I'm going to talk about a time where someone dropped hints on me that I just wouldn't believe really. And it goes back - this all kinda ties - what a early 2000s week - ties back to my job, my first job, at the pool house kitchen at a country club on the east side of the state. There was a girl there who taught tennis lessons, she was my age, and I was smitten the day I saw her, and the more I got to know about her, the more she knocked me off my feet. And you know, it was just gonna be a thing where it's like, “Yeah, she's amazing, period. End of story.” She seemed so far out of my league, so amazingly far out of my league. She was so intelligent, so bright, so like weirdly funny, and she was amazing in almost every way. She was so out of my league that I just never gave anything any kind of thought. And one day we we struck up a conversation over leftover birthday cake from a children's birthday party we hosted at the club, and I was super nervous and probably very awkward and whatever. I can't remember really what we talked about much, but I do know that, you know, shortly after our discussion she ran into me and, you know, asked me if I was going to the Fourth of July fireworks celebration at the club, and I mentioned that I was considering that and she basically was like, "You should go with me. Here's my phone number." And she wrote down her phone number for me and gave it to me, and I was like, "Yeah, that's nice of her. What a - she seems like a nice person." And so I called her with much trepidation, and we set up a time to meet at the Fourth of July celebration and turns out she brought like four friends, and so maybe I had for a moment, maybe I thought that perhaps she liked me, but once I saw the friends show up, I was like, "Oh, this is not a date at all. That was the stupidest thing you could have ever thought. This is just a big group hangout thing." And plus, she brought a guy too among her groups of friends. And so yeah, so then we…

Note: This diary contains a discussion of restrictive eating. So I'll continue what I was talking about with my relationship with food. Yeah, I’ve recently I just been noticing that the changes I've been making and choosing more whole foods, even though they may be higher calorie, is giving me an opportunity to reconnect with my body and check in with my body, and feel just like the sensations of fullness and hunger, in a way that I honestly have not in a while. And so that feels really promising for me since it's something that I've kind of struggled with for a while, especially like since early college I would say. So maybe about six or seven years. Yeah, and I feel like through this process, I have gained some weight over the last year, and it's starting to level out, which is awesome. I don't feel like I've noticed too many changes in my weight lately. But yeah, I'm just noticing that the changes I'm making, on a psychological level, in not restricting food and, you know, not seeing food as good or evil has actually given me the mental and physical satisfaction that I have been trying to find from my food. So yeah, that feels really good. I feel like I've got a lot less stress around eating. Which like I mentioned earlier, you know, obviously you have to do it for survival. So this was kind of a big deal for me and I'm really excited about it.