Running on Empty

I hate Fridays.

I weigh in at WW on Saturday mornings, and so consequently, I starve all day long on Fridays. Even though I have given up my Starvin’ for the Cause mentality and eat pretty much the way I do the rest of the week, my brain knows that I want to make a good impression on the WW scale, and so it taunts me with faux-hunger pangs all the live-long day. Sometimes I’m hungry from breakfast before I even leave the house for work.

I am a co-conspirator in the Pinched Stomach department, since I usually skip my evening popcorn snack and wait to have my breakfast on Saturday until I return from my meeting. I take a big coffee mug with me, and I chug that down as soon as my weight is recorded. Coffee is an appetite suppressant extraordinaire, and scalding my esophagus and stomach lining with a caffeine-heavy drink is a superb way to trudge out the last hour before I can have my first meal of the weekend.

I could eat breakfast before I weigh in, of course. After I did it that first week, my losses would be recorded at actual, since I’d do it consistently every Saturday. Howard and I call this ‘taking the hit’. We did it last fall, when we had to switch to wearing jeans to the weigh-in, instead of shorts. I didn’t really want to do it, since jeans weigh more than shorts, and so my loss for the week could be erased (or worse!) if suddenly my clothes weighed more. But I figured that if I didn’t do it in September, I’d be freezing my flat @ss off in January, and so better to record a smaller-than-actual gain that week, and then pick it up the week after. So I waited until a post-period week, when I’d lost nearly 5 pounds, wore jeans that week, ‘taking the hit’ on my recorded loss. After that, my losses resumed their normal drops, and now I wear jeans without worry. In fact, I’m thinking about wearing jeans every week, even into maintenance, so I’m never recorded as artificially light and have to do something stupid before a weigh-in, like skip breakfast.

I could do the same thing with breakfast. I’m PMSing right now, so next week I’ll have my period, and then as early as next Saturday, I could eat something, ‘take the hit’ on my loss, and then sit satisfied in my meetings from them on. I could do it, but the Tragically Competitive Fat Girl simply will not allow me.

And so exacerbates my hatred of Fridays. Not only do I know that Friday is no time to decide suddenly that the cake in the break room is “Mine, All Mine!”, but also, I “know” that I’m skipping my 10pm popcorn snack AND I won’t be having breakfast until about 10am on Saturday, and therefore won’t eat for a large number of hours. So, right after an unsatisfyingly skimpy dinner on Friday (this is not true—it only feels like it to me, since I know I’m weighing in), my brain keeps forcing my eyes to the clock, and then announcing how many more hours I have to be empty-stomached until I can eat again. Fourteen more hours to go. Thirteen hours and fifty-six minutes. Thirteen hours and…you get the idea. I can’t even go to bed early on Friday night, because, guess what? If I did, then I’d be up early on Saturday, jonesing for food and depriving myself so I have a good weigh-in.

Sometimes I really doubt my true long-term commitment to this cause. What does it matter if I eat breakfast and show a small loss, or even a small gain? I’m not doing wrong things, I’m not sneaking chocolate truffles in between my Canadian bacon slices, and so the weight will come off. Like I said, I’m PMSing this week, so I should be up, and I’m not. I weighed in this morning at 167.25 pounds, down about 1.25 pounds from last week, and I still have today and tomorrow to get through, where I’ll probably lose even more before my meeting.

Here’s something else that points to my utter stupidity when it comes to this. Not only do I lose every week, but all my losses come at the end of the week. I thought at first this was due to my No Food Is Good Food program earlier on, but as I adjusted my intake to a normal amount, I discovered that my weight runs in a very predictable cycle. I weigh in on Saturday, and then on Sunday and Monday, I’m up about 1.5 pounds. I have done nothing different at all, though I think maybe since I skip the evening popcorn and eat my breakfast “late”, that my body slows its metabolism, so when I eat regularly on Saturday, my ‘weight’ goes up. Then I’m flat on Tuesday and Wednesday, or I creep down a bit. Thursday, I’m suddenly down about half a pound from the previous Saturday, Friday I’m down even more, and then Saturday, I drop off to my weeklong low.

I really should stop depriving myself of breakfast. I have weighed in at WW twenty-eight separate times since July of 2006, and I have had only 2 weeks where I was disappointed with the results. Even then, I knew what was coming, and was prepared when the scale announced my light-loss (or in one case a 0.20 pound gain). As you know, I’ve lost an average of 3.08 pounds per week since I started with WW, and even though things are slowing a bit now, I’m still logging consistently around 2 pounds per week.

So, maybe I’ll have my standard eggs & (Canadian) bacon for breakfast tomorrow. It’ll be a good week to do it, since I’m PMSing, which means that next week, I’ll log a big loss, just on principle. I should do it this week, to show myself that, even though the reported weight is less of a loss than actual, I can do WW as a normal human being, and that I’ll be happier because of it. I know Howard wouldn’t mind eating breakfast before we go, and I also know that he skips it precisely because I do. I could go the whole-altruism route here, and claim that I’ll be indulging in breakfast fare for the sake of my fiancé, but it’s not true, and anyway, I think we all know that I’m more self-centered than that. Lucky for me, the center is sounder, and smaller than it used to be.

Ooh, I’m getting the jitters already. Maybe I should wait until next week, and shave a pound or so off the Big Loss. Yeah, that’s better. Makes more sense, too. After all, X is taking DS for the weekend and is arriving at my house at 7:30am to pick him up, so Howard and I can go to our meeting together. I can have a leisurely breakfast with Howard, after the meeting, and before we go out on our first voyage to find me a wedding gown.

Oh, the wedding gown. Hmmm. Do I really want to shop for that tomorrow morning, when I’m PMSing AND I’ve just eaten? I think I need to think it out again….After all, I would really prefer it if the Octopus didn’t make a guest appearance in the ivory silk, come October.

Come to think of it, I hate Saturdays too.

A the D(own with Weigh-Ins!)