20200926 Saturday weigh-in: and??

Saturday morning (before breakfast) is the end of my food week, the culmination or result of a week of work.  Controlling my weight does take work and discipline.  It does not take deprivation or suffering.  Otherwise I couldn’t do it.  Anyway, I weigh myself Saturday morning before breakfast.   

There is a little pressure to make sure Saturday turns out well.  I am careful not to overeat Thursday and Friday.  Not that it matters, I work on portion control throughout the week.  But I have found my body does have short term reactions to a bad diet day late in the week – before weighing.

Last weekend I had a bad couple of diet days.  I have been predicting it would take me a week just to recover!  My previous low weight was 217 pounds.

…and my current weight is 217.4.  That’s pretty much the same as two weeks ago and I haven’t lost any weight in two weeks.  That’s the price of bad diet days!  Anyway, I didn’t take a picture since it’s not a triumph.  But neither is it worse than expected.  I have still lost a lot of weight starting almost two years ago:

Pounds!!
0

A perfect week

Next week I have a chance to have a good week.  Every week I get that chance.  While nobody keeps their discipline all the time, I have had a pretty good record of keeping going.  How is that done?

Willpower! 

Ha, ha, ha.  The Doctor has no willpower.  I think of willpower as the application of force.  You are forcing yourself to do things you don’t want to do.  That’s sometimes because you are seeing the world in a bad or non productive way.  I decided I needed to change, to see my body as something under my control, something I should be in charge of.  How it looks is partly up to me.  

And that brought me to an important question.  What did I get out of eating food?  Clearly I was eating way too much, though I wasn’t keeping a food journal at that time and had no idea just how much I was eating.  If I was eating more than I should, why was I doing that?  

My answer was I had created a link in my mind between eating, pleasure, and comfort.  The reason I was eating was shallow and unworthy: I associated eating food with being comfortably full and with enjoying the taste.  The more I ate, the more comfortable I was and the greater the pleasure from tasting.  But that wasn’t true, it was just a decision I had made.  You can change your mind about that.  What is a better goal for eating than comfort and pleasure?  I would try physical need, and a higher order of pleasure.

For now, have a good diet week.

-The Doctor