Sometimes you have to visit where you were...

... to see just how good it is where you are now.

We celebrated our Thanksgiving day yesterday since we're working through the holiday. Dinner with all the trimmings, mini-pies for dessert. I do my best to eat in a healthy way. I strive for foods that are minimally processed. I avoid flour and sugar. I don't eat pie. I don't eat mashed potatoes and gravy. Yams are microwaved with a little pat of butter, not baked in a syrupy brown sugar bath. A salad precedes every meal, and sometimes is the meal.

However, I'm not doing a Tofurkey Thanksgiving with mashed cauliflower subbing in for mashed potatoes. No. I bust my ass 90% of the time so that when it comes time for the 10%, I'm not going to have guilt. Fuck that - life's too short (insert favorite cliche saying here). Now, I haven't been perfect. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I've caught myself justifying eating more than I need with the old, "I got up at 4:30 this morning to work out - don't I deserve this?"

However, yesterday showed me just how far I've come in the almost 2 years I've been working on my eating issues.

I used to look forward to that uncomfortably full feeling I had yesterday. Hell, I'd seek it out, make it happen. Eat to coma every time. Numb out. Fall asleep. Undo the top button - hell, don't even wear pants you have to button, what are you thinking? I had 1 1/2 helpings of dinner yesterday and could not take another bite, not if you held a gun to my head. In my old life, that would have just been the start. Easily, I've eaten 3 times as much in a sitting and then was ready to tackle dessert; but that is my past. Not because I have this incredible willpower and white-knuckled it though dinner and got dragged kicking and screaming from the table; because I just didn't want any more. Even with servings a fraction of what I used to consume, I actually over-ate pretty severely by my current standards and felt bloated, slow, achey and burpy all night.

It was a feeling that was oddly foreign yet at the same time familiar. I thought back to years past where it would hurt to sit or even lie down after Thanksgiving dinner. How pathetic is that - on the biggest eat-then-nap holiday of the year you're too uncomfortable from eating to get your nap on?

I don't know what has changed. I can't say for sure it won't ever be like that again. I live in absolute fear that The Sickness could catch up with me again one day. The only thing I can do is apply the antidote every day. Get up. Work out. Move. Assess hunger. Assess feelings. Work out.

Move. Every day, move.