Apparently my body went into shock

The moment I started to eat healthily I got a nasty bout of the flu.

I blame Hal's green drink. ;) Too much health too fast!

I am proud to say that despite a few low points these last few days where I wanted sugar to feel better, I did not get any. Even ice cream to soothe a sore throat. Sounds like a minor thing but I consider this a pretty significant victory.

Baby steps.

The good news is the fever is officially gone and I feel a lot better, so I can start making more of these changes effective immediately. Including a walk at either the park OR the treadmill.

I also must blow up the Pilates ball I purchased last Friday in my "take time to pamper myself" extravaganza... which, incidentally, also included a couple of bottles of lotion from Bath & Body Works.

And you know what? It actually did boost my mood.

I didn't rely on sugar. Even when I went out to eat. AND I ate a vegetarian meal, so even better. I did succumb to the bread basket, but like I said - baby steps.

Not having dessert (even when it was part of the meal deal) AND forsaking booze was huge.

I also purchased a book entitled "The Sugar Addict's Total Recovery System", and have perused through it to see if it's something that can work for me. The author maintains that we only eat three meals a day, which I'm not sure is going to work out. I've found the best way to curb my appetite is to space it out and eat on regular intervals. The longer I go in between meals the stronger my impulse to gorge, protein or no protein.

But the information is there if I decide to go that route.

I'm definitely implementing the idea of eating more protein. From what I've researched in the past, protein does help stabilize blood sugar. I think the best dietary course of action will be the Low GI plan, which simply means I give up those foods which cause a dramatic spike in blood sugar for things like lean proteins, whole grains and fresh fruits and vegetables.

I like the idea of dividing the plate into quarters, making one half of the plate fresh veggies and fruits, while one quarter is a low GI starch and the other quarter is a low fat protein.

We'll see how it works out in real life. Such things sound plausible in theory but sometimes life does get in the way.

I'm not going to make any rigid changes until I get the sugar addiction under control first.

This isn't about setting myself up for failure. This is about doing something every day to make me feel proud of how I'm honoring my body and taking care of my health, which - despite my guilt doing so - can also include staying home from work when I'm sick to prevent spreading the flu.

But enough of that for now, it's time to go make breakfast. Peanut butter on toast with some fresh fruit, washed down with a refreshing bottle of water.

Nummy!

Now that we've tackled the emotional componant...

It's time to deal - truthfully - with the physical reason I have been unable or unwilling to make these changes.

It's rather obvious I've been medicating with food for a long, long time. I have all these intense emotional feelings and have been satisfying them with the bandaid of the foods that recreate in the brain these chemicals that I should be feeling naturally.

In simple terms... I've been getting high on sugar.

And like any addiction, it's also been a self fulfilling prophesy. I feel bad emotionally, I get the artificial mood boost from sugar, which only lasts until the next "fix".

That's why getting something "sweet" was how I spoiled myself (quite literally it turned out), and always - always - how I self destructed once I saw any real success. I looked in the mirror, saw the changes or worse, had others point them out for me, and suddenly I was emotionally vulnerable.

This leads once again to more sugar, which leads again to more masking the real reason I'm burying myself with weight because the temporary "high" is so much better.

So step one to reclaiming my life means that I have to get rid of my dependence on sugar.

I went to the store the other day and implemented my plan. I spent the majority of my time on the outer edges of the store (fresh produce, etc) than in the middle, reminding myself that "nothing good ever comes in a bag". I didn't even get sugar free cookies or pudding or ice cream - which had been my original plan. Instead I went with fruit or natural sugars to facilitate the detoxification from processed chemicals.

In the same respect, I'm trying to move away from eating meat... to fill my body with live stuff like vegetables, fruit and produce rather than dead animals. Not vegan necessarily, and not even vegetarian (since I've read that fish is actually a really good food to combat chemical depression), but just a more conscious effort to get away the more conventional eating habits that have always contributed to my dependence on sugar.

I figure the better I feel physically, the better I'll feel mentally - and I need to do that naturally instead of just these quick temporary fixes.

So my focus, then, is to avoid sugar by eating things that are good for me and my body rather than fill it with chemicals.

It hasn't been easy. Walking past the cookies and turning away dessert at the restaurant (and the booze) was not an easy task.

Like with any addiction... one day at a time.

It all started with a bottle of lotion.

I work at a call center, and as the late shift we don't have assigned seating per se. Instead we have to sit where ever there is an empty seat, and more often than not we end up using a desk that the day shift has decorated and personalized for themselves.

So as I sat there at that desk, I noticed this bottle of lotion. Not a lotion user myself, I wasn't particularly compelled to use any of it, but the longer I sat there the more I grew curious about it. I noticed it was from Bath & Body Works, a place I never go because I think it's overpriced - and I don't want to spend that kind of money on that stuff.

I finally picked it up and gave it a sniff. Sweet Pea, it said. It was nice. Curiosity satisfied I capped the bottle and put it back in its place without using a drop. Since I didn't buy it, I wasn't going to use it. That's just not my way.

Plus, I'm not the kind of person who uses lotion anyway.

Call after call came in and I kept looking at that bottle. Every now and again I'd pick it up and sniff it, recap it and put it back on the desk. It dawned on me that just by how pretty it smelled, it simply improved my mood just to smell it.

As I'm growing older I am noticing the changes in my skin. It's becoming a little less elastic and soft. I started to contemplate the benefits of lotion - and wondered why I'd never really gotten into the whole beauty regimen type stuff other girls seem to relish.

Someone like the gal whose desk I shared, whose pictures showed she took care of the way she looked.

I thought about my long, unkempt hair in a ponytail that hadn't been styled in months. I thought about how I usually don't wear makeup or even worry too much about the clothes that I wear. As long as they're clean, they fit and do their job camouflaging all my problem spots, that's all I really require.

The night wore on and that bottle continued to haunt me. Why *didn't* I try harder to make myself more presentable? Why did I use "pampering" myself as an excuse to pile on more pounds and eat myself to death?

I blamed the expense on why I wouldn't go to Bath & Body Works, but a bottle of lotion lasts far longer than a lunch at McDonalds - and as opposed to that high fat, high calorie junk fest, the bottle of lotion actually *does* pamper you and improve you.

Why, I finally asked myself, am I so willing to be unattractive? Not just unattractive... but repellent even.

That's when it hit me like a ton of bricks.

When I was attacked at the age of four and sexually molested, that rapist did more to me than simply invade my body and corrupt my innocence.

He stole my pretty.

Before that, I was exalted as a beautiful child. I was an average weight, and had a mother who taught me how to take care of my femininity. Men loved me from the time I was born, and my mother's favorite story is how they'd line up at the nursery just for a chance to hold me for a few minutes.

But after that event, no longer did I care about attracting any attention. Such attention could be, and in fact had proven to be, quite dangerous.

And thus, the lifelong - albeit unconscious - attempt to keep people at arm's length began. Being a pretty girl was dangerous, but being a fat girl - while often painful and bitterly lonely - was *safe*.

The lesser of two evils, as it were.

I've been on the journey to lose weight more often than not, and the pattern always repeats. I'll do very well, see significant changes and then I'll shut down and start to undo all the good I've done.

It's not a conscious choice, mind you. It's a choice that is buried under excuse after excuse why I can't do what I was doing that was working so well. And it all comes back to one simple truth.

Being attractive or successful or pretty makes me vulnerable. If people want to pay attention to me, it scares me to death.

I don't want to be targeted or worse... overcome. So I keep this wall of flesh around me like a barricade, certain that no one will want to invade me or if they do - I have the stature to prevent it from happening again.

I guess that's what happens when you're abused when you're small. Being big suddenly means you need to swing as far to the other side of the pendulum to ensure that it never, ever happens again.

As I get smaller, I feel less empowered. More vulnerable.

So I guess I need to work on the feelings that I felt back on that day so many years ago.

I felt targeted, so I made myself unattractive.

I felt small and helpless, so I made myself big and threatening.

I felt vulnerable, so I turned into a control freak.

Men who wanted me = a threat. Men who didn't want me = safe. (a pattern that has repeated many times over the course of my life as I chose where to throw my affection and attention)

The hell you create by choice always seems far more preferable than risking fate, where anything can happen to you.

So here I am with all this information and vague ideas what to do with it.

The first of which is a new mission. To dig deep under the layers of fear and find my pretty.

It was quite an epiphany for a Sunday afternoon.

And it all started with a bottle of lotion.