Wednesday is the last day of the year; a realization that strikes panic like a stitch in my side when running.
Oh wait, I haven’t been running since I turned 41. That look back makes this like child’s play – a few days in a year is nothing to twenty. And yet, like yesterday or twenty years ago I am again heckled to hate myself and plan my diet-cure by December 31.
Anne Lamott says don’t do it. Fix beautiful food, care for yourself as you would a guest; walk every day she says. However sound her cryptic words of reason may be, what came to me earlier this year shouts louder for my attention.
If I am not dieting, I am gaining.
No sooner than I write these words that I so proudly found and claimed in 2014, new realizations dawn out of something bigger than me. (I know they are not mine as they come gently and without the familiar, never felted hammer.)
What I call dieting, others call normal eating. Under these conditions, every day of normal eating is a day on a diet.
It seems that you classify normal eating as a diet. Your perception of normal eating is warped; mis-calibrated like unregulated butcher scales it can’t be trusted. Your view of what is normal for your body to look like is clouded by an astigmatism; a part of your DNA and your environment.
You do not need a diet. You need normal eating, and over time you will return to the normal you have never consciously known.
Make “finding your physical normal” your quest for the new year. Come to this by being normal; not outside of this with time limits and an un-natural tract of action for a goal to be abandoned.
Diets don’t work.
Being normal does – because it’s normal.
Let your prayer be, “Help me find and live my physical normal. Starting now. With Your help.”
And 2014’s “truth” is updated by 2015’s prayer.