Peanut Butter Relapse

Words
257

Again I relapsed on peanut butter.

Hours before, I had stepped onto a scale. When the pandemic began — standing six feet, three inches — I weighed 194 pounds and I went to the gym four times a week. Now, I read the scale: 164 lbs.

Down 30 lbs! Of muscle...

My ape mind took over

How about we relax our diet. Eat more burgers. More Chinese. Oh, I love bread, let’s eat bread again! I. Must. Gain. Weight.

With that mentality I entered whole foods. On the shelf I saw the red and blue Jiffy Peanut Butter label... oh peanut butter, good protein, and it's fattening. Into my basket I tossed it.

Back at home, from the paper bag, I snatched out the peanut butter and bread, and I made a peanut butter sandwich for the first time in two years. It was savory. Yet afterwards I realized, I don’t miss the weight, the number 194, I miss the life the weight provided me.

Healthy Weight

If I piled up thirty pounds of muscle on my desk, it would make me cry. All that crimson red, healthy meat, I’d cry to see all that dead and gone. And I would feel fragile looking at it in my chair, like a paper airplane in the wind.

I miss that weight, not peanut butter weight.

I miss the weight that's only earned. The weight isn't found in food. It's only found it movement. And I find it.

Back to the gym, I go.