Calculating my gains...

Hello everyone,

when rummaging through my closet this weekend I happened on a box of papers I had stashed in there (bad habit, I know), and on inspecting the contents I discovered among them several old weight lists I had kept some twenty years ago. These were, actually, documenting some of my first attempts  to get rid of what I did, then, perceive as my horrible weight problem.

Eye opener number one: The weight I had been trying to get down from back then was what is today my target weight. I´d be dancing with joy were I to weigh today what at that time the younger me thought meant that I was ugly and fat.

Eye opener number two was something I had completely forgotten about until I saw the numbers again.
The first time my weight really exploded upwards was over a period of eighteen months during which my life pretty much was turned upside down by circumstances mostly beyond my control. My reaction to that was a bout with binge eating, so bad I gained 66 pounds in those 18 months, ending up well outside of onederland and for the first time entering the land of morbid obesity. 

And this is where the pocket calculator comes in.
66 pounds divided by 18 months makes 3.6 pounds a month. Divide that by thirty days, means 0.12 pounds a day.Times 3500 calories in a pound of fat is 427 calories.
A paltry 427 calories.
One burger, or one serving of fries with mayonnaise, or one single bar of chocolate, or even just a second helping of an ordinary dinner a day.
That was, statistically, how much I had overeaten during that time.

For me, that is the most striking realization to come from those numbers.
The excuse-making games I played with myself didn´t work out. Neither the one where I promised to "be good tomorrow and eat nothing" nor the one where I tried to convince myself that there had to be something wrong with my body because it was suddenly growing all that fat, in spite of all the days I ate "almost nothing".

There was nothing wrong with my body. It was, as everyone else´s, a wonderful, perfect machine. And one of its functions is that it is, in a way, an accountability machine, and an especially merciless and very exact one at that.
It holds me accountable for whatever I do to it. How I feed it, how I hydrate it, whether I move it or not, sooner or later my body will tally it up and present the bill.

When I remember that,  the piece of cake or the box of chocolates or the second helping of dinner doesn´t look half as attractive any more.


Julia