{"id":884,"date":"2010-10-04T19:10:48","date_gmt":"2010-10-05T02:10:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/?p=884"},"modified":"2010-10-04T19:10:48","modified_gmt":"2010-10-05T02:10:48","slug":"after-10-weeks-the-diet-day-71","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/?p=884","title":{"rendered":"After 10 Weeks (The Diet, Day 71)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After 10 weeks of dieting, I&#8217;ve lost 17 pounds.  Despite all of my wringing of hands and grinding of teeth over whether The Dreaded Diet was working or not, I think that does qualify me for &#8220;on target&#8221; status.  It&#8217;s right there in the range that &#8220;they say&#8221; is a healthy weight loss pace.  It seems slow to me, mainly because I never had that initial sudden 10 pound drop that I always used to get in my more youthful dieting days.  Any faster would be considered unhealthy, though, according to what &#8220;they say,&#8221; so we&#8217;ll just go with this.<\/p>\n<p>I have hit the point of diet burn out.  I read in a book (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Step-Diet-Calories-Weight-Forever\/dp\/0761133240\">The Step Diet<\/a>) that 12 weeks is as long as the body can really continue to diet efficiently, and that even if you hope to lose a lot of weight, you should take a break from dieting for a few weeks after about 12 weeks and\/or about 20 pounds.<\/p>\n<p>I hit that point a little early, it seems, but I don&#8217;t know about this break business.<\/p>\n<p>A diet break, ideally, will reset your metabolism and reset your attitudes.  It will alleviate the physical and emotional burn out of ongoing dieting.<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, right.  On what planet?<\/p>\n<p>In most worlds a diet break taken at a time when you hit your first bad diet burn out means immediately gaining back what you&#8217;ve just lost because the only way you can think to take a break is with Butterfinger ice cream and Zapp&#8217;s Sour Cream and Creole Onion potato chips&#8230;with spicy ranch dip.<\/p>\n<p>A diet break in which your goal is to maintain at your current weight is called moving to a phase of your diet that allows a few more calories.  It&#8217;s not called going off your diet.<\/p>\n<p>All of that is to say that I don&#8217;t seem to have the mental energy to concentrate on my diet right now, but I&#8217;m not going off it either because who knows when I&#8217;d ever get it back together again.<\/p>\n<p>And so I press onward.  If the first ten weeks were slow, the next ten week might be cold molasses, but that&#8217;s okay.  If it&#8217;s true as Woodie Allen said that &#8220;90% of life is just showing up,&#8221; I&#8217;ll just show up for this diet for the next ten weeks and see what happens.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not even going to worry about whether I end up eating that cold molasses.  Once I put it in the refrigerator, I never could get the lid off anyway.  Cold and sticky = glued shut.  Some mistakes are just for the best that way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After 10 weeks of dieting, I&#8217;ve lost 17 pounds. Despite<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dieting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}