Struggling

I honestly don't know why it's so damn hard for me to stick with a weight loss plan when I seem to have so much control over every other aspect of my life. I always do what I need to do - work-wise, housework-wise, money-wise, friend-wise, etc. But when it comes to what I put in my mouth or going to the gym, I lose all resolve.

I'm starting to notice a pattern. Last summer, I dropped 20 pounds pretty quickly. I was motivated. Kept my calories to 1200 a day. Worked out every day. Then July hit, and I kept making allowances for myself to fall off the wagon. It's my birthday. We're on vacation. It's too hot to go to the gym. Then school started, so of course I couldn't keep a gym schedule and of course I could ignore what I was eating because I was so busy. So I put the 20 pounds back on.

Fast forward to this May. Disgusted with myself, I started doing the Biggest Loser plan. Do you have any idea how much fiber they expect you to eat? Like, more than twice the amount that Dr. Oz recommends. I was pretty good about the gym, and fastidious about what I put in my mouth, recording everything. It took me 6 weeks to lose 10 pounds. I felt bloated and awful all the time from all the fiber. I was discouraged about my progress, so when the same July time period came around, I was all too eager to throw the diet out the window. I still went to the gym 2-3 times a week, but that was just maintaining the 10 pounds I'd lost - I wasn't losing any more because of the way I was eating.

Now my Disneyworld trip is coming up in a month, and I really want to lose 10 more pounds before we go. I had wanted to have lost a total of 30 before we went, but my backsliding made that impossible. Now I'm trying to convince myself to go back to my own 1200 calorie a day and working out every day plan so I can at least do this other 10 pounds and be back to where I was last year. Then hopefully I can continue. I do want to get healthy. It's odd that I have so little motivation to control this aspect of my life, when I demand complete order in all other aspects of it.

Food Masochism

I've come to the conclusion that I'm a masochist - when it comes to food (so sorry it doesn't show itself in a more interesting arena. For that, please visit Ms. Belle de Jour, whose blog is right over there on the sidebar).

You see, I've been trying to eat healthfully and work out since June. I refuse to call it a diet, because that conveys a sense of being temporary, and I'm trying to make permanent changes. On the whole I'm pretty successful, but occasionally (lately more than occasionally) I decide that I'm in the mood for some fast food or sweets and I allow myself to have it, while trying to keep portion size down so I stay somewhat inside my calorie range for the day.

The kicker is, I feel like absolute crap when I eat the foods that taste good. I get bloated, gassy (which I really can't abide), sluggish, and generally feel icky. Now when I ate like this all the time, I never noticed the difference, since I didn't have anything to compare it to. Now that the majority of my meals are healthy, I really notice the difference.

The masochism part comes in because after some careful analysis (done in my own head), I've noticed that I hit the fast food places when I'm particularly down on myself - when I feel I've been unfair (especially to The Boy), when I feel like I've failed (like making a mistake at work) or when I feel like I should be punishing myself in some way. It's not emotional eating in the sense that if I get angry or sad I head for the fridge - generally if I'm emotional, I tend not to eat. I'm just starting to notice that my chosen method of self-punishment is through food. I did something wrong, so I need to eat crap so I feel like crap.

I actually really like the healthy food I eat - mainly things like chicken with salsa, broccoli, whole wheat pitas, yogurt, milk, fruit. The one thing I love that I try not to eat a lot of is cheese, but I'll even have that as long as I can incorporate it into my daily calories. So it's not that I'm running away from the healthy stuff - I really think this is my chosen form of punishment.

Now that I realize that, perhaps I can knock it off. While I don't think I'll ever be into the psychiatric definition of masochism, I think perhaps I can channel these impulses into something a bit more constructive. Any suggestions?