Day 275: 267 lbs

I lost two pounds yesterday, though I think this is still "easy weight" that comes off quickly when I start a new diet. I actually went about two calories over my 1,500 calorie quota, but that's not a big deal. The scales I use to measure portions aren't that precise anyway.

Even though I've been keeping this blog for nine months, it really does feel like I'm starting the diet over again (albeit 40 pounds lighter than the first time I started this diet). Over the years, I've gone through a lot of start-diet-slip-off-diet cycles, but I think that keeping this daily journal has really helped me. Weighing myself every day and writing a daily thought--however brief--keeps me from completely forgetting that I'm trying to lose weight, and makes it easier to restart the diet.

During the skinniest time in my life, after I lost about 100 pounds in college and kept it off for a decade, I was more able to control my lifestyle and keep myself on track all the time (for example, I didn't have kids). During that time, I used a series of "micro diets" to keep my weight within a narrow range: I'd weigh myself regularly, and any time it drifted above my target, I'd diet for a few weeks and lose a few pounds.

That stopped working when I took on a very intense job with a lot of travel, and later, had kids. And so, over the course of about 8 years, my weight drifted back up to where it was late last summer when I started the diet. I tried a lot of different things during that time to lose weight, but nothing worked for me since nothing dealt with my core problem, namely that I didn't have the self-discipline to stick to it.

I think self-discipline needs to start with little things. And the little things for me right now are weighing myself every day and writing to this blog. Even if I don't manage to stay on the diet, that at least forces me to think about it every day and see the consequences of what I'm doing. And that makes it easier to be more disciplined about the bigger stuff, like controlling what I eat.

Okay, being long-winded this morning.

But so far so good the past few days. And the easy weight is coming off, which tells me that I really am sticking to my diet and not just fooling myself again. There will be more rough spots, after I've lost something like 10-20 pounds, and probably again after another 50 pounds or so. I don't know why, but those seem to be the places where I start getting complacent about my diet, and complacency is the enemy of discipline.