Forlorn hopes

The local YMCA is having a charity book sale every year, and over the weekend, DH and I did go through our respective bookshelves to pick out books to donate.
Now, I have been decluttering books quite often. But this time, I attacked something that had, until now, somewhat escaped my efforts. Namely, the cookbook shelf, or to be more precise, the diet book shelf.
I had, in there, all of the diet recipe books I had, over a course of more than twenty years, bought in the hope that this, finally, would be the book that made me slim. Books that had never been used because after reading them I knew their suggestions weren´t sustainable for me, and others I had tried out, only to find, after a small initial loss, that I was constantly hungry and regaining what I had lost and then some.
Books that did conform to the traditional nutrition lore -have 60 percent carbs- and simply didn´t work for me.
And that ended up with me feeling guilty because I thought that it was I who had to be doing something wrong because it didn´t work. So, I kept the books in the hope of someday catching that elusive ingredient that would make them work.
And I felt guilty every time I looked at them.
For the money they cost, and for my lack of success.
Throwing them away seemed such a waste of money and opportunities.
Now, this time, I know that the books I donate will be sold and the proceeds will be going to a worthy cause.
So, it was suddenly easy to purge them from the shelf.
I filled a whole box with just diet books, the ones I know by now don´t work for me. Perhaps someone else will buy them who has a body their systems work with.
I´d rather have the extra space on the shelf, that allowed me to put some other books out of double-stacking.
And no more guilt when looking at that particular bookshelf. 


Julia