Day Five

Well, I don't know what I was expecting. I had one slice of pizza, and it made me full, I was hungry a while later, but I had some juice and that seemed to be that. I had a peach when I got home, and an egg on a piece of toast for dinner.

I am no longer perpetually ravenous, and my stomach does not feel as bottomless as it once did. I am still hungry though, because I have been underfeeding myself, despite my promise to not do so. I speculate without any sort of justification that this is because I feel very strong feelings of guilt when I eat food. I further speculate that, while the ravenousness (raven?) has been removed, the guilt has not. 

Whatever, enough about me. The point is that the compulsion to eat is basically gone, and that's, more than anything else, what I wanted. It remains to be seen if this will last, or even if this is a delusion. However I did not start this experiment without some knowledge of my own typical attempts to lose weight through caloric restriction. I should have probably included this in the first post, but here it is anyway.

The first day I don't eat very much, and I am thinking about this constantly, I search for distractions, but fruitlessly so. If that first day was successful, it's because I went to sleep very very early. The second day is harder, but I eat more. I try all sorts of tricks to keep my hunger in check. The third day is usually quite successful, as are all the days after it until... at some point during the rest of the week there will be some food available that I simply do not want to resist. Pizza is a good example, but more often than not it's just being invited to dinner with friends. From a net-caloric standpoint, I can still possibly do well on this day, but the cost of still being hungry now no longer outweighs the benefit of not eating what I didn't eat.

This cycle may or may not then repeat itself, and, eventually, one one of those not quite bad days, it was actually, verifiably, a bad day, and once a single bad day has occurred, the probability of having a bad day has now been established to have a non-trivial lower bound. I have yet to find a strategy for undoing this seemingly minor damage. You can try to think of it as "starting over" as in trading in your 5 year sobriety chip for a new sponsor. but that seems like a huge failure. You can try to ignore that day, but that establishes a precedent of having ignorable days, and as soon as that's allowed, it is taken advantage of more and more.

I think it's accurate to say that a chink in the armor of discipline will eventually widen to a crack, and the armor will become useless until it is reforged. And the chink in that armor is that, when it comes to food, theres a lot of types of it that you're not willing to give up permanently. 

I have been lucky enough to have encountered exceptions to this rule, but they all involve my being very active, and I think weight loss should at least persist through injury.