Things stay the same when the same is where you stay.

Deep, right? Even if I heard that on a Delta Airlines commercial recently. They were touting adding color to your world instead of living with “breige” (a combo of gray and beige), and urging folks to travel to places that trigger their sense of adventure. I love to travel; I can totally get behind that idea.

For some, the idea of sameness is a comfort. I also understand that; there are just times when I’m ready to pull away from the world for mental restoration and put a temporary stop to a constantly changing landscape that often isn’t all that good. My mental batteries drain when there’s too much going on around me or challenging me. They recharge when I turn inward.

That process can also lead to deception and to self-comfort. In my case, while I have continued to weigh myself nearly every day despite gaining weight, I had thresholds I didn’t want to pass. Not ever again. And yet, I passed them and deceived myself into believing that for now, self-comfort and restoration were more important. The problem, there, is that self-comfort has to take a form that’s not also self-destructive.

As I work my way back down through the pounds I’ve gained, it’s been the social times with others when I’ve told myself I should be able to eat or drink like a normal human and face only small consequences. Just about all of us gain weight on vacation, for instance, and can take it off fairly quickly afterward. But for me, that’s just not true. While I know how to maintain my weight, I’ve let in the voices that whisper you could be normal and just live it up a little.

And by all means… the occasional deviation from the path is fine. It’s when that stretches from one week into two or three or a summer.

Eventually, that higher level of intake is what becomes the same. For folks like me, my body adapts quickly to same, and regardless of how much of a comfort sitting in sameness may be, I can’t stay there. My body needs constant change or it does exactly what it’s done over the past year or so; mechanisms work hard to return my body to where it was. Like a rubber band, letting go of the stretch results in springing back to what my body prefers, and it doesn’t prefer a lower weight. And my body’s base of knowledge is permanently screwed up and I will fight this fight for as long as I draw breath.

So it’s back to the work of kicking same out of my arsenal of self-comfort, at least resting in the comfort of food and drink.