Posts, Interrupted

Is it possible that after at least seven (temporarily) successful diets, hours of obsessing, hundreds of journal pages, a few dozen articles and a book on the subject that now that I’m on my eighth diet I have finally run out of things to say?

Hmmm. Probably not. (Though whether I still have interesting things to say – if indeed I ever had them – is another story.)

I lost 8 pounds this week, though don’t think I managed to diminish my own joy in that by (a) agonizing about whether I’d really lost anything because my “start” weight was from an evening weigh-in, and (b) every time I went to the bathroom today, noticing new things about my body I didn’t like, and kicking myself for not noticing/paying more attention to them on the way up.

I started several posts this week: One about my surprise in finding, after all these years of diet-reading and article-writing, one point on Tescodiets.co.uk that I hadn’t already come across: “If the bread isn’t worth it without butter, then why bother?” Another was a whiny one about how dieting is like fact-checking – you rarely get credit for the things you do correctly, but the few things you get wrong definitely come back to haunt you. (This was about my fear that though I’d passed up chocolate eggs and dessert as Easter lunch, I’d still had a couple of other indulgences.) A third was about how frustrating it is – and how frustrated I am with myself –to have gotten to this point again, and for the fact that no matter how well things go in the next few weeks and months, I will still be overweight for events for which I wish I wasn’t.

Why didn’t I finish any of the posts? I’m not really sure. Although I’ve had my usual first-week-of-the-diet endless calculating of what weight and size I might be by what date, I have not had my usual first-week-of-diet “having a diet is incompatible with having a social life” grumpiness. I’m not sure how – and I’m sure future posts may deal with trying to distill the essence – but I haven’t obsessed about the food this week. Buying hummus and fruit, packing lunch – it’s been more like brushing my teeth, as in, no matter what else is going on in my life, I do it.

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I’ve got miles to go before I sleep tonight, as I’m running the bureau through the close of the magazine early tomorrow morning. (Maybe that’s why I didn’t finish the posts – too much to do...) Running the bureau is like babysitting, only the kids are a whole lot less cute and the parents (editors) are a whole lot more demanding.

Fingers crossed that there are no arrivals from Planet Zorg, or, um, Namibia between now and about 6 a.m. EST…