Melanie-Mouse

Michele dragging her son Devon for a picture

As I started to round the corner into the kitchen I heard my two sisters talking to each other on the phone, “You should have seen her last night. She went crazy binging on lettuce.” “ha, ha, ha, ha…,” I said jumping out from the shadows. “Very funny.”

You see, I may have painted a rosy picture in my previous post but the reality is that I am with my family and we all know that with family comes tears, judgment and irritation along with the love and the peeing in your pants with laughter.

My family finds it difficult to be patient with me when I obsess about anything, which at the moment happens to be my Nutritional Cleansing Program, and they most definitely want to stick their fingers down their throats if they happen to witness me jumping up and down in front of the mirror because my large breasts seem to be disappearing. I wouldn’t even think of saying to them, “I think I have the breasts I have always wanted, just a handful and nothing more,” especially if Wade is in earshot.

These glories are all mine to try my best to keep to myself lest I nauseate any of my other family members by appearing too vain or eager to lose weight or narcissistic.

All in all, I will say that the first ten days of the program were a cinch for me when on my home turf but in the ten days that I have been in Nantucket the challenge has become far greater and I am surprised and proud of myself for not falling too far off the wayside to indulge on what I have always loved the most about Nantucket, the family dinners with the  good conversation sparked by glasses of chilled white wine and accompanied by bread fresh off the racks at the bakery, Steamers dripping with melted butter, tomatoes from Bartlett Farm that taste like heaven when put together with cucumbers, goat cheese, basil and my mother’s famous Balsamic salad dressing and succulent corn on the cob topped off with the plumpest blueberries, raspberries and peaches, I’m drooling all over my keyboard just writing about it.

The reality is that where I miss the concept of depriving myself of eating or drinking whatever I want, whenever I want the frustration dissipates as soon as I put my loose fitting clothes on and I feel total elation rush through my body. You know that feeling? The feeling you get before holidays or before you are going on a getaway weekend with your husband or for me the feeling that something good is about to happen that I have always felt right before Halloween. Come to think of it, Halloween is the day that I met my husband so maybe I always knew somehow…anyway not to go off on a tangent or anything but I am loving that feeling of pure, essential happiness that I am doing something really good for myself, regardless of the obstacles.

It is as if I am metamorphosing into a rejuvenated and hopefully more refined version of what I was before and I like it. Now people are warning me to not get too thin, as if that would ever happen to me who can’t seem to make it through two entire days of cleansing without sabotaging myself at 9pm with chilled white wine to finish it off with a bang.

After day fourteen I was bored with it all, bored with the attention to myself, bored with explaining to other’s why I wasn’t eating and bored with not being able to eat the fruits of nature while on an island that I used to associate with hedonism in my teens. And so I did what I always do, I rebelled by going out to dinner with my family and having two glasses of white wine and half a dozen oysters on the half shell, and I felt marvelous, maybe a little too marvelous. My sisters and I perused the shops afterward and found a sweet Bulgarian girl who I unloaded my philosophy of life on, “You are young and beautiful and you seem so adventurous. The world is your oyster, go explore it,” and I saw her eyes widen with Shakespeare’s famous quote from his play “The Merry Wives of Windsor”. “I’m going to write that down in my journal and never forget it,” she said as I floated away on the cloud that I was on.

The next day I returned to the program and was none the worse for it and today I will have Michele take pictures of me and again in ten days when my thirty days will be over. Hopefully, I will have attained my goals before jetting off to New York City for the BlogHer ’10 Conference, which in itself is going to be a whole lotta fun to write about.

Eat ya later!