A New Crucible
2025-11-14
I've been dealing with a lot more anxiety, so I decided to take a couple of walks today. I just go up and down my street and loop that however many times I feel is best. One loop is about a mile and I've done four, so I've gone about four miles so far today. The walks help with the anxiety momentarily. The walk will make my anxiety go away, but the second I come back inside my house and start doing stuff on my computer, it will begin to come back and make me feel like going on another walk. Frustrating.
A few things that have happened: I am a type II diabetic and haven't been doing a lot in terms of diet or medication to regulate my blood sugar levels. I've been diabetic now for about four years and within the last month or so, I've started to feel more and more symptoms of peripheral neuropathy and it's been scaring the shit out of me. My feet have been tingling a lot more, so have my hands and arms. I feel numbness and pain in my feet basically all the time now. I don't think it's affected my balance, but I don't know if I'm at the point of no return with this shit yet.
Either way, I know that I have to go full force on losing weight because if I don't, I am going to become wheelchair-bound before I know it. I think that fear is why I've been walking so much today, like I don't want it to be taken away so I'm putting my body into overdrive. I feel like I had the warning for years. I knew it could get like this, but didn't want to deal with it because it would be too hard, and now I'm paying the unfortunate price. My body is finally starting to scream at me, but I don't know if it's too late or not to start listening.
While walking, I thought of the importance of pushing through the physical pain of exercise and whatnot. In a way, it really is like a smelting furnace. The high intensity of the pain shapes people and molds them into something that can survive the environment. Well, the thing I've learned as I've become older is that it's not the environment we're trying to survive, but ourselves. That's a rather trite and cliche remark, but most people either forget this simple truth or do everything they can to distract themselves from it. For me, I'm sick of the distractions.
I know that I've really fucked up, living the way that I have. I don't know what else to do so that I can change my situation. I don't know what other crucibles I have to put myself through to figure my way through it. At this point though, there is one important one that I am starting today: getting my diet in check.
For the most part, I eat whatever I want regardless of its contents or nutritional value or whatever. A rationalization I made recently was that as long as I have supplements, the food that I eat doesn't really matter. To a point, I think that's still somewhat true, but the catch to me is this: I don't have the knowledge to grow or hunt for my food thanks to civilization and industrialization and what have you. I am bound to The Grocery Store in order to eat. With that, I am subject to all of the stupid hormones that are put in all the produce and meat or even worse, ultra-processed foods like frozen dinners or whatever. It's a losing game either way, unless I literally become an agrarian or hunter or some kind of stupid pastoralist.
So with that, the battle of cravings and desire with food is something that can't be won, at least not immediately. Basically all food now is manufactured and marketed to be addictive and calorie-dense, so no matter what I do, there is always going to be some kind of uphill battle when trying to figure out my diet. Our culture revolves around food, so it's easy for people to indulge in stuff and feel bad about it. An unfortunate reality that I have to contend with is that there is going to be a significant period of withdrawal that I will have to go through with my diet in order to start losing weight. It's not my fault that things have come to this junction, but I know that if I don't figure it out now, I will have a much harder life than the one I already have.
Luckily, this is something I've gone through before. My senior year of high school, I lost about 60 pounds and got into the best shape of my life. Over the course of college and dropping out and working as a younger man, I fell prey to Food Culture again and lost sight in terms of my diet. At that time, though, I was riding my bike over 100 miles a week because of my messenger job, so my physique and health didn't deteriorate that much. On top of that, I was still young enough to not feel the ramifications of my shitty decisions.
At 27 years old now, though, I have finally begun to feel the descent. My body is no longer growing, but dying. Everything I do now will be a glorious tribute to this descent, but thankfully it's slow and more merciful than many my age care to think.
When I lost the weight back then, I adhered to a strict calorie-counting regimen and significant drop in caloric intake. An average day for me is somewhere between 3000-4000 calories, but during this "diet", I dropped down to about 1500-1700. For me, keeping a record of what I ate did two things: first, it enforced self-accountability. Second, it enforced a dietary routine. For me, these two things together along with the drastic reduction in caloric intake allowed me to drop those 60 pounds in about 3 months. It was miserable, but it put me in my best shape.
The mistake that I made back then, however, was that once I lost the weight, there wasn't any kind of maintenance plan. I know that the method I mentioned above is not sustainable. I understand that it's supposed to be temporary, so I can go into this with that knowledge. I'll try to set some kind of milestone, but for now I have to focus on action and diligence. I hope that I can figure everything out soon, but right now it's time for another crucible.
I need to find out what I'm really made of.