A burger a month?

Saturday, September 1, 2007 - Day 2 - net loss to date: 4 pounds

Weighing a lot more than we want to way is tough to handle for any of us. There's even a portion of shame involved sometimes. After all, shouldn't I be able to eat normally?

One thing that has always amazed me is how gradual the process of gaining way too much weight can be. I've told people from time to time that my weight gain, since high school, amounted to less than a burger a month. I can even do the math that seems to prove the point:

Weight on 8/31/2007 273

Weight on 8/30/1967 162

Weight Gain in Pounds 111

Weight Gain in Ounces 1776

Period of Gain, in Months 480

Ounces gained per month 3.7

What can I do about a burger a month, after all? 29 days every month I eat healthy and take care of myself, and 1 day I have an extra burger, and look at what happens! I wake up 40 years later and weigh over 270 pounds! Come on! How can this be fair?

Of course, that isn't really how it happens. There have been a lot of peaks and valleys in the graph.

I got off to a good start yesterday, of course. Today the scale showed a 4-pound loss.

I'm not silly enough to think that I really lost the equivalent of 16 burgers yesterday. A pound or so of that is real weight loss, and the rest is a matter of normal day-to-day fluctuations. My weight was especially high yesterday morning, due in part to the fact that it was Friday morning and I generally have a long drive home after a GA meeting on Thursday evenings, during which I ordinarily consume an extra coffee or soda and, often in the past, a snack as well.

But I ate healthy and got my exercise yesterday. I wasn't hungry when I went to bed, and I'm not hungry now at 7:55 on Saturday morning. I walked down the street for dinner at Jose's last night and had their very healthy, nutritious and yummy chicken fajita salad while I sat at the bar and watched a couple innings of the Sox game. But I had an iced tea instead a Corona or a Sam Adams, and I asked the bartender not to bring me the usual complimentary chips and salsa.

More of the same today. That's the ticket, for me.