Scraping By, Lifting Off

The marked decline in the frequency of my posts can be attributed to various home restoration efforts being undertaken as unusually fair weather settles in our region.  In particular, my sister has enlisted me to patch and paint the surfaces of an upstairs guest bathroom, tending additionally to the removal of a small plot of drab linoleum now covering wooden floor beams original to our home's 1847 construction.  I have been preparing the walls by scouring and peeling layers of paper, removing hardware, then filling chinks and other cavities with calcium carbonate spackling medium.  Next, I intend to sand and prime before proceeding with the final finish, a blue-silver tint surprisingly similar to the base coat revealed at fiberboard level.  I have photographed my latest entry, scrolled upon the very surface I have been tasked to improve.

Author's admission: The "'forbidden' tastes" referenced above included difficult foods, true, but  they were ones I have learned to incorporate as a necessity for staving-off weight loss.  Basically, they are the "light" carbohydrates/dairy products standard to my diet in times of reverse-restriction:  reduced-calorie chocolate soy milk, Lactaid® cottage cheese, and, over dry popcorn, nutritional yeast, I Can't Believe It's Not Butter spray, salt.  It is inaccurate and irresponsible, as your narrator, to say they are taboo.  A year ago I, when I was surviving primarily on steamed vegetables and multiple heads of lettuce, they were indeed seen as indulgent.  However, in more recent months I have come to depend on them almost exclusively.  While the ice cream is indeed new to my regimen, the only other outlier introduced that night, being radically out of the ordinary, was a minor cluster or two of my mother's granola.  I am becoming more liberal in my reluctant pursuit of weight gain with permitted rations, and that is why I felt need to exaggerate.  Even minor portion increases  are an achievement over past, inflexible protocol.

Despite last night's pronounced efforts to challenge intake in both kind and quantity, I have subsequently been burdened by a heavy blanket of fatigue, a weariness normally reserved for days following willful fasting.  I am not of the mood to question the cause of this energy drain; I will attribute it, for now, to an awakened metabolism and my usual movements around town, in which I travel on foot to expend calories while fulfilling (admittedly trivial) errands.  I feel as if my body is pleading for rest; I must grant it a release from the compulsive "power walks" required by the ingrained tenets of weight management I now seek to reverse.  Normally, discipline dictates I cover both a long and short route before permitting the first of two large daily meals, but today I opted to write this overdue update in lieu of detrimental activity.  This is an even greater feat for me when considering that I currently have our full property to myself for the weekend, a privacy that affords the use of my mother's recumbent bicycle.  Instead, I choose to reset exercise levels to as low as possible, perhaps two moderate periods in total.  For at least today I surrender to natural instinct and the call of reason.  For at least today I will not pursue numb exhaustion, in company with hunger, as a personal marker of achievement.