Page 18 of Bewitch

“No, and only drink water. A ton of it. A glass when you wake up. A glass before a meal. A glass after. A glass before bed. Oh, and a glass during each meal as well.”

“I’ll be peeing more than a racehorse.”

“Good. It’ll help to clear out your system.”

“I’m not worried about my system. You don’t say how much salmon or chicken or rice… Not the size of the baked potato. What if I eat the largest one in the bag?”

“You have to learn to police yourself to some degree.”

“So I can make the meals a bit larger by—”

“Don’t. Don’t try to already think of fucking loopholes.”

“This diet is boring as shit!”

“It won’t be for forever.”

“How long?”

“How long are you planning on sticking with this?”

“I want to lose weight, and I will.”

“You will, if you listen to me. This is your meal plan.”

“This isn’t a meal plan. This is… I’m not even sure what the hell it is.”

“Look, you asked. I delivered. It’s on you to do it. I can’t control every morsel that goes into your mouth. I can’t force you to do the moves deeper so that they’ll actually change your body. Yes, you’ll be sore. Yes, you’ll become hungry, but no, you can’t eat an entire fucking house. You can’t eat a bag of potatoes. Not chips. Not crap. What you put in matters. Either you do this and are all in, or else you won’t ever change. Do you want to eat your feelings? Or do you want to change those feelings and be someone worth being?”

“Fuck you,” I spit out. “Who says I’m not someone worth being right now?”

“Those tears in your eyes.”

CHAPTER7

Ihate him. I’m so going to make him burn.

He’s an asshole, a real fucking bully.

How is it that he knows where to place the dagger and just what to say to twist the knife and burrow it straight to my soul?

A person is so much more than their size, of course, but that doesn’t mean that a person doesn’t feel less than because of the largeness of that same number.

The truth of the matter is that he’s not wrong. There are times, especially like right now when my entire body feels like it’s battered and bruised and even broken, when I feel like none of this is worth it. Why bother to go through this much pain when it’s not going to be any different this time? I’ve tried to work out at home before. I’ve been to the gym time and again. Never with this sort of regularity before, and I had always been struggling by myself, but I still strove to do all that I could to push through.

Push through any mental blocks.

Push through any physical blocks.

Hell, I swear there are emotional and even spiritual blocks when it comes to this.

Why did God make me like this?

But it’s not God’s fault. It’s mine. I put the food into my body. Look at my parents. Neither of them are even the slightest bit overweight. It’s not genetics. It’s all me and my lack of control.

Then again, maybe that’s why I overeat. My mom has always been rather strict, restricting how much time I could spend with friends, mandating that homework had to be done, demanding that I study for two hours every day even if I had no tests coming up. She wanted me to do all sorts of activities, too, in high school so that colleges and universities would want me. Eating was one thing that I could control, that she couldn’t dictate because I would sneak food, sneak seconds, have an extra dessert if she thought I might’ve earned one…

Yeah, I think using food as a reward is a real slippery slope.

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