I chopped about half an onion with my little chopper, which is the best thing ever if you work in small amounts -- a million times faster to use and clean up than a mini food processor, and just as good. See the Pampered Chef version here; I can't remember if I technically got it from them or if it's a similar one, but that's the idea. Anyway. Chopped the onion, dropped it and a little bottled minced garlic into a sprayed nonstick saucepan, cooked it up a little. Added about 2 1/2 cups of chicken broth, some minced jalapenos, some chili powder, a little cumin, about a cup of canned corn, about a cup of canned black beans, and about a half a can of stewed tomatoes. Simmered it for a while, then stuck my hand blender right into it, just like they used to do on the infomercials, blending the soup while it was still on the stove simmering. Didn't puree it perfectly, but got it nice and thick.

Then I mixed two tablespoons of flour and two tablespooons of skim milk with a fork until it was smooth and added that, which made it nice and thick. Shredded a skinless boneless chicken breast half I had poached on the stove while the soup cooked, let that cook some. Added a small handful of shredded reduced-fat cheddar cheese, and finished it with a couple of tablespoons, believe it or not, of nonfat half-and-half, which gave it a creamier look. This wound up making two generous servings of soup for me, and when I ran the nutritional information, what do you know? It was just about perfect for what I would want for dinner. Well-balanced, right number of calories, and -- if I do say so myself -- very tasty. I would probably add the whole can of tomatoes next time, and either some cayenne or more peppers.

The point of this (short) entry is that this is what I'm trying to do -- learn to do it by feel. I couldn't tell you exactly how many points it had, and I couldn't break it down into breads and milks, and the shredded cheese isn't Core, and I didn't consult any lists of what to eat and not to eat, but I know when I make that on the stove that it's good for me, that I'm not overfeeding myself, and that it's what I want at that particular moment.

Funny story -- when I first ran the nutritional information, it was coming back at 675 calories a serving, which was a lot more than I thought it should have. I could not figure out what the hell I was doing wrong, and I was like, "Man, maybe I'm wrong, and I don't know how to do this as well as I thought." It just seemed off somehow; I know approximately what food values are, and I was really discouraged by it. Then I realized that it was counting a cup of dried black beans. Which cooks up into about a truckload of beans. So that's what was wrong. I fixed it so it (by which I mean MasterCook 7, the program I use for recipe analysis) knew I was using canned beans, and bang! About 375 to 400 calories, which is exactly right for dinner.

It is possible. You can do it by feel, but you have to be patient and train yourself, and that's why I encourage people to use a program for as long as they still feel like it's good for them. At some point, you begin to internalize it and you can do a lot of it without counting, but it takes a long time to do that, and I'm just kind of establishing myself there, which is sort of fun and interesting.

Also, I have leftover soup to have for lunch.

Here's the thing. The whole time I've been doing this, I've worked in steps. Lose a bunch, go full-out, then lose a little ground. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Mid-September was the beginning of the "Lose a little ground" phase. Now when I saw "lose ground," I'm talking about gaining back, like, maybe five to seven pounds, two or three of which are already gone again. It's not a collapse. But I'm not really doing it, either, and I tend to stop working out, and I kind of don't want to talk about it, and I'm just too busy, among other things, to put a lot of time into cooking and so forth. And the thing is that I don't even feel really down about it. I'm just on hold.

But at the same time, I don't really want to keep doing it that way. For one thing, stopping working out is always a bad idea, because not only do you lose your fitness improvements pretty quickly, it just makes me less energetic and less happy. So I'm not happy with the status quo, no matter how easy it is to see that I'm still doing really well, and will end the year easily 20 pounds down from where I started. And I have kept a substantial and ever-increasing amount off for, like, five years now. And it's not coming back. I don't even worry about that, because as soon as I get to the five-to-seven stage, it's like . . . okay, well, enough slacking.

So I got thinking about what to do, and how these periods begin in the first place -- these times when I just kind of hold rather than continuing to progress, and I realized that it's always when there's some interruption. I'm interrupted by a trip or a change in schedule or something, and it's not at all that I'd ever claim that I can't stay on track when that happens; I just don't. And in diagnosing why I don't, I had this revelation.

I don't want to be on a plan anymore. I don't want to be counting anymore. I don't want to be on Core or Flex, even though I think they're both really good. I was at the grocery store yesterday, and I was trying to restock the house after living on Lean Cuisines for a while, and I was thinking . . . "Well, I learned on Core that I occasionally really like a piece of lean meat, and really like the shot of protein. But . . . Core is so hard on bread, and I really like to be able to have bread . . . and I have to count all my lowfat flavored yogurt, so . . . " And I stood there, debating about which one I wanted to try to be on.

And then I just thought . . . I know how to eat. I know how to have a good breakfast, a good lunch, a good dinner. I know how much is too much. I've counted points for so long that I know what benefit you get from not putting cheese on your sub, or getting the small instead of the medium. I know from Core that lattes are really nice and are basically milk, so they're a very good idea. I know from years of experience that whatever my opinion of the anti-carb vigilantes is, a bowl of pasta may be very tasty, but I will indeed be hungry half an hour later.

I know how to eat. I don't always do it, but I know how to do it, and I think I'm tired of being on plans where I invariably feel like I'm either on or off, either doing or not doing. I just want to do what I think is healthy for me for a while and see what happens.

So I'm inventing my own "plan," which I am calling the Eat By The Seat Of Your Pants plan. I want to emphasize that I don't condone this, as I haven't even tried it. Maybe I'll gain five pounds in the first week and come back here all, "Uh, no."

But I don't think so. I think I'm just . . . ready to stop eating like my eating is disordered somehow, which it isn't. I snack on yogurt and fruit or whole wheat crackers, naturally and easily. At worst, I snack on, like, Baked Doritos. When I gain a few pounds, it's because I take a couple of trips and eat really good food that I really enjoy and drink margaritas and lie around. And I'm not sorry about any of that, and it comes back off when I go back to normal.

We'll see. We'll see what happens. All I know is that I look at myself, and I feel like . . . honestly, what is anybody with a book or a plan or a graph going to tell me that's any better than what I already know? I have a lot of confidence in my experience. I have a lot of confidence in what I've learned about myself. That's why when Core came out, even when I was having a lot of success with it, I was modifying it a little bit. I never counted my occasional handful of raisins. Because I know myself, and I know that isn't the problem for me. I know I can have lowfat raspberry yogurt and not binge on it.

I'm wanting to do it myself. I hear people who like points talk about "accountability," and it just baffles me, because . . . how am I ever going to be any more accountable than I am when I see every day whether things are going the way I want or not? And every time I think that, I think, "Right, but they say that at Weight Watchers all the time -- that everybody thinks they can do it themselves, and that's when they gain it all back." Respectfully . . . I'm not everybody. I've already done this. It may not all be gone yet, but it doesn't come back. I don't have to go twenty years before I get to say that perhaps having learned the lessons I did from following all these things, I am ready to apply them in a way that might be right for me even if it wouldn't suit everybody. If I do best with some Core/Flex hybrid, who's to say that's not right for me? What if I had invented Core while Weight Watchers only had Flex? Would that have been bad?

I want to make it clear that I encourage people who are in the early stages of this to follow something like Weight Watchers. I think it's incredibly helpful to have that structure, and like I said, I've learned a huge amount from following those plans and from learning about trade-offs in a way I never would have if I hadn't been on a counting-type plan.

But I know how to eat. When I don't do it, it's not because I don't know what to do, and it's not because I'm not committed enough. It's because I choose to prioritize something else, and however I feel about that, that's the level where I'm going to have to handle it. I don't want to count anymore, and I don't want to obey rules I think are overly restrictive for my personal lifestyle anymore, either.

It's the Eat By The Seat Of Your Pants Plan. And now that I'm back, you will get to hear all about it.

I read about you over at Mo's blog -- no, Mo's other blog. She linked to the article about the new food pyramid. You know the one. The one where you were talking about how if people eat wisely and exercise, they can earn "discretionary calories" that are the ones that are available for things like the occasional pat of butter or the occasional small dish of ice cream. It's the article that has this passage in it:

Discretionary calories are the reward for living right. And Americans who are overweight or obese don't have discretionary calories, Hentges said. "They used them up a long time ago," he said. To get them back, they will have to burn more calories by being more active, he said.

But I am here to tell you this: You owe it to the health of the people you have been appointed to serve not to say one more word about obesity, obese people, or losing weight until you have figured out what you are talking about, because as it stands now, you are one of those people who makes it worse.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. Your background, after all, isn't exactly in medicine or psychology. Your background appears to be in political advocacy. For pork, specifically. No -- literally, pork. I see from the press release announcing your appointment that you were "vice president of Applied Technology and Education Services for the National Pork Board" before arriving at the USDA. As I understand it, the National Pork Board doesn't actually work to improve the health of fat people. Neither does the National Pork Producers' Council, where you were the director of Consumer Nutrition and Health Research before that, and neither does the National Livestock and Meat Board, where you were the director of human nutrition research before that. These groups are there to put money in the pockets of pork producers, Eric, not to give sound medical advice.

What you say suggests that when it comes to fat people, you don't know anything. And because you don't know anything, you owe it to the people you're supposed to be helping in your capacity as a government official to shut your mouth.

You see, your little comment -- your smug, self-satisfied, tsk-tsking, finger-waggling, smirking little comment -- is, while far from the most offensive thing I have ever heard, a remarkably concise, perfectly formed, densely packed example of the one approach to helping people get and keep their weight under control that I absolutely promise you will never, ever work.

It does not work to tell people that they must suffer now to make up for their past mistakes, and that they've already spent a lifetime of indulgences and can now look forward to living like monks. Let me repeat my objection, lest you mistake it for a soft-focus, psychologically generous, misty-eyed plea for kindness to people who have suffered enough. It does not work.

I'm appealing to your practical side. I'm appealing to you as a strategist. You know, the kind of strategist who knows how to move some money on behalf of the National Pork Producers Council. I'm appealing to you as a planner. As an operator. As a guy who wants results.

Trying to shame people -- to embarrass them, to make them hate themselves for every drop of Coke they have ever swallowed, to make them believe that the reason they haven't changed their habits yet is that they have not offered adequate repentance for a lifetime of sin -- this does not work.

I mean, honestly. This is the one approach that has been tested on more people than any other. Telling fat people how much they suck, how much they have to make up for, and how much they should appreciate all of the great times they've had eating ice cream because they will never know them again? This does not work. It doesn't.

You know why, Eric? Because no one knocks herself out if the only reward is absolution. If all she can hope for is to get back to zero. To be forgiven.

Don't you see it? All of these people you are talking about, who have "used up" all of their calories -- used up their treats, their slivers of birthday cake, their opportunities to have just a taste of what everyone else is having -- they don't owe a debt to anyone but themselves, and deep down, they know it. They are the only ones they've put at a disadvantage. Oh, sure, public health implications and so forth, but that's not really what it's about. When it's just you and the mirror -- or you and the scale, or you and the bread, or you and the treadmill -- it's not about insurance costs or the national debt. It's about you.

You're the one who's going to benefit. You know who benefits when I choose to change how I eat? Me. You know who benefits when I hit the Precor? Me. Those benefits go to me.

Is this beginning to make sense to you? Are you there yet? Do you get it?

You're asking all of these people to stop treating themselves. You want them to live a pared-down, apologetic life until the scale says "Ding!" and they can live among the Regular People again. Sure, you say they could earn their "discretionary calories" back by being more active, but there is no mistaking what you are really saying when you say we have "used them up a long time ago." You are saying that the cupcake we do not eat today is to make up for the cupcake we ate . . . when? Last week? Last year? When we were six years old? How long will it take? How sorry do you want me to be about a handful of potato chips when I was twelve?

See, all of this debt? It's not owed to you. It's not owed to the Vatican, or the United Nations, or the Pork Board. It's owed to ourselves. And because it's owed to ourselves, you can't convince us to pay ourselves back if you tell us all we'll get out of it is that we'll be as virtuous as everyone else has been all along.

Don't you get it?

Do you really think I could get up at 4:00 in the morning to pay a debt I owe to someone I don't have any respect for? Do you think I could change the way I eat, or drag myself into the kitchen to make dinner instead of ordering in, or pass up the free pizza lunch . . . in order to pay off a wedding from 1993?

People don't work that way. They don't. You don't work that way, and neither does a fat person.

I do not work hard to make up for the things I've done. I work hard to put myself in the position to have the things I want. I haven't been sentenced to three hundred hours at a cardio sweat to make up for anything. It's not punishment, and it's not penance. I'm not bailing out a sinking ship, you arrogant jackass, I'm just steering it in a different direction, and nothing makes it harder than people who can't tell the difference.

And it's so sickeningly ironic, because speaking solely for myself, nothing worked until I gave myself a clean slate. Nothing worked until I stopped writhing around trying to make up for everything I had done wrong. Nothing worked until I stopped assuming I had "used up" anything. Nothing is used up. There's no expiration date on your right to make your own choices and make yourself feel better. You wake up every day in whatever situation you're in, and if you do it with shame, like you're sorry -- like you're apologizing for being in the room, for making people see you, for taking up space -- you will get nowhere. It's unfair, isn't it?

Yeah, I think so, too.

But do me a favor. Until you're ready to talk to me about what's in front of me instead of the pouring sand into the barrel of guilt you expect me to be lugging around? Just close your mouth. You're making it worse.

So, the Precor, right? To review, it's an elliptical trainer, and I'm in love with it. It's not one of the ones with arm thingies, so it's really mostly . . . well, if you've never used one, it's sort of halfway between running and pedaling a bike. That's as close as I can get to a decent description. And the reason it's so awesome is that it's a really, really hard workout, but it's absolutely cake for your joints.

See, even as I've gotten into better shape, I haven't ever been able to pound a treadmill for, say, 45 minutes for several days in a row, because something winds up hurting. A knee, an ankle, a shin, a hip. It's just a lot of pounding, and something winds up taking a beating. Bikes are even worse -- I can tell you what will hurt. That one will be a hip for sure, and the next day, I will feel like crap. So, of course, when you do something that makes something hurt, then the next day, it's very hard to go back and do it again, because it's hard to tell whether to push through it or rest it, so you wind up on a very erratic schedule trying to work around this week's sore whatever.

But. I can sweat like a pig -- an athletic pig -- for an hour on the Precor, working my ass off, and nothing will hurt. Absolutely nothing. Not that day, not the next day, not any day. My legs are kind of jelly when I first get done with it, and they were even more that way when I was first starting on it, but nothing hurts. At all. And that's a major accomplishment, and that's why I've done it for seven out of the last eight days.

So far, so good, right? Right. Well, anyway. I get up this morning to go to the gym, and I wind up putting on this pair of shorts. Now, the shorts I usually wear aren't all spandex-shiny by any stretch of the imagination, but they are fitted, not because I think I look hot in them, but because it's the most comfortable thing to wear. They're like, you know, mostly-cotton bicycle shorts or whatever. So I own them in, like, forty colors or whatever. But the last time I went to buy a couple of new colors, I didn't really realize they had started cutting them shorter by, like, two inches. And it turns out it's a very crucial two inches. Because, as I discovered today, the shorter onces react to the Precor by rolling up on me. Which is seriously the most unflattering, embarrassing, totally obnoxious thing to have happen when you're trying to work out. You feel like turning around to the people behind you and being like, "I know you're looking at more of my thighs than you probably want to, and . . . you know, sorry." But I was already there, and it wasn't like I was going to go home and change. So I decided to just endure it.

It pretty much brought back every gross, self-conscious feeling from gym class, ever, even though I think that if you're already sweating when somebody gets there and you're still doing it when they leave, they have little room to look down their noses at you. And honestly, most people are thinking about themselves. They're not thinking about you, no matter what you're wearing. It's much more in your head than anybody else's. But still, I was kind of annoyed by it the entire time, and I was reeeeally looking forward to being done.

And at one point probably halfway through, this woman came and got on a treadmill right near me, and I was just thinking, "Yes, her too, she's all, 'That girl on the elliptical machine needs some fashion advice.' Believe me, lady, it's unintentional, so BACK OFF." Yeah. My mind is paranoid.

But I survived the thing, and I left, and I went and had a shower, and when I got back to the lockers, she was there, having just come back from her workout, and only a couple of lockers away. Now, this was about 8:00 on a Sunday morning, so there was practically nobody there, and I was thinking . . . Great. I can't get dressed in peace, because the one person in this place besides me decided she wanted to locate right here. Yeah. My mind is bitchy.

And as I'm putting my shampoo and stuff back in the locker and starting to get my clothes out, I hear her talking to me. "Can I ask you a question?" she asks. I swear to God, I thought for a minute she was going to say, "Are you aware that what you were wearing really wasn't flattering?" I really did. But she didn't. Here's what she said.

"That thing . . . that machine you were on. Is that hard? Is it hard to get used to?"

So, to review, I was on the thing thinking, "That lady is on her treadmill thinking about how stupid I look," and she was literally -- literally -- actually thinking, "Hmm, I wonder if I could do that." It is at moments like this that you become embarrassed to be in the same room with your neuroses.

It gets better. I started to explain to her about how it's easier on the joints and stuff, and she started to talk about how much less she weighed when she was younger, and I started to talk about how much more I weighed a couple of years ago, and we had about a three-minute conversation -- really, three minutes -- in which we discussed the fact that (1) I had done the stupid shakes and the fasting and we both think that's really stupid, because you can't not eat forever; (2) she's an alcoholic and has to constantly tell people that weight is actually a harder battle for her because she doesn't have the option of never eating again; and (3) she's bulimic, which has made it even more complicated. And all this took place while I was changing into my clothes. And it didn't feel weird, like TMI, it's just that we were there, and we had this conversation, and . . . there you go.

Sometimes, the lessons just reach right out and grab you by the neck.

I am eating, as we speak -- er, write -- one of my best discoveries of the week. Don't get me wrong; I'm not claiming that I invented this. People have been doing this since forever. But this is a great example of how this new program has turned my head around in a really good way.

The thing is, I used to be a snacker on stuff like reduced fat Cheez-Its and baked tortilla chips and stuff. It's munchie-seeming, and low in points, but there's basically no food in it. Again, don't misunderstand -- I'm not dissing the salty or sweet snack. However, it's not going to make you less hungry, usually. I can buzz through a pack of little lowfat cookies, and while I will have satisfied the desire for a sweet, and the desire for a snack on a psychological level, I'm just as hungry.

See, I think a lot of people sell themselves short and assume that they can't stop eating when they're full, when in fact what they're doing is eating such that they're never full. Maybe of calories they are, but not of, you know, food.

So what am I eating? A bowl made of cans. You take a can of petite-cut diced tomatoes, a can of black beans (rinsed), and a can of corn. Dump in bowl. Drizzle with bottled lime juice (not Core, but far from enough to add up to a point). Drizzle with small amount of olive oil (which the Core plan wants you to eat anyway). Eat.

That's it. So now, in my fridge, there's a big plastic tub of that stuff. Hell, if I threw some cilantro in with it, that would be a bona fide recipe. And it's basically Core (like I said, not enough lime juice to worry over), so I can eat it "until I'm satisfied." So after I had lunch -- which consisted of a real hamburger, made of real extra-lean meat on a light wheat roll for 1 point -- and I was still hungry, I had a bowl of Linda's First Core Week Stuff From A Can Bean-Corn Salad Thingy. It doesn't take five minutes to make that, and as I said, you can then throw it into a container, save it (I save it without the dressing and I drizzle on the juice and oil a bowl at a time), and spoon some into a bowl whenever you want. And it's really very tasty. Yesterday, I mixed it with a little lunch-sized can of chicken, and that was my lunch.

And there's FOOD in it. You can't compare what you give your body to run on when you feed it tomatoes, beans, and corn, as opposed to when you feed it reduced-fat Cheez-Its. You just can't. And I feel like I ate some real food, as opposed to that "I just ate a snack, why am I just as hungry as I was before?" feeling.

So how was the week generally? It was good. My biggest struggle was making sure I ate enough. Core-type food -- real food -- takes a little longer to make than some of the quick stuff I had gotten used to. So this week, sometimes, when I didn't feel like cooking, I would respond by not eating at all, and that's not a great idea, because then I would wind up having lunch at 3:00 in the afternoon and dinner really late and kind of be thrown off by the end of the day. I wasn't skipping, I was just being slow to get down to eating a meal sometimes.

Was I hungry? Only when I got busy. Trying to find some quick Core meals was how I happened on the Bean-Corn Salad Thingy in the first place. Like I said, it takes longer than a Lean Cuisine, the whole-food eating.

Did I feel restricted? No. I ate ice cream, drank beers and a margarita, had a couple of light mocha frappucinos (best way EVER to spend three points), and had a serving of potatoes every day for about the first five days I was doing it.

BUT. I would also point out that I earned about 35 activity points this week that I counted, and I counted conservatively. I became -- as I've said -- totally infatuated with the Precor, and spent four and a half hours on it between last weigh-in and this one. The day I had to quit after thirty minutes, I'm almost sure it was because I did it at about 1:00 and I hadn't had lunch yet. Breakfast had been oatmeal and berries, so not much protein there. I think if I had eaten some protein before I went, I wouldn't have punked out at the half-hour mark. But yeah, I worked out five days this week, which is very unusual. As I've said, Core is very motivating for exercise, because not only can you spend your points on treats like my beloved light mocha frapp, but you can spend them on things that are really good for you but not Core, like whole wheat bread and nuts and things.

I ate a steak this week. A STEAK. Not a big steak, not a huge steak, not a "run for the hills, she's renaming the blog Eating The Cow" kind of steak, but a steak. Only once, but I ate it. I ate real eggs -- not a lot, because I still am happy with southwestern Egg Beaters for breakfast much of the time -- but a couple. I ate shrimp and beans and carrots and raspberry-banana smoothies and mandarin oranges and chili and cornbread and improvised hash browns, and I drank milk and coffee and lattes and a giant margarita.

Did I miss bread? Well . . . I missed bread as a habit. I missed being able to go for bread out of familiarity. Bread, or crackers, or a bagel, or whatever. But this morning, when I actually spent a couple of points on real whole wheat bread at breakfast, I realized that I have been eating mostly light wheat bread (2 slices for 1 point) that has, basically, no taste whatsoever. I had practically forgotten what good bread tasted like. I would much rather do this -- spend a couple of points on bread and have really good bread -- than be in points-hoarding mode, where I'm constantly afraid to eat anything in case I'm even hungrier later, which is kind of what Mo and I were talking about yesterday. I don't really miss the kind of bread or crackers that I was eating most of the time. Especially if I can have fruit or something instead. I know that sounds like hippy-dippy happy talk, but it's true.

So yes, I felt restricted at first just in the sense that I was being restricted from eating some of the things I normally would. But in the long run, do I believe the plan is more restrictive? No. It's just different. I don't want to talk down the Flex plan, because it's worked awesome for a lot of people, and I had a lot of success with it myself. But I'm eating a whole lot better this way, and I'm more inclined to exercise, and I think I'm more well-prepared to exercise (in other words, better fueled).

Is it perfect? No. As I've said, if I were designing this plan, I'd have left one serving per day of whole-grain bread as Core. And they didn't. And I still am not eating fat-free cheese, I don't think. It doesn't totally make sense to me that 1% milk isn't Core, because it's reportedly better for you, and the fat and calories aren't that different. And I really am still bitter about lowfat deli turkey and ham not being included. That's grumping me out.

But I'm digging the whole thing. I feel like I'm eating by feel a lot more than I was before -- eating what I'm hungry for, rather than by what's lowest in points. I'm not really eating more, I'm just eating differently.

And I don't usually do stats, just because I kind of don't think it's the point, but for the purpose of providing complete information, I lost 4.2 pounds this week. Which is partly the exercise, but the program certainly didn't result in my eating a lot more than I was before.

Every year, Weight Watchers changes the program. Over time, these have been good changes, for sure -- when I was ten, they made you eat liver once a week, and you couldn't eat dangerous things like . . . ketchup. And there were these treacherous Food Lists, and everything had to be traded in under a particular category, so if you couldn't figure out whether your fajitas were a Bread and a Vegetable and one-and-a-half Meats or whatever, you couldn't have them. It was the No Ritz Crackers Diet, as I always remember it, because I remember the leader giving a little pop quiz where he said (yeah, it was a guy -- I didn't appreciate how rare that was at the time), "How many Saltines are a Bread?" And the answer was "six." And then he was like, "How many Ritz Crackers are a bread?" And the answer was that it was a trick question, because you couldn't have Ritz Crackers.

Even at ten, I remember thinking, "So, wait. I can't ever have a Ritz Cracker again as long as I live?" It was stupid, that kind of unrealistic BS. They don't do that to you anymore.

For the last year, we've been on this Flex Points system, which works thusly: Based on how much you weigh, you get a certain number of Points you're supposed to eat in a day. These are your "Target" points. And then you have 35 "Flex" points that you can spend over the course of the entire week. Basically, Flex Points is calorie-counting, with slight tweaks. Points values are basically 1 point for every 50 calories, fudged up for foods with lots of fat and down for foods with lots of fiber. That's it.

People have learned to internalize Points values to the point (heh) where Erin and I have discussed the psychological difference between the two-point snack and the three-point snack -- we are all constantly on the prowl for the two-point snack. In fact, the new 100-calorie Nabisco snack packs are essentially designed to fit the "I want a two-point snack" mentality. I firmly believe they were designed for WW users, with the "two-point snack" drive firmly in mind.

Not everybody loves the Flex Points thing. Before Flex Points, rather than a set number plus an allotment of Flex Points, you had a range of points every day -- same effect, really, but different psychology. Also, if you ate under your maximum, you could "bank" points so that if you went over your max on another day, you'd be covered. Some people have never liked the FP thing as much as the old one (which was called "Winning Points," because all meaningless names are essentially interchangeable).

Sooooo, of course, now it's a year later, and they have to change the program again. For one thing, they change it so that they can have a new marketing push. "Didn't choose us before? Choose us now!" Furthermore, it was inevitable that WW would respond in some way to the low-carb thing. There was just no way they were going to continue to get left off that train.

Which brings us to this week -- New Plan Week. Interestingly, this is the first time I've ever been aware of them adding the new plan but also explicitly allowing you to stay on the old one if you want to. There have always been people who have stayed on the old plan if it was working for them -- that's why there are still people who do Winning Points with the ranges and the banking and whatnot. But the company has never openly supported the old programs anymore once they're changed. This is the first time they've said flat-out that you can do either. What's more, you can change from week to week which one you want to follow. Which is . . . interesting.

So what IS the new structure? They're calling it The Core Plan. What they're not calling it is Something That Definitely Is Not South Beach For Intellectual Property Purposes.

Yeah. Essentially, the Core Plan has a lot in common with Phase II of South Beach, as I understand it. (I've never done SB, but the fact that it's Phase II means they're not putting you through the two-week Phase I carb-detoxification thing where you can't even eat fruit.) They've come up with a list of "Core Foods," and as long as you eat off of the list, you don't have to write down what you eat. You eat "until you're satisfied" from the foods on the List, and anything else you want that's not on The List, you have 35 Points worth over the week. So there are still Points. The 100-calorie snack packs are not in danger of obsolescence.

What's remarkable about this plan, for people who have done WW for years, is that the act of writing down everything you eat has been the absolute unchanging center of WW for as long as I can remember. No matter what they were having you count, you counted everything, and you wrote down -- or "journaled" -- everything.

I decided to try it. Sunday morning, after my hour on the Precor (SWEET JESUS!), I came home and made a smoothie for breakfast/brunch. Plain yogurt, skim milk, a frozen banana, some frozen raspberries, a packet of Splenda, and -- the only non-Core food -- a tablespoon of peanut butter. It was actually really good, but the act of making something without measuring most of the ingredients (how many frozen raspberries? umm, a handful) felt incredibly odd. Not bad, just odd. There's a place to write down non-core Points you're using, so I wrote down the peanut butter. But in my head, I was still adding up Points. My little brain is still muttering, "Yeah, would be a couple for the yogurt and milk, two for the banana, one for the raspberries . . . " It's hard to stop.

I'm not sure how it's going to work for me. While the plan isn't low-carb, really -- it allows all the fruit you want, along with quite a number of whole grains -- it does have some pretty severe restrictions in terms of stuff that isn't on the List and will have to be counted as Points. Bread, for instance. All bread, any bread, any bagel or cracker or piece of toast. There is no bread or bread-like substance on the List.

They're very picky about certain things, too. I love the Louis Rich cooked chicken breast strips, for instance -- they're convenient, fast, and I don't have to go through the pain in the butt of cooking a big pile of chicken breast fillets. The catch is that Core is, among other things, trying to get you to eat less processed foods, so while plain chicken breast is Core, my precious strips are not. Neither are most of the kinds of very lowfat deli meats I like -- so, for instance, very lean ham is Core, but not the thin-sliced stuff I like to put on sandwiches.

Of course, sandwiches aren't so hot, now that bread is limited.

Having done this for about three days, though, I have to say . . . I really like it. I do like not having to measure Egg Beaters and weigh chicken breasts and all that. And I like being able to eat all the fruit that I need to feel satisfied.

It seems to me that although they're responding to the low-carb thing for sure, they're dealing with another problem, too. Basically, when I was growing up, there were two things that your Terribly Restrictive Diet told you: What, and How Much. The result of trying to tell you What and How Much was that you would have commands like Two Milks, Two Fruits, Four Breads (or whatever), usually for a day at a time.

These plans sucked, in several ways. They didn't accommodate multiple-ingredient foods very well, and they had no room for things like special occasions or wanting an occasional beer. You were On The Diet or you were Off The Diet, and you know how you could get Off The Diet in four seconds? Eat a Ritz cracker.

So ever since then, they've tweaked the What and the How Much. They've tried being less picky about the What, while being strict about How Much -- as when you had to count everything, but the only things you had to count were fat grams and fiber grams. The move to Points was basically the victory of How Much over What. In Points, they told you How Much, but they didn't really tell you What at all, even though there were technically guidelines that told you to make sure you got two servings of dairy and five fruit/vegetable servings a day. People didn't really take missing those marks as taking you "off program," as we would say. Perhaps they should have, but most didn't.

The problem with counting How Much and not What is that although I lost weight on it, I always was very aware that I wasn't necessarily making entirely good choices. For example, I would get lazy and not want to make lunch on a weekend day, so I would have two fat-free hot dogs on two super-light, artificially fiber-pumped rolls, with mustard and pickle relish. The pickle relish was probably the most nutritious element of the entire meal, even though it only had -- ta-da! -- four points. (That's only as much as two glasses of skim milk, if you're keeping score at home.) And although I tried to eat salad and stuff, some of those decisions weren't all that sound.

Basically, the Core plan represents Weight Watchers offering you a What-centered plan instead of a How-Much-centered plan, even though just as Points still had some rules about What, Core has some rules about How Much -- particularly the fact that everything that's not on The List is limited to 35 points a week. Which is not much. Ultimately, though, Core is mostly a What-based plan.

My personal theory is that there are people who are pretty comfortable that they don't eat too much, really, they just eat goofy things at times -- I am this kind of person. The other kind is the kind that got fat on giant plates of theoretically healthy food. That second group is the group that's freaking out about Core not restricting portion sizes for Core foods. "If I could stop eating when I'm satisfied, I wouldn't beeeee here!" they say. And I totally feel for them, I do. But I don't feel that way. I do stop eating when I'm satisfied. My problem is more, as I said above, that I go for a lot of low-point foods that don't have much actual food in them. So when I eat more later, it's because I'm hungry.

I am theorizing, based on my vast three days of experience, that the first kind of person will do better on Core, and the second kind will do better on Flex. That's what I would call my First Theory of Flex People and Core People.

My Second Theory of Flex People and Core People is this: Core will work quite well for people who are at least moderately active, but people who are not exercising will find it to be a bitch. Because really, 35 FP a week for non-Core foods is not very damn much when bread puts you in a hole.

But. As stated above, I've just discovered the Precor. This, for those of you who don't know, is an elliptical trainer. And I will eventually be writing an entire entry about the Precor, because I love it. And I can do it for an hour, working very hard, and it will spit out (as it did this morning) that I burned over 700 calories. Roughly, WW likes to give you an activity point (meaning an extra point that you can eat) for about every 100 calories that you burn -- and yes, this means that since food is only about 50 calories per point, you always come out ahead from exercise. I give myself a conservative 6 for that hour spent on the Precor. So now, instead of 5 (the average 1/7 of my weekly 35) to spend on non-Core today, I would have 11. And 11 points worth of non-Core food, I can work with. What I'm trying to do is only use the APs for stuff like bread and nuts and things -- stuff that's good for you but has to be counted -- and then I'm saving the 35 for actual "extra" stuff -- little cookies or beer or whatever.

It's scary, change. There are a lot of very freaked-out individuals out there, which is partly a compliment to the fact that Flex has been a pretty happy plan for a lot of people. We'll see how the new thing goes. Fortunately, if all my theories go south, I can always go back.

Boy, do you hear this a lot. Travel a few boards where women are talking about weight and food and working out, and you won't get far without hearing it.

"I hate her."

Who is she? You work with her, or she's a friend of a friend, or you see her every day at the gym or at Starbucks. She is thin and pretty, with no acne or little red bumps on her arms or scars on her knees. She is perpetually tan, but not too much, always with the white teeth and the smooth, subtly highlighted hair. And, of course, she has the little flat stomach you will never have if you work out for fifty years, because past a certain point, you're not getting that.

"I hate her."

She compliments you that you look great, and even then -- especially then -- you are overwhelmed by the urge to poke her in the eye. How dare she? She knows nothing. You have seen her sucking down her chic full-fat white mocha or her chicken Caesar salad on which she has not asked them to go light on the dressing. You have seen her. She is secretly contemptuous of you, you are certain. She thinks she's better than you are.

"I hate her."

She complains about those torturous five pounds she wants to lose. Poor dear, with her five pounds. Poor dear, with her suffering. Poor dear, afraid she won't be the prettiest girl at spring break. She knows nothing. She eats whatever she wants. She prattles about carbs, maybe, but it's not like it matters. When there are donuts in the office, she always has one. Maybe she doesn't eat all of it, but she always has one.

"I hate her."

And really . . . it's time to stop.

There are enough people to worry about. The rude, the nasty, the insensitive, the stupid, the vapid, the obnoxious, the patronizing, the self-righteous, the dishonest . . . the cheats, the blowhards, the bullies, the fools . . . it's enough.

Because really, she didn't do anything. At least not just by being born lucky, which is, in all honesty, what makes her so infuriating. Sure, yes, perhaps she and her friends are the same people who enforced the social order that caused so much agony for everyone else, but . . . she was thirteen. It was a long time ago. You have friends now. You have a job. She's not in the girls' bathroom trading Bonne Belle LipSmackers anymore. You don't have to talk to her if you don't want to, and you don't have to go to each other's birthday parties if you don't want to, and perhaps you wouldn't want her friends, and perhaps she wouldn't want yours.

In the end, I'm a pragmatist. Hating her is exhausting. It floats around me like a cloud of sour ashes, and the only person who's less pleasant because of it is me. Sure, if she's dumb, she's dumb, and if she's small-minded, she's small-minded. But just for being lucky? Just for not having to get up every day and figure out how many points are in a cup of Berry Burst Cheerios before she's even had her coffee? Nah.

How do I know her day doesn't start with Prozac? Or a call to a dying relative? Would I really dare to say I'd trade my battles for hers without even knowing what hers would be? Is she automatically luckier than I am, overall, just because she seems to be luckier in this one regard? Hell, maybe it's me who knows nothing.

It's just such a trite business now, women sniping at each other over this one's hair and that one's ass and the other one's obsession with her nails. I'm tired. Some of my friends are conventionally beautiful, and some of them aren't. Some of them are thin, and some of them aren't. Some of them are someone else's "I hate her." It gets us all nowhere, the epic battles left over from who felt stupid in gym class when we had to climb the rope -- not to mention who felt stupid in math class when we had to do problems at the board, or who felt awkward when she got boobs before everybody else.

Enough. I don't hate her. Among other things, there are few enough people I really like that I can't afford to rule anyone out for reasons that aren't entirely convincing. It's all about supply and demand.

I saw a comment somewhere the other day from somebody who was expressing frustration about the complicated march through fame of various diet schemes (no fat! no carbs! nothing but grapefruit! nothing cooked!). Her comment was that she was very tired of hearing about all of it, because in the end, as she put it, wasn't it just a matter of eating less and exercising more?

Now, my natural reaction is to flinch at that, because it's such an absurd oversimplification of everything, and it tends to discount a lot of very complex experiences that deserve more respect than that. Furthermore, it also tends to be followed by something that equates the simplicity of a task with the easy achievement of it. I mean, running a marathon is just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other until you reach the finish line; the fact that it's simple doesn't make it easy. Same with quitting smoking. It's as simple as never putting another cigarette in your mouth. Simple, not easy.

On the other hand, as much as I flinch at that description, it's also true in a particular sense, the realization of which, I think, was really important for me personally in figuring out how to do this after years and years of feeling unable to. Because here's the thing -- I think after a certain number of years of gnashing your teeth over your inability to accomplish something, particularly if it's been going on since you were a child or perhaps even as long as you can remember, you stop thinking of it as a regular, achievable, simple task.

It begins to feel like wish fulfillment, as if you would need a fairy godmother for it, or a wand, or at least some magic beans. (And no, soybeans do not count, even if you can make cars out of them or whatever the hell those smarty co-op types are always getting up to.) It begins to feel like it's not something you would ever actually do, it's something you pray will happen to you. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not suggesting that I ever became passive, sitting around hoping that lightning would strike and I would magically become thin without doing anything. I'm saying that I think I became discouraged to the point where I was sitting around waiting to turn into a different person who would be strong enough to work miracles that my regular self wasn't capable of.

You can lose track of the part where it's simple; where it's possible, I think. There's a sense in which the Mall of America is just a mall, you know? The Gap. Ritz Camera. Bath & Body Works. Casual Corner. It's a big mall, and it's an imposing mall, but for the most part, it's made up of stuff you've seen. And similarly, there's a sense in which changing what you eat and working out is life-altering and earth-shattering and forces you to take yourself apart and put yourself back together. But ina day-to-day sense, it's also . . . just changing what you eat and working out. Eat breakfast. Eat lunch. Eat dinner. Eat some other stuff if you feel like it. Go for a walk. You're done. There's nothing there that you can't do. It feels like there is, but there isn't.

This is where my anger about the gastric bypass surgery doctors come in. I'm not here to judge the surgery people, particularly on the basis that it's "the easy way out," because hell, losing much of my intestines doesn't sound easy to me, and neither do the accommodations you have to make afterwards. And for people who are appropriate candidates for it, if doctors want to present it as an option, that's fine. But promotion of surgery has become an opportunity for doctors -- medical professionals who should know better -- to get their names in the paper saying that the reason to have surgery is that fat people cannot lose weight any other way. Cannot. Not "it's hard," not "we're still exploring what works and what doesn't," not "it's uphill." Just plain "can't."

And that's wrong. I am here to tell you, I have lost over a hundred pounds and not gained it back, and I am not special. I mean, everybody likes to believe she's special, whatever, but in this sense? No. The hardest stuff to deal with has been, as I've said before, all of the nutty emotional nonsense that I unfortunately built up over twenty-five years of frustration and anxiety. That stuff was complicated. As far as the actual doing? Not easy -- very, very hard much of the time. But not complicated. Not easy . . . but simple.

Okay, try this as an experiment: Think about something you have in your kitchen that you could eat. Don't eat it, just think about it for about ten seconds. Close your eyes if necessary. Okay, did you do it? Did you think about it and choose not to eat it? Congratulations, you're following the Linda Plan. And I'm only partly being facetious. One of the biggest revelations to me was the "You're doing it right now" moment. I think I expected that for a big accomplishment, there would be enormous moments, like Rocky on the Art Museum steps or something. But there aren't very many of those. I mean, sure, you work out, and you get off the treadmill all sweaty, and yes, you have visions of yourself saving the world from . . . the Visigoths or the Vandals or whomever. But usually, it's not like that.

Look, you just had your dressing on the side. Look, you just had Cheerios for breakfast instead of a donut. Look, you just went to Starbucks and had the skim latte instead of the mocha and scone. Look, you just took the stairs. Look, you got on and off a step for a half-hour while you were watching part of What Not To Wear. You're doing it right now. That's it -- that's what it looks like. If I made up a photo album of this process in my own case, that's what it would look like. It would be, you know, pictures of me eating seven Triscuits instead of sitting in front of the TV with a box of Cheez-Its. Look, there I am with a beer and some baked tortilla chips. Look, there I am drinking water. Look, there I am Sweating to the Oldies. (Oh, yes. I did it. We'll talk about it another day. I beg you not to judge.)

It's really not that glamorous. It's not magical. And I don't say that in the insulting, condescending, "there is no magic bullet, lazy-ass, so take responsibility" kind of way. I say it in the "there's nothing there that you aren't perfectly capable of doing" kind of way.

I think it's healthy to think of the Mall of America as nothing but a string of retail shops that sell mostly the same stuff you can get anywhere else while still holding in your head the notion that it is a landmark, a big achievement, and very impressive when you first see it. Similarly, I think it's healthy to think of changing all of these habits as nothing but a series of really not very singularly significant decisions.

You're probably doing it right now.

If you were trying to learn Spanish, you'd understand that your progress was best measured by looking at a variety of factors, right? Your vocabulary, your reading comprehension, your ability to speak and be understood? You wouldn't stand there tracking the number of words you understood on the Spanish-language news broadcast that night and do all the math, and if you understood 46.7 percent tonight as compared to 47.2 percent last night, you wouldn't conclude that all your efforts were in vain and the enterprise was best abandoned, right? And you wouldn't conclude that you needed to spend $500 on Spanish immersion classes, right?

And yet.

I don't know how it works in other places, but Weight Watchers measures weights in 0.2 pound increments. So they'll tell you you're up 1.2, or down 2.4, or down 0.4, or whatever. It used to be, of course, that nobody tried to get any trickier than a half pound. No more. Someday, I'm sure, scales will go to four decimal places, so that they'll be able to tell you, "Congratulations, you lost 2.4337 pounds this week!" And I can equally guarantee you that someone will react to that development by saying, "But last week, I lost 2.4339 pounds! Why are my losses getting smaller? Why? WHY, WHY?"

And they won't want to hear the answer, which will be, "Because the underwear you wore this week was more linty."

Everyone's been to the weigh-in where you know you had some extra cookies . . . and that one day, Chinese food . . . and you never got off the couch . . . and there was some beer that never got counted. And then you step up. "Congratulations, you're down 1.6!" And you run away from the scale as quickly as possible, before it changes its mind. "Thankyouverymuch, Iwillbegoingnow."

That kind of unwarranted result is to be embraced. It is not irrational; it is whimsical. Just another wacky chapter in the Wacky Adventures of Shrinky-Girl! Sooooo funny!

Not like the other kind of week. You ate all your vegetables. You drank bathtubs full of water. On your birthday, you politely declined cake and had a bowl of antioxidant-rich berries. You worked out six times, and once, while on the elliptical trainer, you believe you saw God.

"Congratulations, you gained a pound!"

WHAAAAAAAAT?

It's surprising to me that the leaders who weigh people in don't wear full protective gear, like umpires.

Because yes, that will make you want to beat the living crap out of someone. You want your reward. You want your point. You want your pat on the head. Ah, those impish scale pixies, having their way with you again.

It is fear of the scale pixies that makes WW tell you not to weigh yourself more than once a week. They don't want you to hurt yourself banging your forehead against the towel bar in your bathroom every morning. But honestly, I think that if you can learn to handle it, it's not any worse to climb on the scale a lot than a little. Because if you do it a lot, you learn to look down at it and spit, "Yes, I'm sure I gained three pounds since lunch. Bite me."

Because it's true. It will go up for no reason, and it will go down for no reason. No -- it will. First of all, most scales aren't really awesome enough to reliably distinguish between 150.0 and 150.2. You're lucky if they can reliably distinguish between 150.0 and 151.2. And you drink and eat and digest and go to the bathroom all day and all week, and you wear different clothes, and there's nothing to be done about the fact that if you think all you're doing when you step on a scale is measuring your level of Bad Nasty Fat, you're going to find that it isn't the case.

There are a million things going on in terms of your body chemistry and composition when you change those habits, and only one of them is going to show up in that one number. That number doesn't tell you whether you got stronger, or your blood pressure went down, or your cholesterol improved, or you can walk farther without stopping than last week. It doesn't tell you if your arms got smaller, or if upping your yoga allowance has made you more intrinsically bendy.

Yes, eventually, it will go down. Gravity works, physics works . . . in all likelihood, it will eventually go down. If you take, let's say, a four-week moving average, that might tell you something. But one week? Pfft. Anticipating that drop of two pounds every single week is a good way to make yourself crazy, not to mention a good way to make yourself quit.

I just envision myself as a smoky Parisian jazz singer. "Zee scale, she goes up, she goes down . . . eet is very . . . how you say . . . mysteeerious. She is temperamental, unfaithful . . . she will make you cry weeeth sadness, make you shout weeeth joy . . . ah, zee scale." And then I just mutter, you know, "Sacre bleu," and have lunch.

I really didn't slack off for two weeks and gain a couple of pounds just to prove a point or set up this entry. But, you know, now that we're here.

Yeah, this happens, too. If you've done this for any period of time, you know this happens. Admittedly, not to everyone -- I know people who have gone a year without a day of slack, and I take my hat off to them. But I'm not like that, and I never have been. I go slack from time to time.

And the irony is that it's a core part of my . . . whatever, my whole Cow Code of Conduct . . . that when you lose your momentum, you don't freak out about it. You take a breath and you get going again, because honestly . . . what's your other choice? I believe this. I could embroider this on a pillow. It's heartfelt, and I live by it, because I've never achieved anything resembling perfect consistency. Sometimes I pull harder, and sometimes I just hang on. And sometimes, things slip just a little. I live with it.

But how do I feel when it happens? Oh, horrified. Angry and irritated. Tiny and embarrassed. The sense of accomplishment shrinks until I can't even see the six sizes of jeans I've already thrown away, because all I can see is the M&M cookie ten minutes ago. Why did I have the M&M cookie? I wasn't going to have the M&M cookie, and I had it, and now I don't know what's going on, and maybe I'm wrong about everything, and what if this all ends and I can't do it anymore and I gain it all back and everyone looks at me with pity again?

Yeah, you know . . . it's raw, that stuff. Not buried very deeply. Part of that is ice-up-the-spine fear, and part of it is leftover puffs of shame that can still waft off of some pretty well smothered embers. And the sickening irony -- the part that's so unfair that it can really twist me into knots -- is that those are the moments when it all really can go wrong, too. I mean, it makes no sense -- that's when you're desperate, right? That's when your motivation is supposed to be the highest. Fear of failure should be a wonderful source of drive. And it just doesn't work like that. It's more like the shaky feeling feeds on itself, and I feel weak and rotten and angry, and I can't get going. It's not like I sink into a fourteen-foot pile of Cheetos or anything, but unfortunately, the idea that you have to sink into a fourteen-foot pile of Cheetos in order to lose ground is one of those myths, the destruction of which turns out to be a mixed blessing.

Gaining a few pounds is unbelievably easy. And the more you lose, the easier it gets. I behaved rationally the entire time. There was really no mad scarfing of anything. It's really just a leeeettle bit of this over here, and a leeeettle bit of that over there, and all of a sudden, you realize that you are officially Not Doing Your Thing right now. And then you're in a position of not staying on track, but getting back on track, which is oh, so much worse.

I sometimes think the hardest skill to pick up has been spotting which things are important. Whether you have a bite of something that somebody offers you is usually not important. Getting the last smidgen of chicken skin off is usually not important. In fact, saying no to a special dinner on a special night for a special occasion is usually not important. But every once in a while, I know that something is important. And after two weeks, I saw that number on the scale creeeeeping up just slightly, and it was very clear to me, for whatever reason, that this particular point was important.

Because surprisingly enough, there is this voice now, and it tends to kick in at these moments, and it says something warm and supportive that goes approximately like this: "We are not doing this, do you hear me? We have eaten five thousand grilled chicken sandwiches, and we have had the dressing on the side, and we have gotten sweaty on purpose in the middle of July, and we have said 'No, thank you' when everybody else got to say 'Yes.' We have learned to live with lowfat ice cream, and we have taken the stairs, and we have had the baked potato instead of the mashed. And if you think we are drifting back to the point where we have to do all of that again just to get back to where we are now, you have lost your M&M-cookie-impaired mind, because if I have to stand over you with a whip and a chair, as God is my witness, you are not letting this go for one more day."

So that's what happened. It ended, and now it's fine. The points are counted, disaster has been averted, and I'm getting my feet under me again. I don't want to give the impression that I think going to hell in something of a dietary handbasket for two weeks is a good idea, or something that I advise. I'm not happy about it -- it's two more weeks of pulling I have to do all over again. It's a waste of work, not to mention a really hazardous maneuver, because once it's two weeks, you're swimming pretty hard just to get to shore, dry off, and get the water out of your ears.

I suppose that what I aim for is just to spot the important point earlier every time. Undoubtedly, there were stopping points -- points where I could have let that voice get a word in -- earlier in the game. Probably after a day. Undoubtedly after a week. Listen better next time, that's all. Hey -- when this used to happen, it would be, like, three months before I hauled my ass out of trouble.

It's strange, and maybe even foolish, but in the long run, when I'm thinking rationally, I don't worry about myself a whole lot anymore in this regard. That voice is too obnoxious. It's my inner pain in the ass, you know? It's that feeling of really . . . wanting something a lot, which is what you eventually learn to use as the the whip and the chair.

So I just keep going. By the way, I'm happy to say that at least the M&M cookies were really good.

So here, in no particular order, are my top ten choices for the most infuriating, nitwitty, knuckleheaded advice that I have run across -- in most cases, over and over and over again.

1. Want chocolate? Have a pickle!

No, people really say this, and things like it. The idea being that if you crave something sweet and you counter it with something salty, you'll kill the craving. I'm not saying this has never worked for anyone -- what I'm saying is that if it works, it's because you don't want the chocolate that much in the first place. If you really want the chocolate, the pickle isn't going to do anything except change your setting from "want chocolate" to "want chocolate, and am grumpy and irritable."

I am a great believer in learning to recognize real cravings in the "craving" sense rather than the "feel like it" sense, and then . . . well, giving in to them, within reason. There was a woman on the WW boards a week or two ago who posted this frantic plea, complete with many exclamation points, about how she was madly, insanely craving a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Blizzard from Dairy Queen. Couldn't stop thinking about it. Couldn't concentrate. Couldn't talk herself out of it. What, she asked should she do?

"Well, you could take a tablespoon of whipped peanut butter, and you could mix it with a cup of Fat-Free Cool Whip, and then . . . "

"Take three peanuts and split them in half and lay them carefully on the flat side of a Hershey's kiss, and then . . . "

"EAT THE FUCKING BLIZZARD."

Yeah, that last one was me. Because . . . are you kidding? It's a Blizzard. It's not a nuclear weapon. And honestly, she's had a Blizzard before if she's craving one that badly. She knows they're not THAT good. If they're driving her to distraction, I would personally advise eating one. Or eating half of one. Or eating three spoonfuls of one and throwing it in the trash. (I have done, roughly speaking, all of those things in similar circumstances.) And whatever plan she's following, count it for whatever it's worth. I find that a lot of the magic drains out of that stuff when you suck out the emotional sway it has over you when you're posting in all-caps on the internet about it.

Another example: There are people on those same message boards who will tell you that you can make a margarita from Diet Sprite, a tiny amount of lime juice, Crystal Light lemon-lime powder, and a tablespoon and a half of tequila. TWO POINTS, WOOOOOO!

Right. Two points. And it might even be tasty. But that is not a margarita. If you drink something that is mostly Diet Sprite, and you expect it to be a margarita, you will wind up wanting to beat the crap out of someone. Don't take yourself there. Have the margarita or have the spiked Diet Sprite, but they're not the same thing. Better to get yourself accustomed to the fact that you can only have a margarita once in a while, I believe, than to have a sad imitation every day and tell yourself it's the same thing.

2. If you find yourself tempted to eat, take off all your clothes and stare at yourself in the mirror, and think about whether you reeeeeeally want to eat.

Yes, that's brilliant. Because what you ought to encourage someone to do when she's trying to climb out of a pit of despair is to embrace her disgust with herself and poach in it like a salmon fillet. Great plan. Hate Yourself Thin in 30 Days.

Sure, you can call this some weird form of "accountability," but to me, it's gratuitous and cheap, sort of the porn of self-loathing. And in addition to the corrosive effects of self-loathing generally, I think it's safe to say that the one thing that fifty years of this kind of advice have conclusively proved is that self-loathing is the one thing that we can safely say is ineffective. Shame has been tried. Scolding has been tried. What else have you got?

3. You should want to lose weight only for pure, noble, warm-hearted reasons. Never be angry. Never want to please anyone.

Okay, this is where we discuss the seven deadly sins.

Sloth and gluttony are kind of not helpful, I will grant you. The other five, however, are valuable tools in my personal arsenal, and I use them regularly. Pride? Obviously. Envy? Yep. Lust? Um . . . heh. Anger? Done it. Greed? Please. Heard anything about the differences in pay between fat people and thin people recently? That's five deadly sins that are on your side and only two that are working against you. With odds like that, there's nothing to do except embrace sin, within reason.

I mean, yes, for the most part, my motivations are pure. I want health, I want control, I want blah blah blah. Much of the time, I'm hippy-skippy-productive-positive-thinking girl about all of this. But if what it takes on a particular day is concentrating really hard on how much I want to stick it to some piece of shit who yelled an insult at me out of a goddamn car window in 1994 because I had the audacity to walk down the street? Then on that day, that's what it takes. My subconscious mind certainly isn't polite about the crap it sometimes tosses out to mess with me; I might as well throw everything I've got back.

4. A great person to go to for advice is your doctor.

This one is tricky. For some people, who have some doctors, this is actually very good advice. But it's also very perilous advice, because unfortunately, there remain a certain number of completely clueless doctors, and they are some of the worst people you can possibly talk to.

When I was in eighth grade, I went on my own initiative to see our family doctor, who had been taking care of me for so long that my file at his office said "Baby Linda." He's the one who "put [me] on a diet" when I was eight, and he's also the one who later put me on the shakes. But anyway, I went to see him, which required pretty much all of the resolve I had when I was that age, and I told him that I wanted to lose weight. I just went totally belly-up and asked him for help, which was . . . oy, embarrassing, sort of, and incredibly uncomfortable, and . . . I mean, I was in eighth grade, you know? Hard time.

Anyway, he stepped out of the office for a minute, and I heard him across the hall talking about me to the nurse -- who was a really nice lady, actually. And this is what I heard him say, in a voice dripping with skepticism: "Well, she says she wants to do something about this." And then he came back into the office, and he was carrying a little yellow booklet with black letters on it. "I just love this," he said with a bitter chuckle. "The title of this just says it all." He handed it to me, and the title was, Are You Really Serious About Losing Weight?

Sigh. No. No, Dr. Dumb-Ass, I'm not serious. I'm just kidding around. You know us fourteen-year-old fat girls and the great time we're having about it. Don't mind us, we'll just be over here stuffing our faces with bonbons in a carefree fashion, as you know we are wont to do.

Jerk.

5. Be "Really Serious About Losing Weight."

Yeah. Dr. Dumb-Ass's little book brings me to my next point, which is that with all the really difficult, really complicated old stuff that you have to slog through when you're doing this, it's really easy -- and really deadly -- to lose your sense of humor. I don't think anyone does anything for life that feels like drudgery. If I let myself become grim and unhappy about it, all contemplation and no fun, then I start to get antsy and want to quit.

You just have to get your chin up off the floor. People who do this with some slump-shouldered, miserable, lip-biting mentality are doomed. I'm not sure what expression I used to wear while taking my daily walk in the tunnels under the Capitol complex in St. Paul, listening to Tina Turner singing "River Deep, Mountain High" when there was nobody within a hundred yards of me, but suffice it to say I am fairly sure it was not "grudging." I mean . . . it's Tina Turner, people. There was shimmying. And technically speaking, it was for my health.

6. Eat to live, don't live to eat.

Okay, I despise this little saying, and I'll tell you why. First of all, the fact that you look at a fat person and assume that they live to eat is a pile of judgmental bullshit. Even at my heaviest, I had friends, I was in school, I loved my family, I loved music, I was writing . . . I was unhappy a lot, and I had a lot of bad habits, but I wasn't living to eat, dipshits.

Furthermore, that "eat to live" thing kind of makes it sound like you should subtract the entire joyful or pleasant experience of food and think of it as, basically, vitamins. That will not work. People like eating good food. You don't have to be an American-ified, McDonalds-eating, sofa-surfing testament to empty calories to enjoy food. And you certainly don't have to become, for lack of a better term, a medicinal eater in order to lose weight. What crap. The best thing I have made at home in the last year, probably, was an absolutely perfectly seared piece of salmon that I did in my very own cast iron skillet. It was absolutely awesome. I don't suffer, believe me. My own experience suggests that plunging yourself into that anti-tasty-food attitude just sends you back on the cycle of "cheating" and "repenting" and a lot of other bad-news behaviors that you can't sustain.

7. Pretend you are adopted.

Okay, I admit I have heard this advice only once, but it is here to represent an entire list of pieces of bad advice found in a book that I read over and over (and over) again in junior high, which was called The Woman Doctor's Diet For Teenage Girls. The part of the book I hated the most (aside from the part where she said you shouldn't wear your hair curly, because one of her patients came in that way once and "looked like a fat Little Orphan Annie doll" -- yes, this was a doctor) was her list of "excuses" and "responses."

They were like this:

Dieting is boring.
Being thin is exciting!

I was meant to be fat; my mother was fat.
Pretend you are adopted.

Seriously, that was her answer. "Pretend you are adopted." Not "yes, you may have a predisposition, but where you are in the range is up to you," or anything like that. Just "pretend you are adopted."

I read that book until it fell apart. I remember how she said that you should come home after school and, if you feel hungry, go for a walk and then open a window. Open a window? I remember how she said that it may be reasonable to consider surgery if you're 100 pounds overweight, because someone may lose "20, 30, even 40 pounds," but that's about it, and they'll still be fat. I remember how she told about her friend the doctor who would test girls to see whether they were overweight by throwing them over his shoulder and seeing whether he got a pain in his groin. She thought that was really great. I find myself a little more skeptical. I mean, Dr. He-Man gets a hernia and you wind up on bread and water.

My point is only that the worst advice is no advice -- it's the "fuck you, loser" advice, which is basically what that entire book was. (Be sure the read the reviews on Amazon; fortunately, I am not the only one to have noticed the problems with this book in retrospect.)

8. The Sacred Trinity.

No, no, not that sacred trinity. This sacred trinity: Celery. Cottage cheese. Melba toast.

I totally get the use of celery as an aromatic -- in a recipe like a stew, with onions and carrots. Other than that, the persistence of these three foods in the Diet Hall of Fame utterly mystifies me. I mean, they're mostly gone now, and that's a good thing. And yes, there are devotees of celery and peanut butter, or of cottage cheese and peaches.

But seriously, this is the part where I briefly become Jerry Seinfeld, because . . . what is with cottage cheese? And has anyone ever eaten Melba toast? How did Melba toast become famous? Was this before Saltines? I mean, granted, it predated reduced-fat Triscuits and many of my other ubiquitous snacks, but how bad can things have been?

And celery . . . I mean, I understand the raw vegetable thing. I do. But . . . baby carrots, you know? At least they taste like something, and they have nutritional value. Celery? Crunchy water. Iceberg lettuce sticks. Shut up, celery.

9. Television is the devil.

Yeah. It's killing me.

10. Think about how great you'll feel about yourself . . . later.

This one is always really well-intentioned. It's also wrong.

I really wish I had been keeping a better journal at the time I started this whole thing in earnest, because I no longer can really put myself in that place -- such long odds, such a long way to go, none of the little day-to-day rewards I get now with getting into littler clothes and gaining confidence and getting praise and so forth. I mean, it's hard now. I think sometimes about what I did then, and I think . . . that, by far, is the thing that I've done that I'm most proud of, is the first day. People started to congratulate me a lot later, but if you want to know when I had my Rocky Balboa moment, it was then. It's not easy now, but it's easier. Then? Good grief. With the news stories telling you how bad your chances are, and the scale staring back at you like, "Oh, RIGHT," and how stupid you feel trying to walk or get on and off of a step in the living room (what I used to affectionately refer to as "the hamster wheel") when you feel so . . . well, ungainly . . . that's hard. And when I say hard, I'm saying . . . hard.

So I wish they'd tell you, you know . . . don't imagine how good you're going to feel. Just go ahead and feel good now. Every day on the hamster wheel is a day you've already won.

I usually hate being all meta, blogging about the blog and so forth, and I promise it will almost never happen, but there are things that have to be said.

We've been live for . . . two and a half days, basically. And they have been, no fooling, some of the greatest and most gratifying days a girl ever had.

Three remarkable things happened on my first day in the new digs over here, just in terms of getting underway. First, I got linked by Pam. Second, I got linked (Site of the Week! Booty dance!) by Put Down The Donut. (If you read F&D, Joelle from PDTD is the same Joelle from BlogMoxie who did my site redesign over there -- see how it all fits together?) Third, I got linked by Lose the Buddha. Between those three links and a bunch of others, a mondo quantity of traffic was driven here that has much more to do with other people's work than with mine, and which is by far the most enjoyable and most motivating way to start a new project. So I thank all the excellent folks who threw me a link or have added me to their blogrolls. On the web, probably more directly than anywhere else, you genuinely stand on the shoulders of other people's work and reputations, and it's kind of like a little vote of confidence when people put their support behind you, so . . . you rule.

And to those of you who left comments . . . wow. Just, really, thank you so much. Not just for all your kind words, although they are overwhelmingly kind, but for your thoughtful and thought-provoking additions to the discussion. I am all kinds of humbled and moved and floored by your tales, and I seriously hope you're going to keep sharing them.

On the administrative side: Yes, I'm working on what kinds of notice there will be of updates. I'll keep you posted -- there'll be a way to keep track.

I also realized I never really told you who I am, figuring you'd all be coming from places where you already knew me, which hasn't turned out to be the case, quite. So for what it's worth, I'm Linda, and I also write here and here, and I'm partly an attorney and partly a freelance writer.

And now that we've discussed inspiration and given thanks, we will move on to the matter of cheese.

I was asked in the comments:

If you don't mind indulging reader questions, tell me the truth: does nonfat cheese taste like ass?

Yes, nonfat cheese tastes like ass. More specifically, nonfat cheese has all the flavor of wax, but with the enticing texture of partially melted Saran Wrap. I realize, of course, that the transitive property would tend to suggest that I am kind of accusing your ass of tasting like wax, which I am so not. I'm sure your ass tastes much better than wax. (That sentence is in there just to generate weird Google hits, by the way, not that I won't get them from having "cow" in the title.) And both your ass and wax actually taste better than nonfat cheese.

Admittedly, I cannot claim to have tried every sort of nonfat cheese there is. It's entirely possible that out there somewhere, there is a nonfat cheese that might remind you of cheese, particularly if you were drunk. If there is, I humbly bow down to its genius. But the nonfat cheeses I have actually tried have been unfailingly vile. Not just unsatisfying -- I'm saying vile. I'm saying the fact that you can still get nonfat cheese strikes me as a failure of capitalism.

In my opinion, the only people who should use nonfat cheese are people who (1) want to make something that looks like it contains cheese or is topped with cheese; (2) want to feel confident that it has no fat in it; and (3) intend to throw whatever it is away rather than actually eating it or, needless to say, serving it to anyone they like.

Oddly, nonfat cheese specifically lacks every quality that actual cheese contains. It does not (1) taste like cheese; (2) have fat; (3) melt; (4) combine with anything else; or (5) form strings that stretch across your chin. There's an argument to be made that objectively, it is not cheese, with the only opposing arguments being that it (1) comes shredded in a bag; and (2) often has a distinctly unnatural orange hue. You'll notice that those two qualities are not associated with your high-end products from Italy to begin with. Equally oddly, the closest thing I've ever seen to nonfat cheese that approximates what it's supposed to be is nonfat wrapped slices -- you know, the Singles you put on a grilled cheese sandwich. And they are successful, I suspect, because what they are mimicking is sort of not cheese, either.

Want to see something really funny? Look at this. It's a recipe for pizza that uses shredded cheese without any fat in it, meaning that it will come out, at best, like it's topped with tangled shoelaces. And then it says, "The Recommended Wine Is: Beaujolais." Because you wouldn't want to serve the wrong wine with your nonfat cheese. Chablis does not go with shoelaces, you silly thing! People might think you are not chic. Mon dieu! I'm telling you right now, that Beaujolais is not helping the "Mexican Pizza" unless you drink the entire bottle by yourself.

Note that this is not to speak ill of reduced-fat cheese, which I use constantly. I am particularly partial to the Kraft 2% bags. I realize they do not give you a restaurant-quality cheese experience or anything, but . . . I mean, at least they remind me of cheese.

But in many cases, I'd rather just have reduced-volume cheese. There's real Parmesan in my fridge, as there is at all times, but I never do anything but grate it -- it's not like I eat a block of Parmesan for dinner. (Though that sounds kind of good.) There's also, in that fridge, some kind of creamy wedge of genuine something that's very good and very soft that I bought at Whole Foods and haven't gotten around to eating with an apple yet, although I probably will. And because it's so good, I will nibble at it and feel divine and wallow in my sparingly decadent glory.

If I may draw an analogy, I will compare the cheese issue to the syrup issue. The cat is basically out of the bag at this point that there's nothing wrong with eating pancakes or waffles for breakfast, especially if they're whole-grain and you eat them individually, rather than by the stack. But the syrup, in large amounts, can really put a dent in your day. For some people, the sugar-free syrups or the "lite" syrups are the answer, because they like their pancakes goopy, and a trickle of real maple syrup is going to ruin breakfast. I, on the other hand, prefer the trickle of regular, as every "lite" pancake syrup I have ever tried has been genuinely nasty. Don't even get me started on the ones with artificial butter flavoring. (Shudder.)

I'm not making myself out to be a picky connoisseur of some kind -- I'm not proud with things where I don't care that much. I eat Boca burgers and the apparent oxymoron known as "meatless sausage," and I even have been known to snack on fat-free hot dogs. Many of you would sooner die. Give you Jimmy Dean, or give you death. And I understand.

And that's how I feel about nonfat cheese. It has nothing to offer me. I would, quite frankly, rather just lick my own arm. Because my own arm tastes much better than wax.

**SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT**

Before you go, it just occurred to me that there are a bunch of people here who got here from WW boards or PDTD, and who don't move in the same DHAK circles that I so often do, and who might therefore never have seen Operation Find Don. If you haven't, go read it. He's just gotta be out there. Since Pam just found her old friend Kenya, I have new hope that one day, Sars will find Don. Thanks!

"ARE YOU CALLING YOURSELF A COW?"

Well, no.

"I AM TRYING TO LOSE WEIGHT! I HAVE ENOUGH SELF-ESTEEM ISSUES AS IT IS! ARE YOU CALLING ME A COW?"

Of course not.

About the title

The story is that at some point, I stumbled across a quote from Harvey MacKay, who is, unfortunately, a business motivational speaker. He said this:

It doesn't matter how much milk you spill, as long as you don't lose the cow.

Because Harvey, even though he probably endorses thinking outside the box and numerous other concepts I despise, has hit it right on the head. The only thing -- the only thing -- that will sink your ass is quitting. I have news for you about people who have lost big-time amounts of weight and not gained it back: They don't go balls-out all the time. To a person, everyone I know who has had success in this particular arena knows how to say, "And then I had a gigantic piece of Extended Screaming Orgasm Chocolate-Peanut-Whipped-Cream Pie, which was really, really, really good. And then it was the next day, and for breakfast, I had Cheerios."

It's easy to get really austere about the whole thing. You can always tell when people are offended by food. They look at donuts with . . . suspicion, sort of. It used to be the fat-gram people. "That has 80 grams of fat." "Thank you. It's a bacon burger and fries, so . . . right." Now, as you know, it is the carb people.

No offense, carb people

I don't mean to slag the carb people, because . . . damn, I don't fault anybody who's doing something. It's the same thing with the gastric bypass thing. If you do surgery, then . . . that's a rough road, and I wish you nothing but luck.

And actually, as I said once before, I have a lot of ambivalence about even getting into this, for precisely this reason. Hell, I don't have answers. I still eat Cheez-Its for dinner on occasion. But this past Saturday, when I was leaving my Weight Watchers meeting (more on this at some point), I was getting into my car when this lady stopped me and said this:

You're my inspiration, you know.

But tongue-in-cheek or not, it's hard for me to even explain what it means to have someone tell you that you inspire them to succeed at something when, for the first twenty-five years of your life, you pretty much constructed your entire identity around failing at it. It's nothing more or less than that. I wish I were kidding about the "whole identity" thing. But I'm not. And that's what she and I got talking about.

We were doing the thing, as you do, where you pick people's brains about what works for them and how they think about things, and I got to trying to explain about how I sat at the same point for probably two years after getting really close to that hundred mark, and how I eventually figured out that I was kind of . . . blocked. And that was when I figured out the thing I said up there about constructing your identity around failing at something and then appearing to be successful at it, and the fact that depending on how complicated and goofy your mind is, you're going to fight yourself about it.

Shaking your booty

To really understand this chapter of my particular tale, you should hear an earlier chapter, which is that when I was a senior in high school, I did that shake-taking regimen that Oprah did. Remember? How she lost 90 pounds or whatever, and came out in her Calvins and everybody cheered with yellow pompoms, and she brought out the little red wagon full of fat? I did that same thing. Nothing but shakes, three or four times a day (four, I think), for twelve weeks. God, those things were gross. I could stomach the orange ones dissolved in Diet Sprite -- I'm pretty sure that's what I had most often. The chocolate ones I found kind of horrifying. The vanilla ones were acceptable with cinnamon. But overall, they were really disgusting. Pasty, chalky, nasty little fuckers. Twelve weeks, and I never broke. Didn't have a bite, didn't have a taste, didn't lick a spoon. And the particular twelve weeks that I chose included Halloween, my birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's. Not one bite. It was the year I turned eighteen.

And, like Oprah, I lost all this weight, and then, like Oprah, I gained it all back. And then, just for fun, a bunch more stacked on top of it. The best comparison I can really offer you, as melodramatic as it sounds, is Flowers for Algernon. You get this reprieve, and it's like visiting the Promised Land, and it's really exciting. Girls who used to snort at you in third grade come up and say, "Oh, I just admire you soooooooo much!" You want to tell them to go fuck themselves, but you don't. Because you used to be a loser, and now you are a winner, and you're much too busy hungrily sucking up the affirmation to notice that you kind of haven't learned anything, in that you're still obsessing over and fetishizing what you eat and how you look. And then, much faster than even seems possible, it just gets away from you. You've run your metabolism down to a pitiful limp, you've taught yourself to be scared of eating (scared! of eating!), and you still don't really know anything about yourself except where you are with this one thing. And I could try to tell you how heartbreaking it was when it didn't take, for me and (I'm sure) all the people who loved me, but anything I said would fall painfully short.

But, as I was telling this woman on Saturday, I remain extremely glad that I did it. I think it was absolutely critically important that I did that. Because here's what I took away from that experience: Weakness is apparently not the issue. And it started to kind of bug me, in the way that my brain is analytical and ponderous. Because when you first got poked in the belly by a disapproving doctor at the age of eight, for fuck's sake, by the time you're fifteen or sixteen, you have a very well-developed theory of yourself, and it goes like this: I suck. I'm weak. No (and here's my least favorite phrase ever) will power.

You know all those jokes? You know what the greatest exercise is? Pushing yourself away from the table. Oh, har har. When I was growing up, it was just kind of an accepted thing everywhere you went that the issue was merely lack of will. Oh, toughen up. Oh, quit being so self-indulgent. Oh, quit being so weak.

And then I went twelve weeks without eating, so that theory was pretty well demolished. Iron will? Yeah, I got that.

How I was ahead of Dr. Phil

So I'm sitting around thinking, "What the hell am I doing? Why am I not changing this stupid thing about myself if I obviously can and I obviously want to?" I got this inspiration, and it went like this: You're using it for something. It was the only explanation. Now, understand, this was before Dr. Phil started telling everybody the whole "you do it because it works" thing, which is the same theory. But those were the words in my head: You're using it for something.

Now, all of the details of my thought process are probably a little too personal and a little more than you need to know, but it boils down to this: Why would you expect that it would be easy to give up something about yourself that's defined you all your life in your own mind? It was absurdly obvious, once I started to think about it. At some point, I realized that I had literally no idea what I would be like if I were abruptly transported into, like, an athlete's frame. I couldn't imagine it. Could not imagine. And it's dumb, because everybody has a personality, and everybody has things about them, and I was not in fact defined by what I looked like, but that's how much it had started to crowd out everything else in my head.

Of course I was using it for something. I was using it to stay myself.

Ahhhhhh. *Ding!* It's not like that has ended the struggling, but it gave me an entirely, totally different perspective on it. People will tell you it's because you don't "want it enough." Oh, I wanted it enough. The problem is that it took a while to figure out that there was an equal and opposite sense in which I didn't want it.

The inevitable extended and tortured metaphor

As I explained it in this conversation on Saturday, it's like trying to win a tug-of-war, and you pull as goddamn hard as you can, and you don't make any progress at all. And it seems like you should be able to do it, but you just don't. And when you seek advice, you get the same piece most of the time: "Pull harder. You're not pulling hard enough."

Gee, thanks.

Or "Pull like this. You're holding the rope wrong." "No, no, pull like this. Stand with your feet like this." "Put this stuff on your hands." "For six easy payments of $19.95, we can teach you how to pull even harder." "Pull harder, goddammit, what are ya, a sissy?"

Yeah. Here's the advice you don't get, that you should get:

1. Tie the rope to something secure.
2. Walk along the rope until you find the other end.
3. There will be a guy standing there. Kick the shit out of him.

I'm serious. It's not just about pulling harder. Well -- that's not quite right. It's about pulling hard. I pull hard every day. There's iron will involved, most definitely. Without a measure of that, you're going nowhere. But when you're pulling really hard and you don't know what the hell is wrong, find what's at the other end of the rope. That's what I mean about fighting yourself about the loss of your identity -- that's what it was in my particular case; yours might be different.

I think part of the problem is that historically, the other end of the rope has been understood to be something like "how much you like cookies," which is bullshit. Like it's how valiant of a person you are versus your urge for mashed potatoes. Ridiculous.

Now, like I said, it's not that those things aren't in play. I've given up stuff I like, or at least given up having it frequently. I've dragged my ass out for walks or aerobic what-have-you when I have not felt like it. That plain old bad-ass brute-force engine I used to skip Thanksgiving and Christmas, I still use every day. The difficulty is that iron will and fiendish determination are necessary but not sufficient conditions for losing a substantial amount of weight.

It's also not that there aren't people for whom tightening up their habits and pulling a little harder are pretty much all it takes. When I see people who are like, "Oh, I gained twenty pounds after I had a baby and started being stuck in the house all day," that's a different phenomenon. I'm really talking about the lifelong-struggle people.

And I do think that for those people, a lot of the time, there's something else at the other end of the rope. It's about protecting yourself, or knowing that your boyfriend loves you for your mind, or sharing something with your mother or your best friend or whoever . . . something, you know? When I say there isn't enough advice about looking for root causes, I'm not saying you don't get counseling-types who tell you that you have to learn that food isn't love -- that shit is so condescending and ridiculous. I'm not a dimwit; I never believed that a cookie replaced boys. That's . . . not really worth dignifying, and it's a really insulting pile of crap to lay on people.

But in the end, the thing is, it's still on you. The only one who's going to get up, follow the rope, and do the ass-kicking is you. Just because it's not "pull harder" doesn't mean it's not you. And it's weird, and hard, and disorienting, and you might have to rip out a lot of your internal architecture to get there, because the entire reason you're pulling so hard and not getting anywhere is that the guy at the other end of the rope is no cupcake.

The good part of it being all on you, though, is that it's one of the most satisfying accomplishments you can own, I think. It's not like I don't love my friends and my family, and it's not like I don't appreciate them for being really supportive, and it's not like I don't appreciate the Weight Watchers people and whatnot, because I do. But you know, there's really ultimately nothing anybody except you can do on this particular issue. Your behavior is the sum total of your decisions, and when you're pleased with them? That's good, and it's yours, and it means something.

So ANYWAY

Yeah, so I told her a lot of this, about the rope and things, and she was really insistent that I remember it and talk about it at one of the meetings some morning. So I got to thinking . . . Well, I write, and I have space, and I know how to throw a weblog up in about ten minutes, so since my brain has already spent ten years figuring this all out, I might as well make some notes, in case someone finds them useful.

So that's what I'm doing. Making some notes.

Now here's what I'm not here to do: Give you constant progress updates. If you're looking for one of those "Down 1.8 this week!!!!" journals, this is not one. I am also not here to argue about Atkins or surgery, at least not right now. Maybe later. But this has been a major project in my life, and I've learned some interesting stuff, both profound (see tortured metaphor, above) and less profound (the fine line between good and evil is well-represented by the fine line between reduced-fat cheese and nonfat cheese), and I'm going to write some of it down.

Plus, it's possible that I will give you my margarita recipe, which I am proud to tell you has 10 points, and therefore is saved for Friday nights at the end of successful weeks, since my FlexPoints reset on Saturday. (Some of you completely understand this paragraph; the rest of you, we'll talk about it later.)