The Choice is Ours

The freedom to choose.   What a luxury that is.  So let's be indulgent eat something that makes our self  feel good.  We deserve it, we long for it.  It's life's greatest reward.  That's something I would tell myself all the time, everyday and many times a day.  I would justify my need for every type of fatty, sweet and calorie dense food I could.  I would eat ice cream like it was going out of style chased with cookies.  Food truly has been my big compulsion all of my life.   Why does bad have to taste so good? 

My weight was really high when I was younger(10-17 yrs 180-200lbs).  Although my self esteem was always very low, I still had to convince myself to go on.  After all I was not dead, just feeling under appreciated.  I convinced myself that I wasn't that bad. Eventually I believed that I was supposed to be large.  That is what nature had intended for me.  The proof was there.  After all, I wasn't getting any smaller.  So I coped..  It's what I had to learn to do.  Feelings of being weak and incapable held me back because I let them.  I needed to feel that I was weak in order to validate myself. Proof that I should be fat and unloved.  I could prove anything I set out to prove. It's too bad that I had to focus on the negative aspects of  my life with a need to magnify the difficult issues.

The battle went on right into my 40's.  Still convincing myself that all the wrong things were right. Now statistically I was in the norm.   Most people seem to be overweight these days.  I fit right in. When the proof is all around you it is pretty hard to ignore.  The reward is the killer.  Satisfaction lingers, It doesn't dissolve in your mouth.  It doesn't cause you heart disease and high cholesterol.  I don't have the need to be normal, or even like everybody else.  Life is not over and I am not sitting around waiting to die.

I now see the beauty in all those other choices that I neglected to look at for most of my life.  Fresh whole foods are true rewards that multiply throughout the course of our lives.  By taking care of our bodies we enable ourselves to reap benefits that we dream about.