Presto Diet - Day Three

My partner showed me a video of Penn Jillette talking about his weight-loss. Said video is here.

I bought his book 'Presto' and started upon a reading rampage. His book is funny and I definitely don't agree with everything he talks about but the main pretence made sense to me.

I've only ever done one diet before, the Liver Cleansing Diet - which my Mum and I did together when I was about 16 or so. I did it and lost a bunch of weight and got a crazy amount of comments and positivity from EVERYONE. It was stupid, because as soon as I began to eat like myself again (binges and all) I just gained the weight back on. Plus I felt like a fucking failure.

Recently I decided to go back to Over-Eaters Anonymous again. I'd gotten to the point of exhaustion with my bingeing - my obsession with food had taken up so much of my energy that I was barely able to keep the rest of my life together. OA is a strange place, you go there because you really don't want to and you keep going because you really really don't want to. It's that type of awful feeling, deep down in the pit of yourself that is just screaming to leave the room - and your rational self realises that sitting in a room for an hour with strangers, telling you about their lives and eating habits should not illicit that reaction. The only reason your mind is reacting like that is because it's trying to save it's addictive self. You and your body want to keep running yourself into the ground because the addiction is just that strong, it has been your coping mechanism for life.

That addiction has both helped and hindered me through almost my entire life, starting back when my relationship with food and my body went sour. Much like how most of my future romantic relationships would go, it was a one-sided, needy-as-fuck relationship. Food was my first love. My second was my friend at Primary School that I used to obsessively stalk whilst he played soccer on the field.

Needless to say, the unrequited loves of my life made me terribly unhappy and food was a comfort to my loneliness, anxiety (that one has become quite the fucking buzz-word lately hasn't it?) and fear.

So this book by a Magician who at best I find funny and at worst I find annoyingly arrogant, felt refreshing and interesting. It also sounded like an bizarre way to implement the Meal Plan which OA recommends as part of your recovery process. A bit like doing an experiment on my fucked up, self-abused body.


At the real core of it all, I don't want to think about food constantly, I don't want to be obese and have all these shitty health problems at 31 years old, and I sure as hell don't want to die early because I ate too much BK.

The Potato Famine part is tough (it's also pretty offensively named). I have done it for almost 3 days now and my obsessive mind has been obsessing about potatoes a lot. And then this morning I woke up and I wasn't hungry, I think mainly because I don't really feel like a plain potato or kumera. That's interesting to me - that because I've taken the choices and pleasure out of my food (it's for 2 weeks), my mind doesn't feel like eating and I can clearly listen to what the rest of my body needs.

So I feel okay, more okay than I expected to feel. Although Penn mentions that the third and fourth days are generally the shittiest for people, so I'm waiting for that. The headaches are shit, the hot flushes are annoying and the puffy face is too but so far that's it. In the meantime I see my weight has gone down - whether or not it's just water weight or something else I don't know but that's cool, I'm in this for the long run. I started at 106 kilos and I'm now 102, my goal is 75.

I want my body to be healthy and live a long time and I'm eating potatoes for two weeks, then a mainly vegan based diet until I reach my target weight. Once I'm there I'll be vegan most of the time and eat what I want every two weeks, for a 4 hour period.

Penn's book may be a money-making venture, it may have more jokes and ego than medical advice (he does mention that he is after-all not a Nutritionist but a Las Vegas Magician) but it has helped me because it led me to believe that with my naturally obsessive and extremist personality (much like his), I needed to make changes that go with my nature, not against it. I cannot eat like a 'normy' and I don't want to. I'm going to eat like a big fat Magician whose trying to heal his body, and so far I feel like this is working for me.

Watch this space...

Your food, your food, your food is my drug.

I saw a film called 'Thanks For Sharing' a few nights ago that focused on sex addiction. I thought it would be some puff piece where they lightly attempted to inject some sort of message into the storyline but filled the rest up with a shit-ton of puns about sex. I was pleasantly surprised at the depth of the film and even more surprised that I felt a real connection to the pain of their stories.

I became keenly aware of the addict crossover world years ago when I fessed up to myself that I had a compulsive binge eating problem. At the time I was navigating myself through the minefield of baggage that was entangled up in the shizzle of my bipolar mess, so my therapist and I decided to focus on keeping me alive and deal with the eating issues later. This often happens when someone has more than one major issue (such as smoking and drinking), the focus goes on the addiction/mental health issue that is more dire and the lesser evil is swept under the rug for a bit. Many addicts have more than one addiction, as do many people with mental health bullshit, in fact I'm yet to meet someone who has collected just one. Often you're just not that aware of the others until the black hole sized one is more manageable or drug dulled.

The odd thing for me was realising that compulsive binge eating was very much an addiction and how similar my experiences with it were to my friend who was a recovering alcoholic. I'm sure people would love to think that they're not and I'm definitely not saying there aren't plenty of differences (I haven't heard of any binge induced comas for instance). But the lies, deception, shame, guilt, complete lack of control whilst actioning said addiction, those are good friends for all addicts. No matter what substance we're abusing, we're trying to drown and numb something fucking dark that's located deep inside us.

In many ways I'm lucky, my addictions haven't killed me yet. I say yet because I may develop diabetes, have a stroke or heart attack due to my addiction to food. I managed to be a recovering OE for a few years but I recently figured out that I've managed to justify my inner addict for months now due to other health issues. So it came creeping back, stifled slightly by my late bastard of a gallbladder which attacked me for six months before I was able to get it removed, I was unable to eat anything high in fat, spice or with any alcohol content without having a severe gallstone attack. Much like my late grandfather who survived a double aneurism and was thus unable to drink, not drinking didn't make him any less of an addict and not eating shit food hasn't made me less of one either.

I'm not sure where to go from here but I think I might search out my old OA book again and see where it leads me. I tend to follow paths like this to avoid impending doom problems that are closer to home, so perhaps if I just dealt with those I'd binge less anyway. Sounds so simple, if only self happiness was as easy as it deceptively sounds.