So just when I was about to give up on exercise, I lost five pounds! Or at least, that’s what my scale tells me, when it’s not telling me I’m fifteen pounds lighter than I know I am. But woah! Hey! This whole “moving around” thing really works!

The concept of losing weight, of course, got me thinking more about being eating disordered. I’d have thought it would be triggering, gaining all this weight, and then I thought that losing weight also might set me off-kilter. Thankfully, I’m not finding that to be the case. I don’t like the gym quite enough for it to become a negative behavior, and, since I’m burning off some calories working out, I don’t feel as compelled to use other bad habits to offset my long-standing love affair with food.

Not it was ever about food, really, it was about feelings – feelings I didn’t want to have. I ate to distract myself and the other was a release. I did it when I was angry sometimes, when I wasn’t sure what else to do, and then it just became a utilitarian function. A fact of life. A habit. This is what I feel like my shrinks don’t get: by the end, it was just something I did. It had no meaning! And maybe that’s why it has been (relatively) easy for me to give it up.

This is all very new to me, right, so let’s re-evaluate in a month or two, but I’m beginning to think that my little sister might have been on to something with this exercise thing. Her and a bajillion other people.