Weighty Matters

I'm attempting to get back on the wagon this week, and it sure is hard when the wagon keeps moving. I stopped going to the gym about a month ago when I got the Devil's Cold that plagued our family for weeks. Last week was the kids' spring break, and getting into a routine when you've temporarily got four kids home all day (all of whom, I might add, were instantly bored and in some cases, incredibly whiny. Spring break is for teachers, not kids.)

So today is the first day of the rest of my life. I love that phrase for the implied melodrama, but really all I want to do is get back into the habit of going to the gym every day. I had been so good for months and months, and I need to prove that it was a lifestyle change that suffered a temporary setback, not just a fluke. I want to be a daily exerciser, the kind of person that goes to the gym without fail, it's expected to happen just like eating breakfast or taking a shower.

Facing the prospect of dieting is not as easy a decision. I still seem to be scraping the bottom of an empty willpower barrel whenever I think about restricting what I eat. I've come to a conclusion - it has to be easier to lose a lot of weight than it is to lose a little. If I lost 15 pounds, I'd be satisfied, 20 would put me over the moon, and 25, well, I don't even consider that a possibility anymore. But it's hard to be motivated to diet when you don't have much to lose, because it doesn't seem to come off. The last six months of serious exercise (but no dieting) have kept me exactly at the same weight. But for some reason, I can't get up the motivation to sacrifice in order to see these last pounds fall off. That's not to say I don't try - I can get myself completely psyched up in the morning that today is going to be different, but by 2 pm I'll be scrounging around the house, eating whatever junk I can come up with. And then I feel defeated, so the next time I psych myself up, I start convinced that I'm going to fail. It doesn't help that Ryan and another friend of mine are both in the same boat - the two of them both diet with single-minded intensity, and exercise to boot, but aren't losing. It reinforces the idea that why should I even try? I'd rather eat, drink, and feel guilty.

I'd love to see The Biggest Loser deal with people like us. We don't have such a fractured life that eating has driven us to severe obesity. We are willing to exercise. We have gotten down to to our goal weights before, but see pounds creeping back on. We eat out, but not a ton. We don't usually drink soda, we eat fruits and vegetables, avoid pasta and load up on fiber. In short, we're doing most things that we're supposed to. In order to diet at this point would mean cutting out every single bad thing we've ever thought about eating, and I for one haven't been able to do it. So could Bob and Jillian could whip us into shape, exercise us to death to beat the 15 pounds off of us? I'd do it if I could. But I don't believe it would work.

So my current theory is this: I'm going to keep exercising every day. I'm going to drink more water, which I'm really bad about. I'm going to work on eating a healthy lunch every day, because that's the point at which my eating goes haywire. And I'm going to buy some new jeans that fit me at this weight, because that seems the surest way to tempt fate into making me lose a few pounds. And even if taunting Murphy's Law doesn't work, I'll feel better about myself if I look good, no matter what weight I am.