Dive Into Moderation

I have always been an extreme person.  By that I mean that I can’t abide tepid.  When I drink a hot beverage, it has to be boiling hot.  If I don’t burn my tongue while drinking it, then it’s not hot enough.  Conversely, if I don’t get a brain freeze from drinking a cold beverage,  then it needs more ice.  In fact, cold drinks in general need more ice.  

I am that way with other things as well.  As I have written about before, I am either ‘eat whatever the fuck I want and damn the consequences’ or I am ‘count every calorie that enters my mouth and exercise five hours a day’.  Even when I try to be moderate, I end up going off the deep end.  

Let’s take the recent example of scriptfrenzy month.  The goal of it is to write a hundred-page play in one month.  I wrote 153.  I started out by just writing.  When it became clear that I was averaging 5 pages a day, I felt I had to write 5 pages a day.  If I hadn’t, I would have felt like a failure–even if I’d written the requisite 100 pages.  

One more example:  cleaning the damn house.  I don’t clean much, but when I do, I go into a feeding frenzy.  Then, once it’s clean, I obsess about every little crumb that falls to the counter or floor.   Then I obsessively clean until I just can’t take it any longer.  Then I let it all go to hell. 

The title for this post comes from a substitute instructor I had for my tai chi class last week while my teacher was in Chicago whooping it up with Throbbing Gristle.   The substitute, let’s call her Janet, and I were talking about being obsessed with things.  Janet recalled what a friend of hers said to her, “Can you dive into moderation?”  When Janet relayed this to me, my first instinct was much like hers:  “Shut up!  Ooooh….”  Dive into moderation?  It sounds like a contradiction, but then again, wisdom often does.

I tried this approach with the last National Novel Writing Month, oddly enough, and I actually succeeded–to a certain extent.  I wrote as much as I felt like each day, and I still came in well over the bar of…whatever it was.  I don’t remember.  You can look here if you really want to know.  I didn’t write as much as I did the year before, though.  And you know what?  I was fine with that–mostly.

The problem is, I think I am kidding myself with my views on moderation.  I mean, I am willing to moderate as long as I still clear the hurdle with plenty of room to spare.  Let’s take the second time I seriously dieted.  I started out sensibly, or rather, more sensibly.  Since I wasn’t as extreme as I had been the first time I seriously dieted, I convinced myself that I was being moderate. 

This is the problem when you (by you I mean me) have an addiction to obsession.  Anything a bit less than extreme seems moderate, even if it’s merely a bit less extreme.  Let’s take dieting again as an example since I am contemplating it once more.  I have seen the mirror, and it’s grim.  Therefore, it’s time to do something about it.

First time dieting:  Exercise up to seven hours a day (aerobics only) and eat as little as I could possibly eat in a day.  One day, it was an apple.  For the whole day.  Mostly, it was under a thousand calories.   

Second time dieting:  Be more reasonable.  Research endlessly and settle on 1200 calories a day as the absolute lowest a woman can eat a day and still be healthy (of course, I didn’t bother with the ‘woman at rest’ part of that statement since it didn’t suit my needs).  Exercise two-and-a-half to three hours a day, including weights, and call myself a moderate. 

Now, the second plan could be called on the very edge of reasonable dieting (I’m not saying it was, but it could be dubbed thusly), but I didn’t play the game fairly.  I never do.  My initial goal was 145 pounds.  I have lots of muscle, so that would look about right on my frame.  However, when I reached 150, I moved the goal to 140 pounds.  Then, when I reached 145, I moved it down to 135 pounds.  See what I did there?  I kept moving the goal posts so I could never reach my goal.  I convinced myself that ‘just five more pounds’ was reasonable, even though I knew it wasn’t.

See, it’s the whole system that is untenable, not just one step or two.  It’s the thinking behind the planning that is flawed.  It is so easy for me to get caught up in my mind’s games.  Sometimes, I am far into the hole before I even realize that I”ve fallen.

So.  Can I dive into moderation?  I am not sure.  I do know that I have to try.