Too Much of a Good Thing
For me, where food is concerned, reason sleeps like a fat little baby loaded up with milk. Reason also snores, dribbles and twitches. It began to nod off when I was 12, after my mother died. Never a sporty type, I turned to food to fill the blank and echoing abyss her death left in me. Luckily, I'm vegetarian, which meant that - unless I ate a wheel of cheese and twenty Mars Bars a week - I was relatively unharmed in my youth. But I'm 37 now and stuck behind a computer for much of the working day, living with a woman whose working day is very active. This means that when she gets home she wants to stay there and keep me with her. Anything can set my waistline off now and there is little or no time to do much about it.
I'm 20 stone now - clinicially obese by government guidelines - but thanks to my height and build, I hide it well. The trouble is it's encouraging a spiralling inability to move much, so I have decided to do something about it. Not because the government says I must, not even because my partner would prefer it if I lost some weight (although that is a factor) but because my weight is affecting my ability to think. A cloak of fatty tissue is shutting down my brain.I get less and less gets written or thought about if I am fat. I find myself thinking solely about how to keep myself gratified, at the expense of hard and uncomfortable thought, which comes to resemble actual, physical exercise the larger I get. TV becomes a welcoming friend, books I read tend to be escapist rather than challenging. Reason and intellect snore in the corner.
OK, so I'm starting this in the winter, when all good Brits should be hibernating a little, but I am beginning to perceive a problem that I must address. So I have started attending Slimming World, in the hope that they can help me lose weight (three pounds gone so far, but two birthday parties this week may well have put paid to that), and starting this blog in the hope that keeping it regularly can act in the same manner as the trumpets at Jericho and bring down the walls of years of destructive self-conditioning. I will also be keeping tabs on and reviewing poetry and any other aspects of culture that wander into my path. Damn it, I have to do something constructive as often as possible, even if it hurts, to wake Reason up. Comfort, in small doses, is a wonderful thing, but if I have learned anything it is that too much of a good thing is wonderful, but only for a little while.
