Karma Chameleon

After I posted Disorderly Conduct on Friday (post immediately below), I dove right in, opting to eat a real lunch and a real dinner on the night before a weigh-in. I figured it I was going to take the hit of a gain at my official weekly weigh-in, I should do it immediately, and get it over with. I’m traveling this week, and so will miss next Saturday’s meeting. I consider this a sparkling bit of karma, since I’ll probably gain weight next week, in response to eating like a normal person. Well, a normal dieting person. Well, normal for me, where I’m still watching every morsel, but I’m fueling my body instead of flogging it.

Instead, I dropped 1.50 pounds, taking my total loss to 61.0, and, at 190.0 pounds, a full pound below my pre-pregnancy weight. If I hadn’t been so freaked out by my physical sabotage, I would have laughed at the irony of breaking a goal when I expected a clobbering. But I did break a goal, and while I still expect to gain some over the next little while, I know it’s not real: it’s my body adjusting to something closer to healthy and maintain-able. So I filed into the WW meeting room, hope mixing in with my caution. This could be the last meeting for a while that I post a loss. I wanted to enjoy it.

I like the meetings, such as they are. The real motivator for me is the weigh-in, the moment when I step on the scale in front of the leader. The ‘meeting’ part interests me somewhat, but since I have such a spectacular support network, I don’t much need the pep talk inherent in the weekly message. I still stay, in part to support my WW comrades, and in part because I never know when the leader will inspire me with her quotes or her anecdotes.

This week, the leader talked about Thanksgiving. It’s a meeting they do every year right before the holiday. The leader posted a menu of likely Thanksgiving foods, including pies and sweet potato casserole. She instructed us to write down a realistic “plate” of things we expected to eat. I wrote down my dinner plan, remembering my promise to eat more. I totaled up all my foods and showed them to Howard, who had written a remarkably similar meal. For reference purposes, Howard and I built a 7-point meal, and our normal daily point total is twenty-four.

The leader then went around the room, asking people their totals. The first total I heard was 28. Holy crap!, I thought. But maybe she’s the wild point. Not so. I heard numbers all over the 20s, and even more in the 30s. Eventually, the leader found someone who’d totaled eleven points. “Eleven!” The leader puffed in shock. “What, are you not going to eat anything?!”

At that moment, I decided not to worry about the upcoming shifts in my weight.I will always be a recovering fat person, of course, but I have enough "immunity" to the bad foods that I can stave off any despair that comes from watching the scale tip upwards. So long as I'm doing the right things, it'll come down again. I want this to last forever, and eating right is the only way to ensure it. Besides, even with the modifications to my diet to increase my calories, I had 7 points totaled. More important than that, I had an identical meal to Howard, which to my mind means it was a reasonable, well-constructed dinner. I’m still going to track everything, still going to write every food down, and still build my points and calorie count every day, but I’m finished with starving myself. I know I can eat now; really eat properly, and I’ll feel stronger and healthier, and I’ll still lose weight.

I figure with the new plan, I’ll lose about 1 pound per week; more if I exercise to burn calories and invigorate my metabolism. I lost 61 pounds in 21 weeks, and now it will likely take me at least 30 weeks to lose another half of that. But so what? The whole point of this was to build a way to eat sensibly, and to live properly in this food- and fat- infested world. I believe I have found it, but if not, I know I have the strength and the courage to change what’s needed.

I’ve had 2 days on the new plan, and I’ve noticed some interesting things. First, I am always hungry. I find this hilarious, since I’m eating more than double what I was eating before. My brain has knocked on my stomach and yelled, ‘Yo! Is that food? Send me more!’ I figure it’s temporary, and anyway, I bore 5 months of hunger. This hunger is different, though--better. The old hunger felt like starving: sick and harsh and painful. The new hunger feels like my stomach is empty and needs something good and proper to quiet it.

This new plan allows me (forces me, really) to take care of myself. I think this is key to part of the ‘why’ behind what happened before. I’ve always sucked at taking care of myself. That’s why I got fat in the first place. I wasn’t eating right then, and I wouldn’t take the time away from DS to exercise or re-energize myself. But it’s not an option any longer. Just as losing weight hit a critical mass, as it were, and I had to change my habits, so now have I hit critical mass again, and must find a way to carve time for my lifestyle into my life.

Thanksgiving still frightens me. I’m traveling to a place where Howard and I will be the only WW’ers. We’ll have to prepare much of our own food, and do that in a place where I’m an unknown, and where the self-imposed pressure to make a good impression and fit in with this group surpasses my angst over being away from DS for 3 days (and OMG that is flipping me out!). This pressure compounds on me, since my hair, which I have been growing out, and which has behaved beautifully until this afternoon, has chosen to stick straight out from behind my ears, despite all attempts to spray, gel, mousse and pomade it into obedience. Oh, well; it wouldn’t be fun if it weren’t terrifying. Apparently.

I’ll make it through. I know it. I’ll have my buddy with me, I’ll have a cooler full of crudites, and I’ll have something sharp and painful in my back pocket to jab myself with, should I be tempted to sneak any non-program snacks in my host's house.

A the F(ull-filled)