The Weight Loss Olympics

If there were a Weight Loss Olympics, I'd have a hundred gold medals around my neck.

If we look long enough, that's a ice cream cone.

Shakes 'n' Bars - I invented the Figurines & Tab diet.

Prefab Plan - I went long, assembling my meals from those frozen dinner boxes.

Sports enhancing drugs - You don't test for Dexatrim, do you?

The Calorie Count - Once upon a time, I could eyeball a whole meal and get within 50 calories.

Leaving it in the training room - Ninety minutes a day, floor calisthenics and aerobic machine, every goldurn day for years.

Portion sizing - My palm, my scale, my doll-sized plates.

Starvation Marathon - Five days with nothing but water and B complex pills. Bring it!

In this contest, you win... by losing. And I was a winner. I lost and lost and lost and lost. But the weight always came back, with friends.

That is because I was not addressing the actual problem. The actual problem was that my metabolism was not designed to handle the flood of carbohydrates the "nutritional experts" were pushing on me. I'm a bright girl, I do system processing, and I actually did put together low fat meals with lots of healthy whole grains which fit within their calorie guidelines. And exercised. A lot.

But as I neared forty, the stupid weight started creeping up again... and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't exercise enough, or eat as little, as my body apparently wanted in order to not gain weight. So I did.

It doesn't matter how much we apply ourselves if we aren't doing it right.

Clueless Eating

I used to follow Pasta Queen, a funny writer who lost half her body weight, then wrote a book, Half-Assed: A Weight-Loss Memoir, which I also read and enjoyed.

Funny thing: she did exactly what everyone gets told to do to lose weight. She got overweight by relying on packaged food, mindlessly eating while watching television, and being clueless about portion sizes. She started cooking, and exercising, and "watching what she ate." She published her memoir and closed up her weight loss blog and moved on.

So some people do have a weight problem because of what we might term "clueless eating." I was wandering through the web, got to wondering how on earth people really could lose weight on Nutrisystem, and wound up killing an evening by reading hundreds of reviews on a dozen different sites. There were people quite successful on Nutrisystem and loved it and wished they could do it again except it's so expensive, and they are basically this:

It's about portion control and I can eat anything I want I just have to stick with the system and I learned so much like how to make a salad and that you can figure out what hungry really is like I thought when my belly started hurting I should stop but it's not like that at all!

So yes, these poor folks were Clueless Eaters; so clueless, in fact, that they cannot go through the supermarket and assemble their own Nutrisystem for much cheaper just by tossing those Lean Cuisine & Weight Watcher boxes into their cart and doing some simple math to add those marked calories up to 1200 a day and they're done.

I don't know why they can't do that. I could do it with real food, in my sleep, at fifteen. Some people do that and it works and all's well and they can't understand people, like me, who can't seem to do that at all so it must be my fault I am deficient in some way.

But since my problem wasn't Clueless Eating, it didn't work.