Tag: Holidays

Post-Holiday Rehab

~ Lori Lynne ~ Leave a comment

The holidays are over for another year, and I survived. Mostly. My family has been pretty low-key about the holiday season for years, so I have it better than many, but it’s still socializing with the added elements of overthinking and societal pressure to be happy and having a good time.

I made a choice to eat without restriction for about ten days spanning Christmas. Let’s have a show of hands from everyone who believes I’m now pleased with my decision…yep. I am feeling the consequences of my actions. Not in the way a normal person might say, with a bit of chagrin, that they gained weight over the holidays. No. What I’m dealing with is the aftermath of what, eventually, became a full-on compulsive eating episode, because that’s what happens when I continue eating a certain way long enough, and how did I think this time would be any different?

Could I have made it through the holidays without doing what I did? I don’t know. What I’m mad at myself about is not the choice I made but my failure to acknowledge the extent of the consequences I would face; my wishful thinking. If I’d faced up to the implications of what I was doing, maybe I could have sought support to help mitigate the damage or help me come out of it before the most painful and punitive ending binges.

Now I have to heal, and recalibrate my broken metabolism, and accept that it’ll take a long time to repair the damage. It’s day one of the “maybe don’t eat yourself sick” plan–and that’s going to have to do.

The Meatball Challenge

~ Lori Lynne ~ 2 Comments

Read this whole post, because I need your help with the meatball.

I don’t enjoy the holidays much. There are exceptions (I made it to a party last night and hopefully committed only minor social blunders) but I’m low-key to the point of denial most of the time. Oh, I like getting together with some of my relatives and playing games and having a nice meal, but (just as with Thanksgiving in my country) I don’t like being told that I have to do it on a particular day. Or being bombarded with how much more holiday-related fun other people with more energy and different families seem to be having. Or the endless question “Are you ready for the holidays?”

As if they were a college final exam or something.

At any rate, silly humor helps me when I am stressed, so I turn to the meatball challenge. The way it works is, you take a well-known line from literature or poetry and substitute the word “meatball” at an appropriate place.

“But soft! What light through yonder meatball breaks?”

“O Meatball! My Meatball!”

“Because I could not stop for a meatball, it kindly stopped for me…”

“Quoth the Meatball: Nevermore.”

You get the idea. Why “meatball?” I have no idea. It just works, maybe because it’s so arbitrary and pointless.

Right now I’m trying to do it a bit differently. You see, Christmas carols are one of the few things I enjoy about this time of year. Archaic language, religious references and all, I love that they’re songs a lot of people know. So I’m doing the meatball challenge with holiday song titles. It’s fun, but I’m running out of carols I know. So if anyone can help, please comment a title for me. Maybe even share so I can get more. Thanks in advance.

Joy to the Meatball!