Seriously, just stop.

Remember Susan Powter? My earliest memory of her is from her Stop the Insanity! phase in the early nineties; my cousin brought a copy of the book to our family Thanksgiving and spent the weekend in my grandmother's rocking chair, her nose buried in the book as she gave my family scathing looks anytime someone proffering a bowl of mashed potatoes or wild rice dared to pass within her invisible force field of New Dieter Restraint and sanctimony.

I remember sitting at the dining room table in my grandma's house, spooning forkfuls of the obligatory sweet potatoes with carmelized marshmallow into my mouth and staring at the top of my cousin's blonde head with a mixture of resentment and abject envy. My cousin was SO cool in my eyes...an only child whose coddling was so thorough that by the age of nine she was already a full-fledged uber-bitch. She was the first in the family to own a Nintendo, the only kid I knew who was allowed to go to pop concerts, and who--gasp--owned Madonna's Sex book when she was 12. She also regaled me with stories of making out with junior high school boys and told me what the word "orgasmic" meant over iced hot chocolates at the coffee shop where she liked to hold court and draw abstract graffiti on her jeans with black Sharpie marker. My cousin J was a bona fide badass in my eyes, so anything that caught her interest was all the more exotic and alluring to me as a result.

Since my mother was determined to ensure that I would NOT become an cranky, adolescent sex-kitten like my cousin, she refused to let me buy the Susan Powter book on the grounds that Powter looked "a little like a Nazi" and that it probably didn't say anything that I didn't already know about weight loss. A few years later I checked out the book at the library, and confirmed my mom's suspicions: Susan Powter did, indeed, have an unfortunate buzz cut, and I already basically figured out everything she had to say.

So why is Susan Powter super healthy and I'm getting fatter and fatter by the week?

I guess if you asked me where I've been for the last several days, I'd have a lot of answers. For instance, I've been pausing a lot of live TV(!) with the DVR on my new satellite(!) and then looking triumphantly over at the cats like I just discovered fire or something. I've been trying to figure out what the hell is going on on Big Love because I still haven't seen the first season. I've been frantically getting my room ready for the beginning of the school year (yuck). I've been entertaining houseguests and catching up with old friends (yay). I've been tentatively stepping into the world of tango again, with plans to start classes again with my super-expensive but oh-so-totally-worth-it tango shoes I purchased from the very kind and supportive Veggie B!, and I've been taking stupid pictures of my cats on my cell phone, especially when they're cute and sniff said tango shoe, as seen in the picture below:
So anyway, all those things were great (except for actually having to work for nine whole months in a row again...le sigh), but the real reason I was gone was because I was doing a lot of thinking. And thinking ain't never end up good. I guess last Monday after I stepped on the scale and jumped immediately into my routine of cognitive behavioral therapy wherein I say my litany of "You Really Aren't THAT Fat" affirmations like, "It's just water weight"..."No way could you have eaten five whole pounds of food in one week"..."Maybe you just PMS, like, through the entire month" I sort of hit diet bottom.

And this diet bottom was different from all the other ones I've had where I've eaten a lot and not exercised and ended up a few pounds heavier and then I spend one evening sitting in my bed and pouting and promising desperately to go right back on the diet the next day and to really TRY HARDER and DO BETTER and WHY can't I just get this right just once and WHY am I such a diet failure and what's it going to TAKE and, and, and...

This diet bottom was the realization that I just absolutely cannot do the diet thing any longer. I am sick of totalling up calories, of bargaining with my food journal and figuring out how many calories of exercise (that I'll never do) it'll take to equal out an extra piece of cake, and whether I can go out to eat with friends and still eat the "right foods" and not be tempted by the "bad ones". I realized that even though I'm supposed to take a fairly relaxing mini-vacation with my family this weekend, I am absolutely going to pieces over the idea of maintaining a diet while we're going out to eat and on the road. It shouldn't be STRESSFUL to go enjoy myself. I shouldn't have a bad day or a good day or a bad or good WEEK just because the scale tells me whether I'm good at burning calories or not.

I've been dieting every day since I was nine. I can't do it anymore.

I've been reading Intuitive Eating, the book that a lot of people I know who've recovered from eating disorders have recommended to me when I talk about those same issues. I've been resistant for a long time, because the nature of the book makes it sound like you have to have a lot of faith in yourself, and I don't think there's ever been a day where I've trusted myself around food, ever. I have to admit, the book is boring as sin, but it does reassure me on a lot of different issues, especially the part that recovering the natural balance in your body between hunger and satiety is a long process that will involve lots and lots of trial and error. I'm actually, surprisingly, okay with all of that.

Anyway, I guess there'll be a lot of things to talk about in the coming weeks, especially as I attempt to figure out what the hell I'm going to do. But I do know that tonight, as I clicked open my nutrition journal/calorie counter out of habit, felt the familiar, nauseating wave of dread pass through my body, and then said "fuck you" to my computer screen and clicked out, that that was the nicest feeling I've had in a long, long time.

And it kind of makes the phrase "Stop the insanity!" take on a whole new meaning for me in the process.