Diet

So -- I am on a diet, have been for the past month. I've lost five pounds, which is exactly the rate I'm aiming for.

It's an absurd diet, but it's working for me. I have not yet found it irksome. I am rarely hungry. It is not healthy -- though it's considerably healthier than my free-range diet -- and it's expensive. But I could eat this way the rest of my life.

It goes like this:

Breakfast: a Spanish omelet at Tom's, with sour cream and hash browns and toast, and coffee with cream, and everything.

A bowl of soup, broccoli, romaine salad, and a couple pieces of fruit for whenever. Usually lunch, but sometimes in the evening. These things are all optional. I eat most of them most days.

A cheeseburger and half a small vanilla milkshake from Burgerville for dinner.

That's it. That's the diet. I write everything down, and weigh and measure myself every morning. Wednesday morning I take the average of my weight the last seven days. If it's not a pound under the previous week's weight, I chop something out of breakfast or dinner. So far I've chopped once: I leave half the hash browns, now. I expect to have to chop out all the hash browns, the sour cream, and the toast, before I hit the end of the road, but I'm hoping I get to keep the cream. And hoping I get to keep the half milkshake.

It's weird to be this in control, and this unobsessive, and yet to be steadily losing weight. It's weird to be eating the stuff I most like, and yet to be "on program." 

The end of the road? That's a little hazy. Beginning this, my waist was fifty inches: I want to get it down to forty at most. That's probably some fifty pounds I want to lose. In theory I'm sixty pounds overweight -- I'm about 220 -- but I can't see myself at 160. Seems too small. We'll see, of course. That's a long way to look ahead: a full year. Bound to be bumps and turns in that amount of time.

What makes this doable is that twice a day, breakfast and dinner, I get to wolf down food that gives me an ecstatic rush. It seems that I can't, or anyway won't, live without that. But with an ecstatic rush in prospect tonight -- or tomorrow morning -- forbearance of other stuff takes no will power at all. I don't feel it as deprivation. In fact, I feel that I'm indulging myself outrageously (which, of course, I am, by any reasonable standard: but reasonable standards and I parted company long, long ago, in re food.) 

And the other thing that makes it doable is that I don't have to do a lot of food prep, which may -- let's face it -- never be something I'm motivated to do. Other people do the cooking: other people do the portion control. I don't have to think about it. I just show up.