Today was my first full day of clean eating, and I don’t mind saying that it sucked. I drank so much water that taking a leak is now my most time-consuming hobby. I’m surprised the toilet didn’t look at me and say, “You again?” The meals themselves were fine–they just didn’t last long. This seems to be the case whenever I cut out carbs, at least for a couple of weeks. It’s like my body’s saying, “Hey, where’d all the bread go? SEND MORE BREAD!”

This afternoon I ate a salad bigger than Minnie Pearl’s hat. It was so big and there were so many vegetables to chew that it took me an hour to get the damn thing down. Midway through, I was stuffed and honestly didn’t think I’d be able to finish it, but I did. (No carrot’s gonna get the best of me.) Thirty minutes later, I was hungry again. All day I’ve been hungry. It’s like I’m just throwing eggs and artichokes into my stomach the way a seven-year-old throws pebbles into the Grand Canyon. There’s just a faint “chink” as they hit the bottom of my guts. It feels like trying to satisfy a pet dragon with a stalk of celery.

The upside to being hungry all day long has been that I already feel skinnier. I had a friend tell me once that when he quit smoking and his arms trembled from cravings, he just told himself it was his body’s reaction to getting so much oxygen. In terms of cigarettes, that logic never worked for me, but I like the fact that my friend could blow smoke up his own ass to help him over a hump. So today I’ve been telling myself that feeling hungry is my stomach’s positive reaction to my good decisions, as if all that noise down there were a bunch of cheerleaders at a ballgame rooting me on. I said a-boom-chicka-boom! 

Honestly, I’m not buying it for a second.

This evening I walked to the park in Van Buren and jogged around the pond/lake/whatever when I got there. Jogging is hard enough as it is, but the trail tonight was covered in goose poop, so it was like running an obstacle course. There were feathers and shit–everywhere. It looked like a bunch of birds were in the middle of lunch and got massacred by a crocodile, shitting themselves just before they died. I kept darting left and right–it was more crap than concrete–imagining that if I stepped on a wet turd, I’d end up first in the pond and then in the chiropractor’s office.

So I only did one lap, then headed back to the house.

Before I got home, I stopped at the high school track and jogged a mile (for a total of about three), alternating each lap between jogging and walking. I really hoped that by the time I finished I’d no longer be able to feel my butt bouncing up and down like one of those big punch balloons with the long rubber bands that children play with. Alas, that was not the case. I kept reminding myself that Rome wasn’t built in a day. A firm butt isn’t built in a day. When it comes to losing weight and healthy living, it’s about being able “to seek distant rather than immediate results.” (Someone famous said that.)

A few days ago a Facebook memory popped up with a picture from the summer camp where I used to work. The picture (below) is almost twenty years old, and it shows me and several of my dear friends dressed up in camouflage and war paint. (We used to do a lot of shit like that in order to entertain and scare the campers. The young ones sometimes wet their pants in appreciation.) Normally I get nostalgic for summer camp and my friends when I see a picture like this one, but as I jogged tonight, the only thing I could think about about was how fucking fantastic my waistline looked back then and the fact that I didn’t even appreciate it at the time.

Now that I think about, I didn’t appreciate beer back then either. I’m sure the two facts are unrelated. In college when I gained weight for the first time, my sister said, “Is it food weight or beer weight?” Well, I hadn’t even thought about it. I said, “Beer has weight?” (This is something they didn’t teach us in science class at Fort Smith Christian.)

This afternoon I watched The People’s Court, thought that everyone on the show could use a good therapist, and put contact paper on some of my favorite paperback books. I can’t tell you how happy it made me, everything so neat and tidy. This evening I soaked in the tub and took extra time to groom and shave, so now I’m neat and tidy too. I’ve been thinking all day that it’s important to have little rituals like this whenever embarking on new adventures like dieting and exercising because it signals that we’re willing to take care of ourselves (just like putting contact paper on your paperback books signals that you’re willing to take care of your things). It’s why we break champagne bottles on new ships–it’s like a baptism, a beginning.

So that’s how I’m looking at today, as a beginning. After all, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. And whereas it’s just a single step, it’s a really important one. So today is my single step, and as I strike out with hunger–both for carbohydrates and for what is to come–I seek results in the distance.

[Thanks to my friend April , whom I’ve known almost my entire life, for posting the picture from camp. She’s fourth from the left in the photo, and if it weren’t for her, I probably never would’ve worked there, and that would’ve sucked more than this diet.]