Mind Games

I have always known that this process wasn't going to be easy.  I am fighting 25 years of bad habits and less than ideal genetics.  I did hope some things would get easier, and truth be told some things have.  Having lost as much weight as I have has made exercising so much easier, and therefore more likely to happen.  My stomach has shrunk, so I can't eat as much as I used to.  The one thing that has not gotten easier has been the mental aspect of my diet.  I crave, get tempted, occasionally give in, and then regret.  I find myself thinking about food so much.  Some of that is about planning and doing the preparation that keeps me out of trouble, but the rest, and the majority, is the darker stuff.  It may be my imagination playing tricks on me, but I am so jealous of the people who seem to enjoy food, but over whom food has no hold.  It may be that there is no one like that, but it certainly seems like all those skinny bastards out there have no trouble with, say, a sudden, visceral urge to eat an entire movie theater bag of sour patch kids.  It strikes me that it is as unhealthy to worry and fret over food as much as I seem to at times as to have the sort of emotional connection I have had for years.  It may be that I always have to fight urges like this.  I am extremely lucky to have not known true hunger in my life.  I have been hungry in the "it is time for the next of my three meals today" kind of way, but not the way so many of the less fortunate around us are.  That opened the door for my relationship with food to become what it was for me: a purely hedonistic one.  If that kind of relationship doesn't work between people, imagine how harmful it can be between a person and the thing that keeps them alive.  I am also a very logical guy, and when I make mistakes or struggle with temptation I find it especially galling because it is not a logical thing.  I cannot explain many of those things, so I find them very hard to combat.  Part of me is reluctant to write about this because I don't control it.  However, it just occurred to me that it is logical, in a perverse sort of way, that for such a cerebral person the mental aspect of this journey is proving the hardest.  I don't know what to expect from this posting.  I know I cannot be the only person in this boat.  I suppose that by naming the problem, and sharing it with you, I hope to gain control over it.  It certainly won't happen overnight, but  as Lao-tzu said "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step".  If nothing else I have proven that over the last four months.