The Year of Living Hedonistically

Well, it's almost over. My year of being 40. Soon I will turn 41 and fade off into the obscurity of smaller numbers and middle-aged overweight housewifery until 50 looms large. At which point I'll be an older overweight wifey chick.

And what a year it's been. I'm not saying there have been huge dramatic events in my life. There haven't. But in the past year, I've:

• Written a book. Yes, a real, full-length one.
• Spent more than 3 months not eating anything with wheat, eggs, or dairy in it. While at the same time ingesting large amounts of potato chips and gummy bears.
• Seen a naturopath - for my son and for myself - and tried a variety of supplements, some with wonky results for my son.
• Gotten addicted to too many games again online. Words With Friends. Gems With Friends. Candy Crush Saga. CastleVille (but I gave that one up!). Time sucks, all of them. 
• Gone from working out fairly regularly to - well - not at all. 
• Dived face-first back into terrible junk food after giving up the giving up diet. And I can't seem to pull myself out of it. 

See? Not much. The book is cool. The rest relates, as much of my life does, to food and weight and (lack of) movement. The common denominator for most of my experiences/emotions/entanglements these days. 

The hard part is, right now I don't care. And it's pretty impossible to change something if you don't care. I feel so focused on this new writing life - which is cool, fun, thrilling, terrifying, and something I actually haven't been doing much of in the last month since finishing the book draft - that it feels O.K. to let all that pesky concern over eating well and exercising fall to the wayside. 

Hey, people, I never said I was logical. At least not in this area. 

So, yeah, as I approach 41 I'm thinking I need to give up this hedonistic, epicurean approach to life. Because it's gonna come back to bite me in my huge ass. My steady diet of chocolate may seem relatively harmless now, especially since my weight, ironically, has stayed about the same since going back on the gluten (but let's not mention the 20 pounds I put back on after losing them last year. Darn things must have GPS.). But it isn't, and I WILL pay for it. 

So, please, unwilling, addicted brain: please consider trying again in small changes to improve your diet and get this body to move. I'm 40. I'm not dead. But I will be if I don't stop living in the fantasy world that what my physical body looks like is irrelevant now that I'm "old" and living in a world of fictional characters. 

And pardon the incoherency, but it's 4 in the morning, I'm getting sick, and my editing skills are therefore non-existent. Or at least unwilling to come out and play right now.