Turning A New Leaf

Advertisement in LIFE Magazine, pg. 129, 6-17-1946

Spring is the season of renewal, but it is not enough for me to revive and explore earlier times, as so few periods from my past recall elements worth repeating.  The last decade has seen chapters of staggered growth and correction, as far as overcoming severe malnutrition and depletion; in its first years I was treated to the help of specialists who provided supervised meals in a medical settling.  Doctors were keen to rebuke my stubbornness to embrace prescribed food allotments and I admittedly dragged my feet against their agendas for normalized body mass.  I now regard such inpatient care as a necessary and fortunate opportunity, one that has has become increasingly rare as facilities limit payment options and reduce or terminate sponsored charity seating.  I myself would jump at the offer to be in an eating disorders program, but my Medicaid package has approved only one option, and it is a part-time outfit in the southern Maine that would require extensive daily travel.  The only other way to make it work would be to camp-out at a hotel near its hospital host center, but this option requires I maintain a roommate overseer lest I renege on my commitment to off-hours policy.  So, more than ever, I am tasked with applying the lessons from past treatment episodes to life as an independent and free operator.  In the past, after reaching a weight that was new to me, I would routinely refuse myself food, exercising and fasting until hunger cues called me to relent to a binge at evening's end.  Now, should my system not feel especially burdened or uncomfortable from previous meals, I try to accept that it is adjusting to a different state of being and, hopefully, a well-paced metabolism.  It is not something to fight against.  In fact, after striking a new high on the scale only just this week and proceeding to eat normally, my body proceeded to discharge such massive bowel releases that I was once again left weak and depleted, my weight returning to its previous low.  This unexpected and mildly alarming development has left me questioning whether my feeding plan is in fact sufficient, especially when left to rival and compete with the exercise I continue to insist upon.  I surrender to an afternoon nap when schedule permits, yet offset this positive habit with extended walks, pedaling on a recumbent bicycle, leg lunges, stair climbing, and other efforts to expunge energy.  Just today I dared myself to obey my always active appetite and allotted an extra portion of fruit with lunch.  Not a tremendous development, but it demonstrated my willingness to break free of powerfully entrenched protocol.  I continue to replace soft drinks with brewed tea and water, although not in complete substitution of the former, as I have been indulging a strict two can allowance of decaf Diet Coke as late-night refreshment.  (This may still read as a generous quantity, but it pales next to the eight or more glasses I was only recently receiving over the course of a day.)  All in all, as the spring phases towards maturity and the trees again furnish their boughs with expanding corsages of green, I shall imagine my constitution building a thick new ring, like wood fortifying its base, recording the present as an age of appreciable, pronounced maturation.

"People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone." - Audrey Hepburn (May 4, 1929 – Jan. 20, 1993)