good food in the fridge in favour of stuff that I should have thrown out yesterday.

Bugger.

Mind you, my body is still on a mindless search for nutrients at the moment. My last entry wasn't emotional eating at all. It was my body screaming for some decent food now that my digestive system has calmed down. I've probably gained back .8kg (1.7lb) of the crazy 1.9kg (4.1lb) I lost last week. I'm happy with that, the loss was unhealthy (remember, any more than 1% of your current bodyweight per week is probably a bad idea, I lost more than double that!), but if I keep this sort of eating up, I'll gain it all back and more.

Something to watch out for now that the silly season is in full swing.

In better news, I'm feeling much better about life, the universe and everything. The supplements and some St John's Wort are helping address the exhaustion and the depression and I can eat normally again. I've lost the dizziness, so I'm restarting my exercise this weekend. So it's back to our usually programming next week. Mari Winsor, look out, I'm coming for you!

Gah! Must. Resist. Eating. Everything. In. House...

What the hell is wrong with me? I've eaten a perfectly good dinner and all I can think about is eating more!

Can someone please handcuff me to the nearest immovable object before I do something I really regret?!

I know I've said it innumerable times here and in comments on other blogs, if you have a bit of a blow out, don't beat yourself up.

Well, I'm about to make an exception to the rule.

My brother regularly comes over every fortnight for a bit of a gossip. We order in dinner and I usually make pretty good choices. I also allow for the meal in my exercise and my points in the days before and after.

This week, we ordered pizza. In my head, I was going to order my usual thin-base marinated chicken pizza (so good!) and eat three pieces of it and chuck the rest (usually done just after the pizza arrives so I don't even get the choice to eat it).

OK, so I didn't order the chicken pizza, I ordered the seafood with all the cheese and the buttery garlic sauce. And it was deep pan, but that was just because the pizza place fucked up my order again. And I didn't do my usual trick of tossing out half the pizza so I ate all six slices of the damned thing.

Now, ordinarily, at this point I would be reassuring myself that it's not the end of the world, it's just pizza and the sky is yet to fall on my head.

It's pizza, not armageddon. Right?

Well, that's not the reason I'm making grumpy faces at myself. Yes, I made a bad choice. That's fine. It happens.

But the pizza was just plain BAD. It didn't taste good. Yet I kept shovelling it in. It should have been easy to stop at a couple of slices because I wasn't enjoying it at all. But it was there, so I kept going.

THAT is what is making me grumpy. It's fine to make a bad choice if you're really enjoying it. But if it wasn't even delicious, what the hell was I thinking?

Ordinarily, if it doesn't taste good, I don't want to eat it. Why would I persist in eating yucky pizza?

Now, it happened to be a couple of hours after my first therapy session (which went incredibly well) and the same day I'd started new medication (which has gone incredibly badly), so I do need to cut myself some slack.

I was clearly indulging in some emotional eating. Although I'm not entirely sure what emotional satisfaction I hoped to get from eating bad pizza. It was a double header of negativity, I didn't enjoy eating it and I felt bad after eating it.

I'll try to chalk this one up to experience, but in the future, I'm going to make sure my binges are yummy. If you're going to feel bad about eating something to excess, it might as well be delicious!

Food halls are the devil.

I found myself in one this afternoon, trying to find something to eat. And I couldn't make a rational decision to save my life.

I wanted creamy butter chicken and rice, deep-fried sesame prawn toast, curry laksa, blueberry muffins, chicken schnitzel sandwiches with mayonnaise and cheese, donuts and pork buns.

The smells spun my head and while I knew I could walk over to the sandwich counter and order something sensible, all I wanted to do was choose the worst possible food I could.

I ended up getting some vegetables, tofu and pork (unfortunately battered and fried, but I couldn't tell under the sauce when I ordered it) on steamed rice. Not the worst decision I could have made, but not ideal.

I left most of the rice and left feeling deeply unsatisfied. My husband had to steer me physically past the donut shop before I bought a bag of cinnamon sugar donuts and ate the lot.

Even as I type this, he's promising to keep me out of kitchen because I could still eat and eat and eat like a crazy woman. I've had a perfectly good dinner of spaghetti bolognese and yet I could still empty the fridge straight into my mouth.

I don't understand what is motivating this. I'm feeling better, several long-term financial issues are being resolved, life is pretty good. Why is it that all I can think of is to inhale the contents of the kitchen?

Someone tie me up and gag me before I do something I regret...

So, Tree, what prompted you to eat 74 points worth of food in two days and not take any exercise?

This did.

"Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life..." -- Trainspotting

I'm about to throw myself into controversial waters here, I'm sure. I'm happy for people to disagree with me, even to articulate why they disagree with me (as long as it's done intelligently and with no insults), I have one request, though. I beg that you read through the entire entry before you start firing off comments or emails.

Here goes.

As far as I'm concerned, obesity is not a medical condition.

It's a choice.

Still with me? Good. Here's why.

Now, I 100% acknowledge that some medical conditions result in obesity. It's a symptom of that condition. But obesity is NOT a medical condition on its own.

Obesity is a symptom of our choice to make poor nutritional and fitness decisions.

People make a choice to eat food with poor nutritional value or choose to eat too much or choose not to exercise. It is a choice. You chose that behaviour. You did it to yourself.

Before you get hot under the collar, I'm one of you. I chose to eat more food than I needed. I chose not to exercise. I turned into a 100kg heifer. I didn't like that, so I chose something different.

I'm not saying anyone goes around thinking, "I think I'm going to inhale an Olympic-sized swimming pool full of French Fries and become a heifer from hell." It's not a deliberate, conscious, rational act. It's not a good or smart choice. But we choose to go through the drive-through at McDonalds and we choose to super-size it and we choose to eat it. We choose to make poor decisions over and over again and suddenly we find ourselves fat and unhappy.

Nobody holds a gun to your head to force you to eat poorly or too much or sit on the couch all day. You choose that.

People can whine about advertising influencing them to eat the wrong foods, but at the end of the day, it's still your choice to eat it or not.

We make excuses because nobody wants to face the real truth. We do this to ourselves. Nobody forces those Krispy Kremes down our throats.

This abdication of responsibility appals me. Trying to make obesity a medical condition so that people can abdicate all responsibility for creating their own situation upsets me. There are genuinely ill people out there who need medical treatment. People who's health conditions are not necessarily the result of poor nutritional decision-making.

If anything about obesity needs treatment, it's the reasons people choose to do this to themselves. Why do we medicate ourselves with food? Why do we neglect our health? These are the causes of the problem. This is what needs treating, not the symptom.

We need to examine our choices. Why did we choose to do something that is clearly not healthy and doesn't necessarily make us happy? Why did I choose to use food as something other than fuel?

Once we understand what influenced us to make these choices and resolve those issues, then making poor nutritional or fitness choices will be less of a problem.

It's something I'm still struggling with. It might be something I always struggle with. But it's up to me to take responsibility for what I've done to my body—for whatever reason I did it—and do something about it.

That's why I'm here.

Dr Phil was right, a 'no fail environment' really does make a hell of a difference.

I don't buy crap at the supermarket. I just refuse. If it doesn't take some effort to prepare (other than raw veg and fruit), I don't keep it in the house. No biscuits (cookies), no lollies (candy), no chips, no snack food, no nothing.

If it's not here, I can't eat it. And if I want it that badly, I can get off my lardy arse and walk down to the supermarket to buy it.

I haven't thought about hot chocolate or Milo in months. Neither has been a blip on my radar since I started this gig. But now I'm working with a client who keeps a catering-sized can of instant hot chocolate and a huge box of individual packs of Milo in the staff kitchen.

I'm obsessed.

It's all I can think about.

All I want is a mug of creamy hot chocolate or Milo. I know I haven't allowed myself the points for it and I need to keep my sugary points to a minimum if I want to maintain any sort of loss.

Part of me says to give in, to have the mug just to stop the obsessing. Another part of me sees the thin end of the wedge. The 'just one won't hurt' becoming two mugs, three mugs, gallons (OK, so I'm exaggerating just a bit).

Is it so wrong to be so focussed on something so stupid?

I know if I have it I'll be disappointed. It won't taste as good as my fevered little brain has imagined. I'll be disappointed in myself for giving in to what is really a reaction to proximity, not need. I'll be disappointed as my blood sugar crashes a couple of hours after I drink it and I turn into a moody cow from hell.

There is no good here.

I dragged myself off to a coffee shop to grab a skinny chai latte, just to alleviate the craving for something sweet, milky and frothy. But I'm not sure how long that will keep me going.

Should I give in?

Hoo boy, I know I wanted to get to the bottom of this whole emotional eating thing, but this is stretching things a little.

I'm hanging on by the proverbial fingertips, doing everything I can not to walk across the street to the store and buy every pack of Doritos on their shelves.

The subtitle says I'm not going to be bossed around by a cookie, nor will I be commandeered by an upstart Mexican snack food.

I'm a double Taurus (rising and sun signs). For anyone who has the slightest inkling about astrology, you will not be at all surprised that I'm fighting a weight problem or that I eat to calm myself. Right now, I'm between client cheques. A long way between client cheques. And the rent is due tomorrow.

For a double Taurus, this is akin to the sky falling on your head. And all I want to do is eat the problem into submission.

So says my lizard brain, anyway. The, albeit tiny, logical part of my brain reminds me that food will not help me pay the rent, in fact eating my body weight in corn chips will only serve to make me feel even more miserable. But 30-odd years of snacking when I'm down is hard to resist.

I did all the right things. I went for a walk, I distracted myself with other things, like house keeping and reading. I even made a pot of the ugliest fucking soup you've ever seen in all your born days (but it's bloody delicious and I'll post the recipe separately). But the stress nibbled at me and the snacky goodness called me.

I resisted. I resisted their call. I'm fighting to let that logical bit of my brain win out over my lizard brain, or my Dorito brain perhaps. Instead of soothing myself with their cheesy evil, I spoke to my boy about my stress and spoke kindly to myself. The sky is not falling. There is a way to pay the rent and we won't be thrown out onto the street to live in a refrigerator box in a garden somewhere.

The battle was won. But the war continues.