111 days 'til Swimsuit Season (a.k.a. When Hell Freezes Over): 1/24/11

I am SO tired of thinking about food 24-7.

That has GOT to be the crappiest thing about trying to lose weight.  Whether I try to or not, or want to or not, I obsess non-stop about "All Things Food" when I'm trying to lose pounds.  It's impossible for me not to.  In my experience, counting every calorie has been the ONLY THING that has consistently worked for me.  When I count every single thing I consume and force myself to be 100% accountable (if only to me...), I lose weight.  EVERY TIME.

However... counting every bite means pretty much planning every bite, which puts a person in the unhappy and unfortunate position of thinking about food literally every single second of the day.  


I am so sick and tired of thinking about food I seriously want to PUKE.


I'm flailing, floundering, flopping around within my diet like a starving, dying fish, and I HATE IT.  It's 1000 times harder than it was for me 12 years ago; WHY is that?!  I have chocked it up to my older, obviously more sluggish metabolism and increased hatred of exercise, but could it be something more?  And if so, WTF is it?!

I keep telling myself that I've "hit my breaking point," "hit rock bottom, " all of those appropriate buzz words.  But the truth is, have I?  There has got to be something that is keeping me from doing what needs to be done to drop my 40 excess pounds.

So, what is it???

I'm at a loss; I really am.  As I sit here typing, I'm chugging a Coke and thoroughly enjoying every calorie and carb-filled gulp.  It tastes like sweet, sin-filled nectar.  

My willpower must be crappy, right?  What else could it be?  If I had even the tiniest shred of willpower, I'd be able to resist the bad stuff and eat nothing but healthy foods, exercise like a fiend, drink nothing but water, and weigh 125 by June 1st.  Right?!

Whatevs.

We all know the score with any diet - if we feel too deprived of one thing or another within the confines of said diet, we're going to eventually cheat, and inevitably fail.  I believe this to be my core issue, with every dietary rule and guideline I've been trying to impose on myself.  

I feel so damn RESTRICTED all the time, I can barely breathe.

I leave myself no room for error.  There is no room for any mistake of any kind, and I'm SUFFOCATING.

So, for sake of argument then, if this is my core problem / issue, it would explain just about everything that has occurred within my diet since I first started it back on September 20, 2010.  That was 126 days ago.  (Who, me?  Obsess???)  I weigh exactly 5.0 pounds MORE today than I did 126 days ago.

It could have been worse, though.


I have to figure out a way to not fall so far off my diet wagon that I sabotage my entire day (or sometimes entire week!) of doing good with my diet.  This is what I do.  Constantly.


I start every Monday with my brain in a sort of "clean-slate" mode.  I get up, weigh myself, drink a cup of tea or coffee, counting the calories like a good girl.


I get ready for work, eating nothing, drinking nothing more, and I try desperately to NOT think about how hungry I am until I can't stand it any more - preferably this would occur around 11:00 a.m.


At 11:00, I allow myself about 200 calories.  My entire day continues on in this vein; going as long as I can without eating when I'm hungry, without drinking when I'm craving a pop or coffee or juice, all the while being absolutely conscious of how many calories I've consumed so far that day, how many I'm going to allow myself to consume next, when that will be, and how long I'm going to have to wait after that before I'll be allowing myself any more calories.  All day, every day.  Trying to eat as much protein as I can, to keep up my energy; trying to make sure I'm getting enough of the vitamins and minerals I need to stay healthy, even though my food intake is ridiculously low; trying to eat the 5-6 "mini meals" you're supposed to eat to keep your metabolism firing at full-force throughout the day; trying to invent new and creative and interesting things to do with hummus, or jello.


Well, this is where all that ends for me.


I have to stop the obsessing about food.


For me, all that obsessing leads to nothing but failure and that leads to depression.  I try to outwardly make light of every time I eat or drink something I shouldn't, but the truth is, every single time I do that I'm simply cheating on my diet and preventing the completion of a successful dieting day.  I very rarely end a day at 1200 calories and go to bed.  I almost always cheat.  The plain, simple fact is, I SUCK at dieting.  


Maybe this is extra depressing for me because of the kind of person I've always been.  I'm fanatical about order and discipline and neatness.  I've been over-weight a total of 6 years of my adult 24 years, and those 6 years were the most depressing of my entire life.  They were depressing for me because I hate, absolutely DESPISE being fat.  I am disgusted by my reflection, and get naseous looking at pictures of myself.  I see success stories in magazines or online where people have lost 100 pounds, or even more, and I look at the Biggest Loser before and after photos and all I can think is, "If I weighed 400 pounds, there is NO WAY I could live with myself."  I don't think I could get out of bed in the morning, much less strap on a pair of running shoes and go for a walk, while trying to psych myself up to lose 100+ pounds.  I couldn't do it; I KNOW I couldn't.  I give those success story people all the credit in the world.


So, should I just try to get mad at myself, then?  Shame myself into sticking to my diet?  Tell myself, "You big, fat, cow!  Look at those Biggest Losers!  They lose HUNDREDS of pounds, and you can't even lose the first FIVE of your 40 extra pounds?!  What kind of a loser ARE you, besides a pathetic one?!"


Nah, that wouldn't work with me.  I don't do self-flagellation or deprecation very well.

So that leaves very few options left open to me.  One could be that I need to re-vamp my diet plan to make it less restrictive and more "do-able."  I wish I knew how to successfully do this.  I feel like I've tried every variation on this theme.  I've incorporated all of the different tactics and theories that have worked for me in the past, to no avail.  I've read diet books 'til I'm blue in the face and feel like they all pretty much say the same thing:   Lean meats, low-fat dairy, lots of veggies, lots of fruits, whole grains, legumes, good oils, no white-flour processed carbs, avoid sugar, high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners, don't drink, don't smoke, exercise, get enough sleep, take your vitamins and drink 64 ounces of water per day!


OK, well, DUH.  Tell me something that every 6-year-old DOESN'T KNOW!!!


The real question is, "HOW?"


Has anyone written THAT book yet?  Because I can't remember reading that one, and I think if I had, I would REALLY remember it.  


I want to know the "how to" part.  Because everything on that list sounds great in theory, but DOING IT consistently, day in and day out, is @#$*^ DIFFICULT.  Judging by the looks of the rest of this country, I'm not the only person out there who thinks this.


Enough wallowing; it's making me ill.  Even though bitching is 100% calorie-free, it's making me feel like my stomach is full of something resembling two-week old chili.  My guts are churning tonight.  I weighed 164.0 this morning, which is ludicrous mainly because I was expecting at LEAST five pounds more than that, after the week I just completed.  Non-stop family events, non-stop eating, and non-stop diet guilt.  Oh, and non-stop depression about it all.


So I get on the scale, and it says I'm a half pound lighter after LITERALLY stuffing my face for the past 4 days.  How???  WHY?!?!?!?!  


Sometimes, none of this makes any @#$*^ sense to me.  When something like that happens, I literally feel like throwing my hands up and screaming, "WTF?!?!?!?!?!"  How can I be thrilled about a half pound lost when I KNOW I ate 16,000 calories in the last 96 hours?!  This is beyond ridiculous!!!


I can hear someone saying, "Don't complain!  You lost, rather than gained!"


This is true.  But it makes NO SENSE, and all I'm trying to do here is make sense of it all.  So my scale and my weight are both taxing my patience beyond measure today, and even though I've lost the equivalent of 2 whopping sticks of butter (right, Sarah L.?   LOL), I am finding it impossible to do a Happy Dance at this point.


So, time to figure this out.  I can't say I've got any new ideas.  I know I'm just rambling at this point, and if anyone out there ever does read this blog, by now they're scratching their heads wondering, "Damn, does she want to lose the weight or DOESN'T she?!"  To the average stranger (or blog-reader), it probably appears that I'm the least-motivated, most wishy-washy dieter ever born.  I can't even argue with that assessment.  


All I can do is keep trying to do something about it.


Here's hoping that by next Monday, I will have figured out even a tiny portion of this age-old paradox:  Why can't I stop CHEATING ON MY DAMN DIET, when what I want more than anything in this world is to LOSE THIS WEIGHT???????