Dieting, and an August 5, 1987 card

I had a little book with lists of food and the calories they contained. This was back in the days before everything you ate had nutrition information and there were no digital means to track your fitness or eating. Every morsel that I put in my mouth was written down in a notebook with a calorie total next to it. If I wavered in my devotion to this irksome task, a picture of myself at my most rotund had been pasted into that very same book as well.

After two years of this sort of recording, I started to relax a bit in my eating, but not in my exercising. I had started to play racquetball for up to two hours with whatever willing opponents I could find and allowed for the occasional pizza or cheesecake to creep into my routine. I did this less because I couldn't bear banishing these treats from my life than out of a desire to be a "normal" person who ate these types of things. I managed to do this and still continue to lose weight, though I did panic when I got sick and couldn't burn more calories with copious amounts of exercise.

I had an eating disorder during my childhood and young adulthood, and I swapped it out for a different type of disordered behavior in college. Instead of compulsively eating, I started compulsively exercising as fear of not continuing to lose weight and to eventually be physically rejected by Tito when we finally met face to face gnawed at me.

I wrote this card from a Pizza Hut and it wasn't the first or last time that I talked about what I "indulged" in and how I was going to rein myself in later in compensation. I often felt that I had to prove to him that I wasn't going to return to my former weight by explaining such adjustments.

August 4, 1982 letter

When I compose these posts, I go through my files of scanned correspondence, find one that I want to share, and read it until a story or thought relating to that letter, card, or photo pops into my head. I then share that store and the scan. Recent events (the pandemic) have made it nearly impossible for me to bring up my old memories from the past and I haven't posted stories because I've been (unsurprisingly) eaten up with anxiety and fear. However, I don't want to stop sharing materials related to my book because I'm blocked about background stories so I decided to just share without an accompanying story sometimes. I'm hoping this will  help me get back on track. I hope you're all safe and well, and we can all get through this together.

Today, I'm sharing a letter which was written during the time period in which Tito had just moved to Japan and was training in Okayama. This was a time period in which he couldn't receive my correspondence (as he was there temporarily and would move to Tokyo when his training was done). I was used to lavish attention from him as our long distance relationship started and his time to leave the U.S. neared, and then there was mostly silence. This was a shock to my system, and this letter reflected that.