There is a box of clothes on my closet floor labeled, “Fat clothes (in case of emergency)” which is slightly less full than it was two weeks ago. Sound the sirens and alert the diet police because this is most definitely an emergency.

I stepped on the scale two weeks ago and a scary number appeared in the window, like a gremlin peering in. Aaah! It wasn’t so much a surprise as an inevitability, considering that I’d stopped exercising for three weeks are started eating whatever the hell I wanted. Oh, the cashiers at Kroger could tell some tales! Let it be known that I have discovered the secret to weight gain: eat more, move less.

I was sick of exercising. I was sick of eating salad. I was sick of seeing everyone eat donuts at meetings while I was eating carrot sticks. I resented how much time exercise took, leaving no time to work on my blog redesign. And most of all I was bored. Bored with Pilates. Bored with running. Bored with lifting weights. Bored, [...]

• Continue reading "Crap, I got fat again"

I think I might have to become a workaholic.

When I’m bored, I eat. It’s my favorite hobby. Sometimes I come home from work and none of the 36 books I’ve checked out from the library look interesting. None of the dozens of TV shows I have to watch look appealing. None of the projects on my “To Do” list look worthy to be crossed off. So I eat. And then I eat some more. And then I finish it off by eating again.

But sometimes at work I’ll get absorbed by a project like water sucked into a sponge. Then I’ll look at my watch and it’s five o’clock and I haven’t eaten my afternoon snack. I have to stick my apple and cheese sticks back in the fridge when I come home. My brain gets so preoccupied that it forgets to tell my stomach to eat. Who hasn’t gotten hungry after watching a burger commercial on television? This is just the inverse. If I forget to think about food I only get hungry when I [...]

• Continue reading "Working to stay thin"

I used to get bored on long car trips as a child. This was before they sold SUVs with DVD players or iPhones or personal MP3 players. Back in the 80′s you played license plate bingo or you hit your brother. After 12 hours of driving from the Midwest to the east coast, this could get very boring and if I could have stopped the car and gotten out to watch some She-Ra instead I would have. I think this is one of the reasons people fail at weight loss. They get bored and they stop the car.

There’s a strange conundrum to weight loss, an oxymoron almost, that you must keep doing the same thing over and over again but differently enough to keep you interested. I have to exercise day after day, but if I do the same Pilates routine for too many weeks in a row, I start to dread rolling out my mat. I have to eat healthy day after day too, but if I eat the same foods over and over [...]

• Continue reading "The same, but different"