Walk the Line

I weigh myself every Friday. When you do Weight Watchers Online, you have a weigh in day once a week and you enter your weight every week on the day you pick and everything revolves around that. I’m supposed to log my weight every week, but I never do unless it goes down, so I haven’t logged anything since December 23rd. For the past three months I’ve gained and lost the same two pounds over and over again. I just can’t seem to put together a string of “good” weeks for long enough to lose five pounds and get to my goal weight. I can do it, just not for four weeks at a time.

To be honest the first 60 pounds or so that I took off I could be a lot more careless than I can now. I could bullshit a lot of what I ate. In a way that’s the nice part of weight watchers…you don’t have to learn it all in one day. You learn to eat right because you don’t have to do everything all at once and you’ll still lose weight. Those careless days are gone now.

The point is that I really really really don’t want to weigh in tomorrow because I know what the scale is going to say. It’s going to say 123 or 122 if I’m lucky, and then I’ll be really pissed off and work really hard for two weeks and then the scale will say 120 and then I’ll be so sick of eating nothing but carrots and sugar free fat free jello and of cooking dinner EVERY freaking night and counting every point that I’ll fuck it up again and I’ll gain two pounds back.

I don’t know how to stop this cycle. A friend of mine recently pointed out that there’s not a lot of incentive to lose the final five or ten pounds. It won’t show to anyone but me. It probably won’t even change the size of the clothes I wear. It’s just something I want for no other reason than to reach a goal I set myself, to prove to myself that I can do this. But it’s so hard to be hungry, to plan plan plan, to not go out to eat, to not eat what’s convenient and fast and cheap, to never have treats, to never indulge cravings. It’s so hard that to make it through all that takes stronger motivation than I have right now.

The other thing I’ve been worrying about is that being on a really strict reduced calorie diet and running a lot MAKES me binge. I’m not a binger, normally, and this weekend something just snapped in me and I couldn’t shove the crap in my face fast enough. And it freaks me out to no end when that happens because it feels like a short, very slippery slope back to whence I came…telling myself I’m just not meant to be skinny because I’m older now and cooking with butter is healthy and French women eat chocolate all the time and so on. Right now I’m in a mindset where I feel like I can do anything. I can challenge myself and count all the points and follow all the rules and I will lose weight. But other times, like this past weekend, I lose that mind set and I don’t know how to get it back. I don’t know how to regain that control when I lose it. I really don’t. And I don’t know why sometimes it’s there and sometimes it’s not.

It’s very hard to walk that middle ground between crazy in control girl and crazy out of control girl. I really don’t want to be the type of person who weighs fat free sugar free cool whip. Hell, I don’t want to EAT fat free sugar free cool whip, much less weigh it. On the other hand, I know myself, and I know that inside me is a fat girl who loves butter and hates running, and she’s always in there, whispering that I look fine NOW and she’s tired and she hates planning and she wants to eat some mint chocolate chip ice cream like everyone else because what will it matter. And that inner fat girl needs a tight rein.

The only thing that makes any sense to me anymore is that it’s really important to me that I reach my goal weight. It matters a lot, to me. It’s something I set myself to do and I’m not willing to give that up. So I’m going to try to do whatever it takes to be at 115 by April 1st, for no other reason than because I refuse to fail. I want to prove to myself that I can do this. I CAN DO THIS. And I will.