happy stuff & my favorite book ever

My sister is fine. Thank you for your prayers and warm thoughts. She is going to stop smoking, come hell or high water. Hell will come, I know, but I believe she'll get it done.

On another happy front, my favorite book in the world is Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. Surprised? I was too. I am not a fan of westerns. At all. I laughed at all of the brouhaha surrounding the book in the late '80s. A western? Please.

And then I read it. Have you? If you've not, consider it. It is a glorious novel of love and honor and betrayal and the human condition. McMurtry won a Pulitzer with this book, but that's just further evidence of how grand a work it is.

The characters have incredible depth, the writing is superb. If you are alive, it will make you laugh and you'll cry. It is irresistible, so much so that I reread it every year and have since 1990.

Delicious, a classic work of art. Have you read it?

i got my dawg!

Such a wonderful story to compare to Atlanta Falcons scumbag Michael Vick. I got my dawg! Rejoice!

exercise = happy

I have been stuck in such a gloomy spot, descending in a kind of hopeless spiral fueled by pain in my feet and the state of the world and anything else I could find to take me even further down. I haven't worked out in 11 days. It's been hell, and I knew that I missed it, but I didn't realize the tremendous positive effect exercise has on my state of mind until last night. I went into the gym in despair and left an hour later with a feeling of excitement and good cheer. The good effect continued all evening and still today. I feel like myself again; hope you are happy today as well.

intuitive eating

I abandoned dieting a week or so before we went to Padre Island, around the first of April. My abandonment of my constant companion was the result of being so completely weary of the obsession with food, dieting, not dieting, eating, not eating, restricting, how to restrict even more, shall I get rid of what I just ate? or no, I'll start tomorrow, have I gained weight, lost weight, what can I do to get rid of this madness that's consuming my life. It all seemed so hopeless and I was losing the same 10 pounds over and over and over ad nauseum.

I am not sure where the idea came from; I've heard of it over the years, but never imagined that it would work for me. I'm a food addict. I can't allow myself to eat anything at all any time I want, I'd weigh 1000 pounds if I did that. But the sense of there being nothing at all left to try made me willing and so I just quit dieting. I told myself I'd be fine if I could stay where I was, though the IE folks tell you to expect a weight gain. That was difficult, and it was difficult to give up weighing every day and writing down every molecule of food that went in my mouth.

When I went to the gym last night for the first time since my toenails were yanked off (hallelujah!!), I wasn't going to weigh because I've been sitting around for 11 days, haven't worked out at all, have walked very little because of the pain. Before that I spent a week tending to my daddy and his health concerns, stuck in a hospital much of the time, where there's no access to anything decent to eat.

But can I ever stay off a scale?? Nope. Between the treadmill and the elliptical, I had to run out there and the miracle is that I was just the same as a month ago. Just. The. Same. Stunning, for all of the aforementioned reasons that I should have gained 10 pounds, plus the fact that in that month I have eaten lasagna and chocolate and strawberry shortcake and roast chicken and salad and vegetables and a hamburger and lots of healthy food and lots of not healthy food and chocolate. And chocolate. And I've not gained any weight.

This is incredible. It's unprecedented. I didn't think it was possible. IE theory suggests that after the initial mad scramble to eat everything you've been deprived of for years, there will be a rebalancing of the internal want-to-eat switch. I've experienced some of that in finding myself hungry for good food, healthy food. In allowing myself to eat absolutely anything, I find that I don't want to eat only crap. When I tell myself I'll never eat chocolate again, it's all I can think about. I am so grateful and I feel so relieved. It's as if I have my head back after too many years being lost in the insanity of an eating disorder.