Bad Habits

Given how often I complain about being a failure, a faithful reader probably already knows my weaknesses....but for the hell of it, here's a list of [some of] my weaknesses. In no particular order.

• Eating at night. I get home and I feel like the first thing I have to do is eat. Why? I guess more specifically it's eating upon arriving home. I used to always eat after school, which could be part of it.
• Bottomless snacks. My beau tends to put bags of chips in front of me. A stronger person would refuse, but I have an issue with diving right in.
• Social eating. Eating is a bonding ritual. If you want to be close to someone, you eat with them.
• Inability to throw away food. I know it's not really wasteful not to finish a plate at a restaurant, because no one else is going to eat it after it's been put on your plate. It's a waste to make the servings so large in the first place. It still feels like I'm wasting money, or food... it just makes me feel guilty.
• Here's a WTF sort of habit. Eating when I feel energetic. I guess it could be called boredom eating. I'm nocturnal and I feel cooped up at night. Eating kills some of that hyper feeling.
• Treating diet pop like it undoes some of the food-damage. It really doesn't. It has some caffeine and it's bubbly, which is fun - but I should know better. It's bad for me in it's own way.
• Humoring my sweet tooth with sweets. I could easily do that with fruit, or maybe even juice... but I tend to seek out the fatty sugary disgusting things that are always around my house.

In retrospect, my entire adolescence would have been better if my family were healthier. Though it's not even just about me, I'm getting to a point in my life where I'm genuinely concerned for my parents' well-being. I don't even want to talk about it... but it's bad. I feel like everyone in that house is suffocating. So trapped.

Anyway, when I don't eat "my share" of food, my parents tend to get irritated with me. My mother accuses me of being too thin, and my father accuses me of wasting the food I didn't buy or want.

Firstly, I've never been too thin. My mother told me she used to have a 23 inch waist. She also told me that after 3 children, it was 25 inches.

Are you kidding me? My body comes from my father's side. Curvier Mediterranean genes. My waist never got down to 25 inches. I got it to just under 25.5, and that was a huge deal for me. I'm thinner than her now... but she's cooped up all day. Eating out of anger and hatred of pretty much everything around her. Plus, she's in her mid-fifties. That doesn't help.

What I really want right now is to be fit, honestly. It would be an improvement. I don't know what my waist is right now. I don't know what my weight is right now. I have been paying attention to my foods and activities, but I'm not in the right place. I don't know. Maybe if I hold out long enough for a day I don't feel like such a grotesque slob, I won't hate the number on the scale.