Monday, November 15, 2021

An Unexpected Reprieve

This is my fifteenth binge-less day, so I think we can affirm that the collapse of Favierian civilization has been postponed. My ambition is to have no binge days at all. I have three feast days scheduled during the year, which I will not count as binges: Thanksgiving, my birthday (in March) and some as-yet unspecified high summer date in July or August.

Since I have been tracking binges, my longest binge-less streak has been 46 days. My primary focus right now is securing the habit of binge-less eating: what happens to my weight or waistline is irrelevant if it’s not under control and sustainable. So while I still have the goal of getting a 90% waist-hip ratio, eventually, and/or my 32” waist, it can wait indefinitely while I nail this down: it doesn’t much matter which way the ship happens to be pointed if I have no steerageway. I’m going to be very wary of cutting my calorie intake while I get this settled. I’d do it if my waistline started expanding, I guess, but I won’t do it just to make it shrink. A 34” waist is fine, and a timeline of five years to get to my final goals would be fine. First things first.

I suspect, though I don’t know -- sample of one, & all that -- that fasting destabilized me, and that it may not be a tool I can use. Anyway, I won’t be experimenting with it again for a while.

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The longer I think about my truncated icosahedron, for representing my world, the happier I am: thinking of the pentagons as open sea was one kind of delightful, but another and even more delightful thought is that they can be otherworldly places. Annuvin. Faerie. Mordor. Places you can't see into from outside, and where, once you have crossed their thresholds, the rules are all different. Maps don't quite match up: but what else would you expect? It's not actually a game defect: it's a game opportunity.  Sure, you can go there, but can you get back? You go over a few restricted passes, or through a tunnel, or you open a gate, and suddenly you're not in Kansas any more. Making some of the world by hand will be its own kind of delight.

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Washed clean by the autumn sun, and by the wind blowing from the fresh snow in the mountains, and by the serious rains rolling in over the Coast Range. This Indian summer of my life: I have never been so happy, or so at ease. An unexpected reprieve. May it come to all of us.

5 comments:

YourFireAnt said...

That last paragraph is wonderful.

CatherinE said...

So happy for you!

Kathleen said...

Cheering for you!

am said...

A daily reprieve is an extraordinary thing.

This time of year in the more or less coastal Pacific Northwest may be dark and rainy but so refreshing at the same time.

Dale said...

Yes. During the worst of the smoke, last year, I would panic and imagine I'd never see days like these again.