The Fat Trap

This article should be called, “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know.”

http://twitter.com/#!/nytimes/status/152069443034423296

I actually didn’t manage to read the whole thing word for word—I had to skim after the first two screens because I began to get depressed.

Most of you know that I have lost 70 pounds. The first 40 of that came off between 2001 and 2003, and the rest between 2008 and 2010. Yay, that’s good, blah blah blah. Yes, I have managed to maintain that +/-5 pounds for the last two years. But it’s unbelievably hard. Yes, I do indulge sometimes. That’s exactly why the over/under happens. Sometimes I get into serious bouts of exercise and paying attention to what I eat, and sometimes I make beautiful cakes and don’t feel like walking in the cold.

But I think about my weight and calories and exercise every minute. Maybe you think I am exaggerating, but I’m really not. If I’m not exercising, I’m feeling bad about it. If I think about food or am eating, I try to calculate the calories or what I would have to do to battle it. I think constantly about how my clothes fit. If they’re snug, then I’m angry. If they’re loose, then it’s, “Ok, how can you make them looser?” Every second.

All of this and I am still overweight. So I think about that too. Worrying how to stay within my range, and the whole time I am also thinking, “I need to lose 30 more pounds.”

It could be done, of course. I know that. I know how to do it. This is the part that is less clear to me: why I don’t forego a glass of wine with dinner and then exercise at the calorie-neutral rate to battle it, and so come out ahead. Maybe it’s self-sabotage. I often tell myself that it’s just getting a little pleasure where I can. Which I do think is true. But I also remember often Tracie’s words of wisdom: “Nothing tastes as good as being fit feels.”

This is probably the part of the post where I talk about a New Year’s Resolution or some such nonsense. And it is nonsense. I see this every January. The first three weeks of the month, the gym will be packed to the gills. People will be in there sweating away with the best of intentions. Some of them will injure themselves, and that will be the end of that. Some will decide to start sleeping later instead of doing this. Some will only need to lose a few, and they will come off easily and it’ll be back to business as usual. But there I will still be, plodding along knowing that I have to keep going whether it’s New Year’s, St. Patrick’s Day, or Halloween. It’s a never-ending battle, and I just have to be at peace with that.

Ah, another blog post without a point in the end. I think what prompted me to point to the article in the first place, is that while I was reading, I was thinking about some of the folks in my life who don’t seem to quite understand my relationship with food, my weight, and my appearance. This article is a little window into that, maybe. It certainly doesn’t explain everything, but it’s a good reminder that I am not the only person out there who is constantly dieting and constantly making no progress beyond status quo.