A Going Concern

Well, it's arrived: the real break-your-spirit, think-of-nothing-else hunger. It's been an extraordinary run: five months of losing a pound a week pretty nearly like clockwork, and never getting really hungry unless I was late with a meal. But I suspect the jig's up: I've tripped the alarm and the hunger hormones are on to me. I've lost 12% of my body weight, and somewhere around 10% is where it usually kicks in. I've been expecting it, but I had decided to just keep riding the escalator down until it started to jerk and spit and run rough.

Within a week or two I should be down to 195, which is a good stopping place for phase one. At that point I'll "go onto maintenance," meaning I'll stop trying to lose weight, for six weeks at least. In practical terms, what it means is I get a potato and a banana every day. It will leave me with 15 lbs to go to the fabled 180.

A potato and a banana! An entrancing prospect. I am looking forward to them eagerly.

When I embark on this orgy of luxury, one of three things will happen:

1) I will keep losing weight, but more slowly, at say half a pound per week. That's what the numbers say should happen. If that's the case I might not have to do the weight loss thing again: I might slowly drift down past 180, and come gently to a halt at some delightful weight my body settles on. Or

2) I will just hang out at 195, till such time (at least six weeks hence) as I feel ready to resume the struggle. Or

3) I will start gaining weight. The course of action in that case is straightforward enough. I just start chopping things out (half a potato, half a banana) until I level off.

The hunger may or may not subside, in any of these three cases. That's the really important unknown. If it doesn't, the whole enterprise becomes shaky, and I'll have to reevaluate at the end of the six weeks: I do not intend to spend years of my life obsessively hungry. If it does, then I don't really care which of the three scenarios I find myself in: whupping the food thing will still be a going concern.

Postscript: I wrote this a couple days ago and set it aside. The hunger has in fact subsided, all by itself, but I think I'll follow the steps outlined above anyway. My sense all along has been that it would be wiser not to try to drop all the way in one go. Leveling off is something I've never tried to do before -- I've never gotten that far -- so it will be interesting in itself. When my weekly average goes to 195, which should happen next week or the week after, I'll see what leveling off looks like. I might deal one of the new foods in first and give it a couple weeks to settle in, and then do the other. When I look at in near prospect it seems like a lot to change at once, to do both.