Free The Weight-loss Diaries by Courtney Rubin Page B

lost weight: six pounds (four pounds the first week and two the second). But I want so badly to look like I have that it seems all I do is second-guess myself. Am I doing enough exercise? Have I misread a serving size and therefore accidentally been eating too much? Would I lose weight faster if I left the carefully measured teaspoon of olive oil off my salad and just used balsamic vinegar? Is the Zone really the way to go—should I maybe 35
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    The Weight-Loss Diaries
    attempt to follow it while still following Peeke’s and Nancy’s advice? Heck, is that even possible?
    At one point, I’m so stressed out by whether I’m doing enough and whether the nutritional advice I’m listening to at the moment is the one I should be listening to—not to mention stressed by a bunch of deadlines—
    that I nearly cram a chocolate-caramel cluster into my mouth without thinking. The fierceness of my reflex to eat one—and then another two or three—is so intense that I literally catch my breath. For some reason I think of a postcard I once saw on one of those free-card kiosks: “A moment of hes-itation is all it takes to miss the boat.” If I could just pause for a moment, maybe this urge to eat would pass.
    But how to pause—to shut my brain off from the endless debate of
    whether and what and how much I should eat, or what I can eat without anyone commenting? I know it sounds hokey, but I take a deep breath and try to figure out what I really want, chocolate-caramel cluster aside. In this case, it’s someone to do the crummy parts of my job, leaving me just the good bits.
    It comes to me in what feels like a brilliant, lucid flash: I want to eat because I don’t feel like doing what I have to do today and the rest of this week . It seems so self-evident that I can’t believe it’s taken this long to occur to me. But how could it have? I was always too busy stuffing down unpleasant or scary thoughts—do I need a new job? what if I can’t find one? what if I’m totally unsuited to this profession and just haven’t figured it out?—by eating.
    To complicate matters, I also want to eat because I might eat later. No kidding. This is the problem with planning—this endless thinking about what food problems might come up over the next day or week makes me feel as though I’m constantly about to fail. I picture myself on a racetrack knock-ing over hurdles instead of sailing gracefully over them, except in my mind the hurdles aren’t made of wood—they’re just giant treats à la Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. This week’s problem-that-I-have-to-think-about-yet-don’t-want-to is that I have to do all these sports bar reviews, and bars are hardly diet friendly. Even if I sit around drinking Diet Coke, I’m still going to have to at least look at the menu. How else am I going to be able to go back to the office and write up the bars with cringe-inducing sentences like, “If your team is losing, the Fred Flintstone–sized plate of nachos ($5.95) is a good distraction”? And looking at the menu means contemplating the options, which means . . . well, usually not anything good.
    More alien to me than regular exercise or sandwiches stuffed with Boca Burgers and vegetables (which I’m already getting sick of ) is all the planning
    The Rest of Month 1 (January)
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    required in making these lifestyle changes. After all, I’m the kind of person who pulls all-nighters and then ends up on vacation without toothpaste or underwear because I’ve packed fifteen minutes before heading to the airport.
    But now I’ve got challenges that caffeine and convenience stores won’t solve, since you can’t leave five workouts to do until Sunday night or hope to make a healthy dinner out of cupcakes from the CVS snack aisle. Now I go to the grocery store once a week—me, whose refrigerator once held only leftover Chinese food, if that—and sketch out my meals for