Follow the Leader

I need no further proof that I am still the Fat Lady.

I might walk around in size 3 junior jeans (if a little stiffly), but I fight the cravings of a mad woman every single day. I see candy and I want it. I smell peanut butter and I tremble. If the guy in front of me brings in donuts one more time this week, I may go postal. I don’t even really care for donuts, but I am prey to any food that is free, or fatty, or tastes like comfort. I am not okay to do this on my own, and I am not healed. This broad is just never, never going to sing and set me free.

A couple of years ago, I had a personal trainer build a diet/exercise program for me. He talked at length about retraining my taste buds to crave healthy foods and shun empty calories. And, to a certain extent, I have done that. I was moaning so hard over the tomatoes we got from the farm this week that Howard had to excuse himself from the kitchen. Last night we had organic corn on the cob and I nearly wept with joy at how good it tasted. I didn’t even use any butter-just a little bit of butter buds (some scary, preservative-filled, butter-like powder) and salt, but wow. Yummy, yummy stuff.

It works on the other side, too. I see sandwiches piled with fatty meats and cheese and I sniff in disapproval. I walk right by the impulse-buy brownies and Nutri-Grain bars in the cafeteria. When I come home from work and I’ve missed my afternoon snack, I go immediately for the nonfat yogurt or mini-popcorn. It doesn’t even occur to me to hunt for something evil. It helps, of course, that there isn’t anything like that in the house. Even DS’s Ritz crackers are so oil-laden that I can’t even smell them without my stomach turning. I have changed my habits. But even so, there is as part of me—a big, slathering, eat-until-I-faint part, that wants everything she sees. It has no bearing on my hunger level, the nutrition content, or what the scale read that morning. It is all about availability and convenience. And need: panting, sweating, need.

I’m at my worst when I’m alone. That’s what’s so frightening about Howard’s job, and the fact that he can disappear for weeks at a time. When he’s with me, and we’re eating together, I have a support network that is also something of a gatekeeper. I couldn’t imagine eating something frothy and Off Program in front of him. I can’t even imagine discussing it. I hesitate to let these temptations seep out of my brain and on to my tongue. Talking about comfort food excites me as much as it disgusts me, and I worry that talking about them dilutes their danger. I might be wrong, and I might be cutting of an excellent source of dispelling the great allure around things I can’t eat anymore, but it’s too risky to try. So I don’t discuss it with Howard, and I don’t admit that I have a problem, and then suddenly I’m faced with cake remnants in the coffee room or some Red Riding Hood du jour brings in a bag of something that she doesn’t want in her house, and I suffer all day long.

So when Howard went out of town a few weeks ago, and I was left alone with my PMS, I slid off the wagon. Not much—juts a few goldfish crackers and an atomic fireball here and there. Plus, of course, way too much fat free Reddi-Whip on my jello. And then on my couscous. And then on my pickles. No, no, just kidding on that. But I went through most of a shaker of popcorn seasoning in 2 weeks, flavoring up the Near-Dairy topping so it tasted more like dessert. Or, in a few instances, dinner.

And it showed up almost immediately. I had been creeping downward, even holding on to 148 pounds for a couple of days. That’s a miracle, especially given that I was heading toward my period. But then the goldfish crackers swam in schools and then DS didn’t finish all of his M&Ms one night, and suddenly I was thinking up reasons to stop by Walgreen’s on my lunch break. Sure enough, by Thursday I was teetering at 151. There was water weight in there for sure, but there was some oil as well. I managed to come back around, and I wound up with just a small gain on Saturday. But still, the whole episode left me shaken.

Now I’m in the withdrawal phase, where I’ve stopped hunting for treats and now I’m just working my way past the urges. My body is all excited about the new surge of refined sugar and it wants more, more, more. I’m back to digging my nails into my palms and re-routing myself around the building to avoid the marshmallow pits. My life is suddenly a game of Goth CandyLand, where I’m navigating the Sugar Plum forest and the GumDrop swamp, but instead of smiling sweeties, there are smirking meanies, and even though my entrails bunch up when I falter, I still want everything I see that’s wrapped in foil or served on a stick. So when it came time to do this week’s goal, I went back to my empty plate and made a promise. This week, I would follow the program.

I’ve heard this comment for a year at WW: Follow the Program. There will be someone who will announce a great loss, and Maria the Spectacular will ask, “What did you do differently?” The answer is inevitably the same: I followed the program.

I admit that I’ve rolled my eyes (internally) when I’ve heard this. Well, of course it worked if you followed the program. And of course you’d have trouble if you didn’t. Write down what you eat. Concentrate on low-density foods. Drink water until you leak. Exercise, exercise, exercise. But this week, it was different. Maria, who has had her own toils with keeping her years-long maintenance intact, noted that she’d had a couple of rough weeks and then surged back with a huge loss. The catalyst? The program. I followed the program, she admitted. Well, if it works for the leader, then it woudn’t hurt to try.

I went home and opened my WW spreadsheet. I have a chart with my weekly weigh-in and a sheet with every day’s food intake, along with the calorie, POINT, and protein/cab/fat/fiber content. To my amazement, I hadn’t logged a single day’s intake in nearly 3 weeks. I had gotten lazy about it before that, noting that some days I was simply copying the whole of the previous day’s food and pasting it into today. If I eat the same things, I rationalized, and I know what those food values are, I really don’t need to log everything. I know how many POINTS are in my lunch salad, and Howard’s hummus, and a 3 oz serving of grilled turkey on a whole wheat wrap. I can keep track in my head. I’m fine.

Apparently not.

So I dug through my head and back-filled a couple of days. Voila. Not only was I no longer in weight loss mode (target =18-19 POINTS per day), but I had crept over into maintenance-plus. I was lucky that I hadn’t gained more than I had. I was still fitting in to everything, and I still looked the same, but I could feel my insides changing. I had allowed the enemy to breech the front lines. The encroachment was small, but significant. There was time to fix it, but no time to wonder if I should. Follow the Program. It had to help.

I’m down below 150 again, and while I’m edging toward my PMS, I have it under control. Maybe the slip up was a good thing. It was humbling for sure, and a good lesson to learn. It’s also been a time to think about a reasonable goal weight. Do I just need to stay in loss mode forever? It seems I can’t trust myself to ease into maintenance, even when there’s only 2 pounds left to go and I’m burning 2100 calories a week in exercise.

Maybe I’ll be en guard forever. Maybe the desire for sweets will never vanish. I might have to find a way to look at those cravings as a comfort-sort of viewing change as something predictable-it’s always here, it will always be, it’s easiest just to accept it. Rather than berate myself for wanting the bad things and then caving in, it would help if I acknowledged the pain that I feel, but remind myself that the discipline is much easier than the regret. Nobody ever got into trouble for following the program.

I am simply not a person who can have “a little bit” of something off-program. I can’t have cheat days. I can’t ease into normal. I can’t mold the program to fit my life. I have to shape it from inside me. I have to bend myself to fit the program, and I have to follow it exactly. There’s no suffering involved in that—I’ve done it for a year, and when I’ve suffered, it’s when I’ve strayed. Low-complexity carbs make me hungry. Broccoli does not. Pop-Tart remnants make me cranky. Apples never will. I thought I was far enough away from 251 to risk a little bit of fun. I am not. I will never be.

I can feel the change already. I’m sitting taller, I’m walking better, and last night, I pounded out 40 minutes of hard time on the StairMaster. I’m still resting my knees from the race, and I hope to get back outside once the blacktop stops bubbling, but for now I’m stuck on the stationery aerobic machines at the YMCA. I can do it. After all, even though I’m not burning as many calories, I’m getting a harder workout that’s strengthening my legs.

And I get to do a little lifting, which helps all over. I came home from a workout on Saturday and insisted to Howard that we get the weights in the house. I can run or log time on the elliptical pretty easily, and pretty much anywhere, but I have to have the weights at home. It’s a bit of an expense coming at a time when we have to give away all our money to caterers and florists, but it’s an important investment. I deserve to lose weight and keep it off. I will make it work: I just have follow the program.

A the B(ack on Track)