After 10 weeks of dieting, I’ve lost 17 pounds. Despite all of my wringing of hands and grinding of teeth over whether The Dreaded Diet was working or not, I think that does qualify me for “on target” status. It’s right there in the range that “they say” is a healthy weight loss pace. It seems slow to me, mainly because I never had that initial sudden 10 pound drop that I always used to get in my more youthful dieting days. Any faster would be considered unhealthy, though, according to what “they say,” so we’ll just go with this.
I have hit the point of diet burn out. I read in a book (The Step Diet) that 12 weeks is as long as the body can really continue to diet efficiently, and that even if you hope to lose a lot of weight, you should take a break from dieting for a few weeks after about 12 weeks and/or about 20 pounds.
I hit that point a little early, it seems, but I don’t know about this break business.
A diet break, ideally, will reset your metabolism and reset your attitudes. It will alleviate the physical and emotional burn out of ongoing dieting.
Yeah, right. On what planet?
In most worlds a diet break taken at a time when you hit your first bad diet burn out means immediately gaining back what you’ve just lost because the only way you can think to take a break is with Butterfinger ice cream and Zapp’s Sour Cream and Creole Onion potato chips…with spicy ranch dip.
A diet break in which your goal is to maintain at your current weight is called moving to a phase of your diet that allows a few more calories. It’s not called going off your diet.
All of that is to say that I don’t seem to have the mental energy to concentrate on my diet right now, but I’m not going off it either because who knows when I’d ever get it back together again.
And so I press onward. If the first ten weeks were slow, the next ten week might be cold molasses, but that’s okay. If it’s true as Woodie Allen said that “90% of life is just showing up,” I’ll just show up for this diet for the next ten weeks and see what happens.
I’m not even going to worry about whether I end up eating that cold molasses. Once I put it in the refrigerator, I never could get the lid off anyway. Cold and sticky = glued shut. Some mistakes are just for the best that way.
