These Difficult Times

First thing in the morning, a few times each week, I weigh myself on a scale. Every time I do this, I write it down on a small calendar I keep in the bathroom. It’s a good habit, I think, and have done this for several years, and this morning I weighted 175 pounds, which isn't bad for a thirty-five-year-old in this country.

The more I thought about my weight for the past twelve months, the more I was curious about how much it had actually fluctuated. So I created a graph of it, which I include below.

When you look at this graph, you can also see how much my weight fluctuated throughout the year. Note that my weight had a 7.5 pound differential, ranging from a high of 176.5 pounds to a low of 169 pounds, with an average of 172.3 pounds and an approximately 3 pound fluctuation around this average throughout the year, which seems strange to me because I actually remember feeling wild weight fluctuations.

One obvious anomaly through the course of the year was my weight loss beginning in August, which was when I made a distinct effort to lose a few pounds for a special occasion in the middle of October. It took me about one month to drop six pounds from 175 down to 169 pounds. But after that, I ran into difficulties.

I had a big reason to lose those six pounds: I was getting married. Originally I planned on losing a lot more than 6 pounds during that time, but in September, I got a highly contagious, yucky case of viral pink-eye that kept me out of sight for nearly three weeks and completely out of the gym. And if you look at my weight after October 15th, our big day, the chart reveals how, after our wedding, I began three months of relaxation in which I steadily put back on those six pounds (and then some!) right up to my top weight for the year. Notice the huge spike during December. Yikes! Cause and effect people!

I present this to you as evidence that my basic psychological system for losing weight has worked for me. An important point that I make to people is that the work of losing weight is not really about doing more. It's about doing less. Losing weight or maintaining weight loss is more about the epic battle to resist temptation than it is an expression of ruthless exercise. I consider getting exercise to be only a small portion of the effort I put into my weight loss, as I wrote, only about 20%.

I also want to illuminate that for a human being's weight to fluctuate six pounds is a lot, even if you are a big person. Have you ever had to heft around six bricks of butter? It's hefty!

One pound of butter feels heavier than it looks. Now imagine that butter layered onto you and then hidden. I put on six of these since October. Eesh.

There have been periods of my life in which I have gotten tremendous amounts of exercise, as if I was possessed. I once went from 187 pounds, down to 157 pounds, over the course of four months. Note that this was after 9/11, and I was unemployed, so I had plenty of time. I would get an hour and a half of exercise and then follow that up later on in the day with another thirty or forty minutes. During this time, I lost incredible amounts of weight. But, more importantly, it took me a Herculean effort to maintain the exceedingly strict low calorie and low carbohydrate diet required. I never felt better.

But as the chart makes clear, my days of weighing 157 pounds are gone. I have a stressful full-time job, which makes getting exercise at the gym that much more difficult. What is worse is the myriad of carbo-riffic temptations flying past me at work. That's the hard part. Resisting temptation.

This year, however, I plan on losing more weight. I have a new pair of running shoes that do not cause me knee pain and which I hope will make it easier for me to run longer distances. And perhaps, who knows? I may even run the New York City Marathon. But in order to do this, I will need to get my weight down to an average near 160 to have a good time. As of this morning, that's 15 bricks of butter away!