Day 179: 269 lbs

No change in my weight since yesterday, which is something of a gift since I broke my diet all weekend including President's Day. I'm doing better today, though.

I really need to work on this motivation thing. When I started this diet, six months and 50 pounds ago, I was about the heaviest I'd ever been in my life, after gaining a fair amount of weight in the prior year. None of my clothes fit, I looked like the Michelin Man, and it felt awful. Even my baggiest clothes looked like they had shrunk three sizes in the wash.

Now I'm quite a bit lighter, and I not only fit my clothes, but I've dropped a pant size. So I've removed the immediate problem, the ballooning which motivated me at first.

But now when temptation strikes, I don't have that ever-present sense of being too huge that I had six months ago. So when my wife suggests dinner out, or we have Oreos laying around the house, I don't have that pinch in the pants to remind me to say "no."

So intellectually, I still want to lose another 70 pounds or so. But emotionally, it just isn't as urgent.

The question is: how do I keep to my diet when the desire to eat that cookie is stronger than the desire to fit into smaller pants?

Losing weight (and keeping it off) is like trying to quit smoking, since eating ice cream and smoking a cigarette both stimulate the same pleasure centers of the brain. That's one reason I've never dared light up: I figure I'd never be able to quit.

But in some ways, trying to stick to a diet is harder than quitting smoking. At least if you're trying to stop smoking you can go cold turkey and never touch tobacco again. You can't just stop eating. It's like trying to smoke exactly one cigarette per day. The give-in-to-temptation part of my brain is constantly being stimulated, and I can't prevent that.

What I really need to do is detach myself from the immediate pleasure of indulging in treats. The Buddhist tradition teaches that physical pleasure is transitory and a distraction from true enlightenment. I need to train myself to ignore the transitory physical pleasure of eating that ice cream cone, and focus on the true enlightenment of becoming svelte.

(Never mind that Buddha is invariable portrayed as rather on the portly side.)