1661 is a magic number this week. It’s a palindrome, it’s the average number of calories I had per day this week, and the “16” has an echo of what I weighed last week, 216 pounds.
There’s another interesting number, which is today’s date, 20201010. Two times 1010 is 2020! This is a data blog and a numbers blog, in its way. I have decided I want to be in control of my body and my body’s weight. That is best done with numbers: calories, clothing sizes, weights and measures (of food portions and the body). There was a time when I tried magic diets and that didn’t work well for the most part.
What has worked well? Let’s see how well I did this week:
Since I began my weight control project in January 2019, I have lost:
When can I stop dieting?
That is the wrong question. A bad question. That is a question asked by someone who is living a “diet” lifestyle they don’t like. I am having a great time, eating whatever I like. I am enjoying eating more than I ever did when I was out of control and gaining weight uncontrollably. That’s the real reason this is working so well. And all I had to do was change my mind.
Magic diet is my term for diets that substitute magic for thinking. I tried a diet that claimed that you had to eat foods in a certain order, to lose weight. Another type of diet I tried that said certain foods should be avoided. This includes the keto, or low carb, or low fat, and similar exclusion diets. Another popular one was to substitute a low calorie milkshake for 1 or meals per day. The only one that worked (a little) for me was the low carbohydrate diet. The claim is that if you follow these diets you will lose weight. But they all have the same problem. You can do these things and they may work for a while, but you are still the same person with the same thinking who became overweight in the first place. That is what you have to change.
You become overweight not because you are eating sugar or fats or carbs or grapefruit or drinking juice, coffee, or soda. You become overweight because of your mindset, your way of looking at the world, experiencing the world. Your values and thoughts are resulting in overweight. That is what must change. Your food choices and your body’s weight will catch up to your thinking, if you improve it.
The single biggest difference between people who are gaining weight and those who maintain a thin weight throughout their adult life is in values and how you live them out. I don’t even value being thin very highly. I decided that I needed to value being in control of my weight, more than almost anything else. Then, I could pick the weight I wanted. That attitude feeds into other parts of you life too; if you are responsible for your weight, why not your house, your yard, your community, your day job? Thin people have decided that being in control of their weight matters to them more than anything else.
I will talk about achieving that control another time, but for now I will say you have to develop the correct reasons for eating and ways to measure your control.
Have a good week!
-The Doctor