Diet or get off the scale!

Albert Einstein is right!

Albert Einstein is supposed to have said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By that definition, I’m totally bonkers. Every day, I eat about the same amount and exercise the same amount (which is none at all) and when I get on the scale in the morning, I’m disappointed that I didn’t lose weight.

For the first few months of my diet, I actually DID diet: I consumed fewer calories than I had in the past. With the first 28 weeks, I lost 25.5 pounds. Not quite up to my goal of a pound a week, but close enough. On July 23, I was down to 195.5 (from 221).

That’s when I stalled.  I stopped keeping a food journal and tried to coast, but in fact I ended up going back to a few old habits like snacking at night so my intake was at a maintenance level. I gained a few pounds, lost them, gained them back, dropped them again. My weight loss graph looked as though it was tracking a kid on a pogo stick (if you’re too young to know what that is, check out this YouTube video).

This has gone on for two months. On my official weigh-in this past Friday, I was 195.  One half pound in eight weeks. Let’s see, that works out to 0.0625 pounds a week. Hmmm…. At this rate, I’ll be my ideal weight in 12.3 years. Instead of celebrating my 61st birthday by buying a size 12, I’ll by trying on new slacks when I’m 73.  And although it’s NEVER too late to get into shape, I really don’t want to wait that long!

So, starting this week (right now in fact) I’m determined to diet or get off the scale, if you’ll excuse my take on the more profane “s–t or get off the pot.” I’m tired of that sense of disappointment and discouragement when I look at the scale every morning — and of feeling “insane” for thinking I’d be seeing a lower number. I miss getting up and weighing myself and bursting into a joyous “YESSSSS!!!!” as I dropped another pound (or even half a pound).  I want to go back to being filled with the sense of expectancy and triumph I experienced when I was on track with my weight loss.

In order to NOT do the same thing over and over again, I’ve looked carefully at my quicksand times and places, the wheres and whens I’m most likely to sink into the mire of “wrong eating.” With me, it wasn’t hard to figure out. I snack at night. Continuously. True, I’ve been trying to stick to good, healthy, low-fat foods like fruit, crackers, and high-fiber cereal (hold the milk and sugar!) but as I realized a few weeks ago, even grapes and peaches add up when you eat a bushel of them at one sitting.

But I don’t eat simply because it’s evening — only while reading or watching movies on DVD. This is something my partner and I love to do and the 10-midnight slot is usually reserved for this type of entertainment. But we also snack non-stop while we’re watching — and have the rolls of fat to prove it.

To avoid these problem times, we’ve switched our schedule so we’re watching the shows right after dinner when we’re not hungry. We’ll spend the late-night period at our computers or in some other “temptation-free zone.”

I’ve only been at this a couple of days but it has greatly reduced my snacking. Since I wasn’t snacking out of hunger, I don’t feel deprived. Hopefully, this will get me back on track and, by doing something different rather than the same thing over and over, I really can expect different results. That scale WILL start going down again! Thank you, Einstein!