An Episode of Weight-Loss Infidelity

Happy New Year! — as belated as this is.

The good news is, if I stay on top of things from here on out, I’ll still be able to make 164 by August 1, my original goal date. The bad news is, I won’t hit 196 by my birthday, and probably not by Feb. 11 … just not enough time left.

Yeah, I put on weight for Christmas.

I stopped tracking my intake. And I found it hard to start again. I lost some of it after Christmas morning, only to put it back on for the new year. Since New Year’s Eve, I’ve been hovering between 215 and 216.4. Three weeks ago, I was 13.8 pounds ahead of my original plan. As of Monday, I was only two pounds ahead. As of this morning, I’m 12.8 pounds over the monthly goal line.

Yesterday was the last straw: For reasons I can’t quite remember, I made a ham and cheese omelet sandwich. Seven hundred and ten calories, which I didn’t think about until I got around to logging my intake. When I finally crunched the numbers and saw the result, I said, “Okay, that’s enough! Get back to your program, Layne!” Sometimes, you just have to get mad at yourself to get over yourself.

The hard part, of course, has been regaining the discipline. Regaining the discipline is hard because whatever your rationale was for going off the wagon, the longer you stay off, the more guilty you feel about it. Disappointment becomes fear of failure, which threatens to become a conviction of failure. You’ve had many years to perfect the art of self-recrimination; so your conscience flagellates you for your loss of discipline, which only makes you feel less secure and confident that you can take the weight back off. It feels like infidelity. And, in a sense, it is: You’ve been unfaithful to yourself.

But how can you trust yourself again? Only by earning that trust. The only answer to an episode of infidelity is recommitment. I think a necessary component of recommitting is regaining the mindset with which you initially began the commitment.

I am a glutton. That’s not an insult; it’s a statement of fact. I say that to myself with the same intention that recovering alcoholics say, “I am an alcoholic,” or “I am a drunk.” It’s what Mel Gibson, himself a recovering alcoholic, called “hugging the cactus”: embracing unpleasant truths about yourself, refusing to rationalize, whitewash, or euphemize them into harmlessness, but rather accepting them as flaws around which you must reorganize your life.

To say I’m a glutton is to recognize that I have an ultimately self-destructive compulsive behavior issue. Unlike alcoholism, however, I can’t quit eating; that would destroy me faster. Nevertheless, I must control my eating and not let it control me. I must trust that I have enough food to eat; I must show my gratitude for having enough food to eat by not eating more than I need. Food is not a substitute for love, companionship, or acceptance.

Or sex. Which reminds me of something Fr. Andrew M. Greeley wrote: “Chocolate is not a substitute for sex. But on the other hand, sex is not a substitute for chocolate.”

I do note that Jan. 6 is the traditional date of the Feast of the Epiphany (now observed on the second Sunday of Christmas) and the observed date of Christmas in the Orthodox tradition. Although I wouldn’t call yesterday’s episode an “epiphany”, it was certainly eye-opening. I have no doubt that I can lose the weight I put on since mid-December or make the August deadline. At my initial rate of 1.8 lbs./week, I can make 196 by March 23. Certainly, Lent, which begins Feb. 26, will help, particularly if I fast not only on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday but on all Fridays in Lent.

And I added back into my budget the 166 kcal I subtracted for the 90-Day Challenge. Even with them back in, I may still be able to “stretch” to making 196 by March 9, which would have been my little brother Bob’s 52nd birthday. And, as I discussed before, after I drop below 196, I may decide to pursue a less aggressive strategy of keeping my budget at 1,500 kcal/day, which would extend the timeline — probably to the end of 2020. We’ll cross that bridge ….

In any event, I’m back! Next week, I’ll post the chart I didn’t post today, along with the month-end numbers. Remember: Trust the process! You didn’t gain the weight overnight; why should you expect to lose it overnight?