Today I fulfilled the second half of the weight control method: weighing.  After a week of careful calorie counting, discipline, and concentration on my vision for how I want to live, it is time to find out how it is going.  Is there progress?  That means I am in the zone of effectiveness.  Did my weight stay the same or go up?  That could mean illness, overeating the day before, or even ineffective weight control.

Last week, when I got on the scale the number was 244 pounds.  This morning when I got up, the number facing me was 242.6.  Progress!  That ‘s not bad.  I have been talking myself down all week to manage my expectations, since I had a super bingey day last Saturday.  I also had about 2000 calories the day before my weigh-in, with a post dinner snack Friday evening.  And I still lost a bit.  

For the last couple of months, my weight has gone:

• 246.0
• 243.6
• 239.4
• 249.6 (big swing!)
• 244.0
• 242.6

So I have been hanging around this weight level with a fair amount of bouncing around.  The corresponding daily calorie averages for those weekly weighings were (in parenthesis):

• 246.0 (2200)
• 243.6 (1880)
• 239.4 (2000)
• ——— (2320)  – didn’t weigh-in that week
• 249.6 (2400)
• 244.0 (1930)
• 242.6 (1980)

It seems like a magical pattern.  The weeks where I managed my food intake well (averaging below 2000 calories per day) my weight decreased, and when I had bad weeks with a lot of calories per day, my weight rose.  If only it were as easy to eat less food as it is to say you intend to eat less food.  

This confirms what I thought all along.  Controlling your weight takes constant effort and hard work, and the thinner you are the more work it must take – more work meaning paying constant attention and keeping up your discipline in food intake, all the time.  

Your system for weight control had better be attractive and self fulfilling, if you want to have any hope of carrying it out forever.

-The Doctor