Advice from a small town girl

It’s the same old song. “Second verse same as the first; a little bit louder and a little bit worse!”

I had to shop for bigger clothes last week, because I have regained all but 2 of the 20 pounds I lost last year. And still I don’t stop eating as if all food may vanish from the planet tomorrow.

My feet hurt. My right knee seems to have decided to punish me for all the years of abuse. My cholesterol just topped out at 234. It’s hard to get moving. It’s hard to keep moving. Sometimes it’s hard just to breathe.

What was I thinking?

Oh, that’s right; I wasn’t.

When my youngest niece was about three and visiting my home in Portland, I remember her sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the television, watching cartoons. Virtually every time a commercial came on, she would say, “I NEED that!” It wasn’t “go get that for me” or “I want one of those.” It was “I NEED that.”

That’s my brain when it sees a box of Girl Scout cookies, a roll of Ritz crackers or a chunk of Tillamook cheddar. I NEED that. I’ve just about arrived at the conclusion that this is unfixable.

Just about.

Lots of people (who seem to want all my money) have offered solutions to this problem.

They lie.

Well, maybe they don’t exactly lie, it’s just that the only program that works is the one you can stick with.

And I apparently haven’t found that one yet.

I like to think that I’m very knowledgeable about weight loss. But maybe that’s because I focus on the science, not the magic.

I have a tendency to remember, when I see a Nutrisystem or Jenny Craig commercial, that someday I’ll have to prepare my own meals.

And when tempted by meal replacement plans, I tend to remember that reducing your caloric intake to under a thousand calories per day will in all probability permanently damage your metabolism.

Hypnotism seems very attractive, until I remember that you can’t be made to do anything you don’t really want to do.

And since I have no idea what I really want to do, well . . .

Reality-based programs such as Weight Watchers, Tops and Overeaters Anonymous are practical, no-nonsense approaches that should work. You just have to stick with them until you die.

That’s true of anything.

Even morbid obesity.

Do I want to stick with THAT until I die?

What are the tradeoffs?

I can continue on the path I’m on, and gradually just become one with the couch. It’s tempting, until I remember that I would eventually have to get up. To go to the bathroom if for no other reason. And getting up is growing increasingly difficult.

Or I can choose a different path. It seems that any one of the others would be better than the one I’m on. At the very least I could say that I haven’t given up.

To paraphrase Robert Frost, two roads diverged in a wood (or a desert, or my heart) and I wish to take the other one.

The magic one.