Trust

My goal for this week, (because, yeah, I do kind of have goals even though I try to be mellow about them) is to not gain more than a pound. After a few days of eating with abandon, I seem to have swung back to a more moderate place yesterday, and I have been working out as much as ever. I'm going to my trainer's class this afternoon. My weight fluctuates from day to day, but I go by my Weight Watchers weigh ins on Monday evenings. Right now I'm at about the same place as last week, so if the next couple days go well, I might even lose. Every single time this happens -- I eat in a way that feels out of control for awhile and then I work my way back to a place that feels better -- I am relieved to have made it back and comforted that it hasn't really damaged my efforts to lose weight. I feel almost, almost but not quite able to trust it.

As I wrote on Thursday, I am trying to banish the voice that tells me eating a lot of crap is bad. And part of that is about the fact that it's not bad. Bacon has no ethical value attached to it. Eating bacon isn't like torturing puppies or cheating on taxes or even driving a car. Gaining weight isn't bad. Nor is being fat. I'm working on that. But I also recognize that I am trying to lose weight. I want to lose weight. It's not necessary, it's not the right thing to do, it's not me doing good. It's something I want. So the other piece of banishing The Voice is trusting that a little setback like a craving for pizza or two parties in two days at which I choose to eat delicious food, does not derail my efforts to lose weight. It doesn't put back the 65 pounds I've lost, it doesn't take away my remarkable biceps, and it doesn't mean I will be eating that way forever. And even though I've seen it happen time and time again, I apparently don't quite trust it yet because I am still feeling that relief when I make it to the other side.

Struggling

The last couple weeks have been challenging for me. Halloween is my favorite holiday and I embraced it thoroughly. I threw a party the weekend before, and though the dinner I cooked was healthy, I also made monster cupcakes and chocolate demon mice for dessert. I made cocktails. It was no big deal -- I had some of everything, but didn't feel out of control. And then there were left-over cupcakes and chocolate mice in my house for a week. I ate a cupcake every night. Still not a big deal, but I wouldn't have eaten a cupcake every night if they hadn't been there. I also neglected to go grocery shopping that week because I'd shopped for the party and had left-over real food, too. But that didn't last and I ended up buying dinner every night instead of cooking. Again, not a disaster, but several less healthy choices than I would normally have made. Halloween day came and there was candy at work. I ate a lot of candy at work. And eating candy somehow brought back old feelings of needing to eat as much as I could while no one was watching, so I ate plenty of real food, too. Then I went to someone else's dinner party and ate more candy. On Saturday, I had to work and ate more candy.

When I went to my Weight Watchers meeting on Monday, I had gained two pounds.

None of that, in and of itself, really bothers me. I feel like it's important to be able to embrace Halloween, to eat crap if it makes me happy, and to not feel guilty about it even if it doesn't make me happy. I've been losing weight steadily for seven months, so gaining two pounds one week doesn't really matter.

What scares me is that while I'm feeling that way, I don't trust that I'll get this back. This has been easy, losing weight. I'm enjoying myself, and I have no interest in getting to a place where I start worrying and feeling guilty and telling myself not to eat things I want to eat. That mindset fucks me up. I truly believe that the most valuable thing I'm doing right now is not worrying.

But it only works if I keep wanting to eat spinach and chickpea curry and go running at 6:00 every morning. If I start wanting to sit in front of the TV and eat cupcakes, it's all over. Right now I feel like I have it back. I made that curry over the weekend, as well as a vegetarian chili, cucumber salad, and roasted root vegetables. The idea was to distract myself with an abundance of yummy healthy food, and it worked. This week has been better. But it feels tenuous. I fear that I'll feel out of control again and not bounce back so quickly. I couldn't even write about it while I was wanting to eat candy constantly -- it felt like the struggle would be real if I named it, so I name it now in the past tense because that's safer.

I'm entering a place I haven't been before -- a longer period of successful weight loss, a smaller clothing size, and it feel scary and like it will be easy to lose.