Dukan, Day 3: 4lbs lost.

 
Two days, four pounds.   This feels strange: to be counting pounds, to be announcing myself in terms of weight, of flesh, lost.   Yesterday I stopped into the video shop and bought Al Pacino’s ‘Merchant of Venice’ - no, Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice’, starring Al Pacino.   I think.   Maybe I should watch it first and then decide what to call it? 

Aah.  Now, I realise now why I called it ‘Al Pacino’s Merchant of Venice’.  It is, of course, because Pacino, my favourite actor, plays Shylock, who is for me the most poignant character in all of Shakespeare.  Shylock knew what a pound of flesh was worth.   He knew its measure, its heft, its value.  I am learning it, in various ways. 

 
I have an elliptical trainer in my living room.   Each day I present myself before it in dumb supplication.   I place a glass of water on the bookshelf, mount the machine and push off.   Never have 200 calories seemed so inadequate.   I have developed a furious hatred of Kit Kat bars, whose advertisement boasts that each one contains just under 200 calories.  

::   ::   ::   ::   ::

I have more energy today.   I'm not bounding around but I feel a certain emotional lightness, if that is a dreadful pun.    It is unusual for me to be so self-absorbed, to dedicate myself to myself in this concerted way.   Everything is about me: the cooking, the weighing, the shopping, the exercising...  I find it bizarre.

::   ::  ::   ::   ::

I'm preparing a lecture for next year: Lacan said that the only resistance in the analysis is the analyst's.    I acknowledge that the only resistance to this diet has been my own.   Everyone I've told about the diet has been completely supportive.   Of course, I haven't told everyone.   In fact, apart from OS, I've told precisely   7  people: my family, my analyst, my sister and two colleagues.   This is three people more than I would told on previous attempts.

I think I've held back from sharing the news that I'm dieting because it means admitting something about my body.   It's not perfect.  It's unfit.  It's failing me.   It means submitting my body to external judgement, which I fear will be negative.   I have always been too small, too short, too low... a litany of complaints that have limited my pleasure in my own body.    My school's sport was basketball, ideal for a someone who has been the shortest person I've known since I was eleven years old.   Filling out my passport form in the heady days before centimetres, I became irate at the civil servant who rounded my height to the nearest inch, down.  

My Granny was tiny, too.   Perhaps this was part of our bond with each other.   We shared witty proverbs about our height:  'Good goods in small parcels.'; 'Poison in small doses.'

Later, in college, I learned new ones:  'It's easy climb a falling tree.'  There had been no falling trees for tiny teenagers so short they looked like children.   I failed to measure up, perhaps?  

'Fed with the same food...' but different.  Pounds and inches. 

Now I'm the one saying my body doesn't measure up; I'm the one criticising, finding fault.   I'm one of the others.   

'nay, if the scale do turn
But in the estimation of a hair,—
Thou diest and all thy goods are confiscate.'

I fear there is more at stake here than mere pounds of flesh.

It's uncomfortable, this perspective, I don't like it.   

I don't like it at all...