Two and a half months since my last entry. I’ve dieted for several good spurts during that time. But let’s face it, a spurt is a spurt and never results in substantial weight loss. I didn’t want to step on the scale this morning, but I forced myself. Oh, horrors! I’ve gained back almost half of my hard-earned loss. I will not gain any more. I am nearly suicidal. I’m constantly living with that what-am-I-going-to-do-I-can’t-stop-eating feeling.
Remember the scene from Poltergeist where the jaws of hell envelop the closet doors, sucking everything in? I’m having a similar feeling. It’s as if I’m holding on to that door frame with my hands and feet. It would almost be a relief to let myself go and be sucked into that horrible hole, ending it all.
Then again, it’s as if I’m being crushed tight into a corner. The pressure of the world—the whole universe, it seems—keeps smashing me, tighter and tighter. It’s sucking up all the air, crushing my lungs, and I can’t breathe, and I hurt, and I’m terrified that I won’t be able to get another breath, but I’m also terrified to keep on breathing because I’m on my way up the hell scale, and if I gain one more pound, I’ll burst or kill myself or something; but I can’t stop eating, so for sure I will gain another pound and—ohhhh! “Please, God, help me!”
I cannot believe that I let myself gain eleven pounds in the past two weeks. Yet I’ve done it before. When I was pregnant with Matthew, I gained about eighty-five pounds. Uh-huh, you guessed it—I’m pregnant. And while I’m ecstatic at the prospect, I simply cannot gain as I have in the past. I weighed over 270 pounds when I delivered Tiffany. I will not do that to myself again. I cannot; I am now five years older. I might die if I weigh that much.
This pregnancy has kept me continually nauseated, feeling constantly on the verge of throwing up. Whoever named it morning sickness? Morning, afternoon, and evening sickness is more like it! I keep thinking that if I could find the right food, my stomach would feel some relief. Nope! All my stomach is feeling is fatter!
I keep telling myself that I am eating strictly to make the nausea go away. I know I’m only pretending to myself, but all fat people have worked hard to master that art, the art of deceiving themselves. Pretending it’s okay to eat another sandwich because we haven’t eaten very much that day, pretending that this is our last—I mean very last—splurge, pretending we can’t tell that our clothes are fitting tighter. Why, if we worked that hard at not eating, there would be no more fat people. But we continually pretend, and pretending is such a hard job that we work up quite an appetite.
There is nothing I can eat to make this awful feeling of nausea go away. Time alone will take it away. Two more months, and it should be gone. What am I going to do in the meantime? Gain thirty more pounds? The scary fact is, I could do it. I could easily gain thirty pounds in two months. But I refuse! Even if I have to stay in my room and write twenty-four hours a day to stay away from food. From this second on, there will be no more eating to try to ease the nausea. It never helps. It only makes me fatter. No more eating to try to ease the nausea. It never helps. It only makes me fatter. I’ll write it 10,000 times if necessary until it’s drilled into my thick skull.