Back Again

Well, here I am - back again. I have gained back probably a bit more than 1/2 of what I lost. At the moment I seem to be totally out of control. I know that I have to lose weight - there's no question. I am, for example, out of breath every time I walk to the top of a hill, or every time I try to walk into a store from the parking lot. Now I know enough to know I don't have PHT or some other terrible disease, just a lot of visceral fat around my lungs. Yet I seem to eat more everyday day rather than less.

There is a money factor too. I eat a lot of bread, bread adds $10 to my weekly grocery bill. Also, my medical insurance has offered 10% rebate if I join some sort of healthy plan at my doctors office, and "maintain a healthy weight" or join to plan to reach a healthy weight. 10% is about $900, I simply can't afford to turn it down.

When I started this blog, and started losing weight, I was motivated by a 3 day stay in ICU. That experience has passed and the experience hasn't stuck with me. This is bad. When I finally quit smoking, it was because the last 3 cigarettes I had made me feel faint and dizzy. Each one was worse than the one before. I knew I was going to die if I had another. So I quit, and it's stuck.

But I had a lot of preparation before that last cigarette, and I knew one thing. That I couldn't have even just one more cigarette because I would ne hooked again. With just one. So I never had another.

I am becoming to believe that food is the same way. If I am going to lose weight and keep it off, I just can't have another doughnut, period. Or dessert at a restaurant. Etc. Somehow it doesn't work to say you are going to limit your intake of these things. Of course when I say "you", I mean "me".

When I orginally did mthis blog, it was easy to do the main component, that is, log my daily calories. It was natural, it gave me feed back, and I couldn't understand why everyone didn't do it. Yet now it is a burden. I know that when I started going off the "diet" - "program" is probably a better term - I was depressed by three things. First of all, I hit a plateau and just wasn't losing any weight over the last few months. Secondly, there were a great number of picnics etc, and it just seemed impossible to keep on the program. But most of all I was depressed by Mike Huckabee.

Quite apart from his presidential run, Mike made news by losing 100 pounds as governor of Arkansas, and keeping it off. He also made news by actually doing real things to reduce the obesity levels among Arkansas kids. But when I read that years after his weight loss, he still had to carry around a cooler of his own food, and avoid official banquets and otherwise more or less oriented his life around not eating too much. Well, that was just too much for me. I mean, it all seemed so pointless because his experience seemed to mean that I could never be "normal" when to it came to food. That I could never teach myself not to eat too much, or adjust to not eating too much, or whatever.

But now I guess I am coming to understand that's the way it is. That I am not "normal" when it comes to food, any more than an alcoholic is "normal" when it comes to alcohol.

One thing I noticed about quitting smoking, in myself and in others when they quit, was that everyone had a slogan, or a crutch if you will, that they could use when tempted by a cigarette. My own was "Having a cigarette now won't change a thing". And that worked for me. And I am wondering if it won't work again for food. Food as an addiction is something I have touched on before, but now I think I need to investigate more fully.

Perhaps, if I can become convinced that I am addicted to food, or somehow "abuse" food like other people "abuse" drugs, then maybe I will be more capable of resisting each individual impulse to eat There were, after all, hundreds of impulses to smoke every day when I was quitting, and I resisted those. Somehow, gaining control over "eating impulses" is now much more tenable than thinking that I will record everything I eat for the rest my life.

Well, my houseguest is back from church, so I have to close. I have a great deal of reading to do to catch back up, including my own blog, which I haven't read yet! There is also The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, Food Addicts in Recovery, and the Wikipedia entry on Obesity.

And the jokes on me: the houseguest has returned with donuts, muffins and bagels from Tim Horton's. Just what I need - donuts sitting around the house. Let's see how that slogan works...