I didn't need a GPS to get here.

Ahhhh, November.  Remnants of Halloween candy, kick-off to the holidays, darkness coming early....Ugh.

I have this friend who emailed me Friday about going to Weight Watchers.  I spent the last 24 hours stressing about what to say.  Well, I'm saying NO! because I didn't like it 2 years ago, it hasn't changed, the leader who I didn't like is still there, so hell no.  But I was really concerned about how to tell my friend no.

My friend used to be obese.  She has tried all the same diets I've tried. She's bought books, tapes, CDs, exercise equipment, all that.  And now my friend is morbidly obese.  Yeah.  None of her clothes fit anymore, even the size 26s.  She has hit the wall and the lights have come on and she can see herself.  And it ain't pretty. 

My friend knows lots of fad diets and drugs to take and stuff but doesn't want to do that route.  But she's struggling with making herself do it the right way:

1) exercising
2) eating healthy food.

Isn't it crazy that the basic concept of losing weight can be summed up in roughly four words?  Isn't it even crazier that will all the "diet practice" my friend has had, she can only see to add weight?

My friend decided against WW.  For her WW feels like food obsession - all that point counting and stuff makes her crazy.  She also knows that controlling the food isn't the problem.  Controlling herself is.

I said to her, "Girl, you know what you've been eating.  What's eating you?"  She wanted to poke me with a cheesecake about then.

See she knows that it's "what's eating her" that has triggered a gradual massive weight gain. Unravelling the knots of the mystery is the hard part.

Maybe it's that she was put through the ringer at work over the last year. Maybe it was losing a couple of very close friends and relatives. Maybe it's because she gave up because everything became a burden and just dragging herself through each day while shouldering the "must dos" of her daily life was enough without having to deal with working in exercise and calorie counting. Maybe the pain of loss and near-loss made her just want to sit and not deal...just coast.  And find comfort where it was most familiar.

Then...maybe work got better. Things changed with family. Suddenly she could see herself and understand that she is wearing the outcome of her suffering for the past year.  And maybe can knows she can tackle it all again, one day by one day to find her old self.  My friend knows that the old self is stuffed down inside and under all the pounds of wasted time and reckless eating.  What has been done can certainly be undone.

And so it begins.

And for the benefit of any lurkers who know me in "real life": I ask that you support me in blogging. You call all clearly see that my friend has gained an outrageous amount of weight in the last year.  It's not a secret or a mystery.  I just know that when my blog became topic for gossip among my real-life contacts and I was forced to abandon it - things started to unravel in my life.  Can't we just peacefully co-exist as we have been without making this a public spectacle?  Blogging was my outlet and a place for me to work on my own writing. I need it.  I just hope that you won't feel obligated to violate my right to write this time.