Day 7

July 8th, 2018 by Potato

Day 7. The wild calories continue to call at me. Their taunts and siren songs pick up at sunset. So far I have not been tempted out to the wilderness to investigate…

It’s been a week of actually doing the stuff I’ve known all along I should have been doing, and things are going well. I’ve run a calorie deficit every day. I’ve lost over a pound in a week — an amount that took 3 months in my “let’s just fart about with trying to eat a bit more sensibly and be a bit more active.” None of this should be much of a surprise (except the surprise that I’ve actually been good for a whole week).

I’m not physically hungry at all, so far it’s a fairly achievable calorie deficit. I’m taking a bit of a cue from the intermittent fasting ideas, with late breakfasts (~10-11am) and no snacking after 10pm, which I think helps, as I’m used to the idea of missing breakfast in a crazy morning rush. Psychologically I’m craving all the things. Like, I just want to transmute my stress into nothingness via the catalysis of chocoloate, even though that is a reversible reaction, with some nasty by-products. I’ve been whining, and likely will continue until I get to the point where eating healthy is more natural, and where I don’t want to eat a box of cookies just to prove that I can complete some kind of task.

The deeper question is how did I get here, and how would I get here on purpose faster in the future? Whether it’s losing weight, starting to budget, or starting some uncomfortable project, how can you get to the point where you actually just buckle down and do it? I don’t recall a particular epiphany — hitting my never weight should have taken me right to this point, but instead it took another year and a half to actually take it seriously and use all the tools at my disposal. My dad getting sick did re-surface the idea of mortality, but then why July 1st and not June 1st?

It’s an important question, because while I expect I’ll be good next week, and hope I’ll be good the week after, and the week after that, ad nauseum, I know there will come a time where I will slack off or fail. And when that happens, how will I dust myself off and get myself back here again? How, when I’m not sure how I finally stumbled in in the first place? For that matter, I’m not even quite sure what it is that I stumbled upon: willpower? Wisdom? The incubation time for a good idea to finally take root?

Anyway, had a decent week health-wise. There have been other decent weeks, but this one felt a little more on purpose, what with the tracking and not eating all the timbits when work got busy. Not quite sure how I managed it or how to do it again.

2 Responses to “Day 7”

  1. Garth Sproule Says:

    Losing the weight by maintaining a calorie deficit works. The hard part comes in maintaining the constant mindfulness required to keep it off. I find that I just get tired of the small but necessary fight that is needed to keep it top of mind and after a while and the mindfulness just shuts down. Wish I knew how to prevent that from happening.

  2. Potato Says:

    Thanks Garth, that is something I’ve been thinking about — I’ve had a few good weeks of following the plan (even on vacation, in the face of cinnamon rolls and Cow’s ice cream, I kept tracking and averaged a slight deficit), but now I have to basically keep doing it forever.

    At least for now I can leave that as a problem for Future Potato to solve (that guy’s a sucker), and I just have to get through this week.