January 22, 2010 - Breakfast

The message of The Biggest Loser and the industry built up around weight loss is that you are to lose weight in order to start living! your! life! But. My life was placed in amber when I started to lose weight. I stopped living it and became an observer. Work became confusing, relationships changed because I could no longer define them in familiar terms of food and drink. Even my approach to writing changed, became more formalized, more self-conscious and, say, nervous. A number of valuable and interesting things that I defined as My Life were removed or transformed. It all came at a price, and I am now at least somewhat an impostor. At least that's how it feels when people see me and say: Dear God, you've changed. Writing everything down, externalizing the internal process of appetite management, cyborgizing so that I could alter and edit myself at a slight remove--for two or three months life halted with this project, and only now is it moving again, and in strange, unpredictable ways. This is a different life, one in which basic physical processes have become less about what feels good and more about information. (Yesterday at work I did ten proper pushups with a spare moment, after I went to get lunch. I felt the sudden energy to do them and couldn't see any reason not to.) Weight-loss--the self-improvement industry in general--are a kind of natural, physical postmodernism. You become the text you are editing, rewrite your feelings, the body. Deinstinctualized, faith in the future reposing in machines--natural, electronic, or the endless ellipses of the elliptical.

Weight: 290 lbs