I weighed myself this morning and the number was 69 kg. That’s 152 pounds. I have not weighed this little since my early 20’s.
As I’ve commented before, as a person with a history of both anorexia and obesity (at different times), I cannot deny that I probably have somewhat chosen to go ahead and just let this eating problem turn into a permanent weight loss program. Still… I think there is coming a time when I will have to confront this situation more rationally.
I joked with someone last week that eating, nowadays, is a chore on par with cleaning my toilet. To test this, later this morning after eating a breakfast of ramen noodles (with half the spice removed to make it more bland), I knelt down and cleaned my toilet right then, thinking of this comment specifically.
Sure enough, the toilet was less unpleasant.
So there you have it.
The Jains of India have a tradition called santhara. It is a sort of slow-motion suicide-by-self-starvation – sometimes drawn out up to 12 years. The practice is in line with other ascetic practices of the Jains, whose historical predecessors were likely the ascetics referenced by Gautama Siddhartha when it is said he tried asceticism and failed it, before he ennunciated his “middle path” which became Buddhism. This type of asceticism has a sort of fatal appeal to me, and I feel as if my post-cancer-imposed eating regimen is evolving into a kind of unintentional santhara.
In any event, my peak weight of about 265 pounds isn’t quite cut in half literally, but I’m feeling that way. Half the man I used to be…
For reference, here are two interesting pictures from my archive. One picture is from near my peak weight, from February, 2005, with my friend Bob (he’s on the left) in Utrecht, Netherlands.
The second picture is from 1986, when I was 21, near my current weight, I think (or a little less even, maybe 140 pounds). It is a scan of a picture (it was in poor condition, so sorry for the poor scan) that was taken near La Libertad, El Salvador, in September, 1986.
