Later On

One task I discovered with long-term weight loss is to discover where your diet is leaking (like leaks in a boat: stuff coming in that you want to stay out). If you’re basically eating right (according to your scrupulously honest food journal) and you’re exercising, yet your weight refuses to budge, look for a leak.

Several times in this effort I have stalled.

The first time I remember was before I got my diet right: I had to trim the starches a bit more than the originally suggested diet based on my weight and goals. Once I had trimmed the diet, weight loss resumed, then it gradually stalled. I then found the first leak: pomegranate juice. Drinking around 2 fl oz of pomegranate juice daily has been  found to significantly and noticeably improve arterial health. So I started drinking a little pomegranate juice in a large glass of water. I do that daily, and so I didn’t enter it in the food journal: it’s just part of the baseline intake.

But then one day I looked at the pomegranate juice bottle: 1 cup = 160 calories. And I was drinking multiple cups per day—because I was not measuring the intake, I didn’t realize. So I started drinking 1/2 cup of the juice a day, period. That plugged that leak (and I definitely have noticed that I buy much less pomegranate juice). Once I made that change, the stall ended.

The next stall was when I realized I had no choice but to exercise: one can do only so much from diet alone, assuming you want to lose weight healthfully. So I started the Nordic Track.

This last stall has been five weeks of hovering in the range 218-220 lbs. Last night I was contemplating the reasons for the stall after eating a modest dinner (a small portion of the braised chard with chicken and steel-cut oats). I returned my dish to the kitchen and, because I was thinking about it, I noticed a sudden STRONG impulse to take a bite of the leftover chard from the big skillet: just a forkful. Nothing to write home about—and, more important, not enough to journal.

I recognized the impulse, resisted, and discovered how strong it was: it was an impulse that presumed its own satisfaction, and when the bite of food did not materialize, there was a kind of impulse explosion—so much so that I spoke aloud: “There you are!” The strength and emotional content of the frustrated impulse seemed very like the temper tantrum of a two-year-old not getting something he wants.

I returned to my chair and thought about it. I had noticed this “just a bite more” impulse before, and I thought I had conquered it, but here it was again, freshly reinforced apparently—and over the course of the evening, every time I left my chair the impulse strongly returned: if I got up to check my email or go to the bathroom or refresh my glass of tea—each time the “have just a bite” impulse was there. (I suppose at some level I was “thinking” that it was okay: if I never got up specifically to eat something, then the eating was “by the way” and would have no effect.) This impuse was particularly strong when I put away the leftovers and emptied the pan into the storage bowls: it was if some part of me thought it had an inalienable right to a last bite as I put the food away.

I realized that, in terms of psychosynthesis, I had a subpersonality that really wanted to eat and was clever in distracting my attention and hiding its actions from my conscious mind. I never was getting up to get a bite of food—always for some other task: having a bite just appended itself to that existing (and, dietarily speaking, harmless) task. And because I drink a lot of (white) tea, I get up fairly often: that’s how I was able to eat an entire second portion of the dinner the previous evening, which I did notice at the end but somehow dismissed: “I ate too much,” I thought, without examining how I ate that second portion.

And because each bite is just a bite, it didn’t seem worth journaling—so the bites remained out of sight of my conscious mind: I could review the journal and see nothing amiss, yet those bites quickly added up to another portion each evening: eating two dinners instead of one.

I did not have a single additional bite of the dinner last evening—and I noticed the periodic emergence of the “have-a-bite” impulse, which was extremely strong once I consciously noted it. And this morning my weight is a new low: 214.4 lbs.

The best precaution and practice is to make sure the food journal includes ALL the food ingested, even the amounts too small to record—because if you create a loophole like that (a bite too small to record), the part of you that wants to eat will exploit it, and you can be sure that you will end up taking many, many small bites. Any food intake not measured and recorded will be exploited—like the pomegranate juice was.

I think I’ve now plugged the last leak, and my food journal will present to my conscious mind an honest record of my intake. If I do take “just a bite” of something, I’ll enter it in the journal with a “B” prefix. And when dinner ends, it ENDS: no more bites, not even when putting the food away. No evening foods.

UPDATE: I was thinking more about how taking a bite seemed okay provided I hadn’t gotten up specifically to take the bite. That is not an argument that can withstand conscious scrutiny, but that of course was not its purpose: the idea behind it was to create a vague feeling that everything’s okay so that my conscious mind doesn’t get involved (“Move along. Nothing to see here.”)—because once I start thinking consciously about what’s going on, the game’s over and the leak is plugged. Lesson learned: Unjournaled bites quickly add up to a bushel.

UPDATE 2: In thinking about this problem/solution, I considered life after reaching goal—life on maintenance. One cannot eat consciously at all times—life impinges, attention drifts, and the fat subpersonality can strike again with much the same tactic (distracting attention while consuming lots of small portions). But the solution is clear: watch one’s overall weight, and if it drifts upward, immediately bring out the tools to ensure a conscious examination of what I’m doing: the exercise log and the food journal. Once one can examine a true (and complete) record of exercise and food intake, the source of the problem—and the solution—will, I think, be obvious.