100 Days

What I ate today

Breakfast (12 p.m.)
1 grapefruit
Calories: 100
Fat: 0 grams

Lunch (2 p.m.)
1 can of tuna
½ cup of brown rice
Calories: 470
Fat: 3.5 grams

Dinner (6:30 p.m.)
Salad
3 pieces of chicken
3 servings of lettuce
½ green pepper
1 serving of mushrooms
4 servings of fat free Italian dressing
2 servings of Just 2 Good Bleu Cheese dressing
Calories: 315
Fat: 4.5 grams

Snack (9 p.m.)
2 ounces of turkey
Calories: 50
Fat: 2 grams

Snack (12 a.m.)
2 bites of a roast beef sandwich, with cheese, I believe (I didn’t make it. I’m not sure)
Calories: 100?
Fat: ???

Total Calories: 1,035
Total Fat: 10 grams

Exercise: I didn’t even leave the apartment today. Do you really think I exercised? If so, you are dumb.

Two weird things happened today, food wise. First, I found a nearly untouched pound of turkey in the fridge. I have no idea how that got there since I have been living for the past five days with the belief that all of my turkey was gone. The package said “Sell by Feb. 11”, so I was a little skeptical. But since it was there and I didn’t feel like eating more brown rice, I decided to dive in. I’ll let you know if I get food poisoning. It didn’t taste fresh, but it didn’t taste bad. So I think I will give it another chance.

Second, at midnight I opened my bag to find an untouched sack lunch. I had forgotten that I grabbed it from the basketball game I covered last night. Short story: While I was waiting around to interview the coach, an assistant came in with a box of lunches he had forgotten to pass out after the game. Since there were only a few players mulling around the locker room at that point, and there were at least 12 lunches in the box, I took one for later. At midnight tonight, I found it and had two bites of the roast beef sandwich inside. It wasn’t that good.

So that was my Sunday. Pretty exciting. But there is actually something to report. Something fairly big, and not so good.

Saturday I had my first calculated fuck up. This was a case of blowing the whole fucking thing up. And, unlike the gravy incident, I fell victim to nothing but myself.

It began at the basketball game. There was a buffet set up, easily accessible to me, for alumni of the school. I have gotten past these sorts of things before, with relative ease. But I managed to convince myself that it would be alright to just look at what they had. After that, I convinced myself it would be fine if I took the night off from the diet. I wasn’t shocked at the minimal amount of work I had to do to convince myself of that.

So I indulged in the buffet, all the while planning a Wendy’s stop after the game. Well, after the game, I was invited to go out drinking. So I did. Remember the drinking rules? Beer only. So I had five before heading home with a decent buzz.

Directly across the street from the bar was Wendy’s. Next door to Wendy’s was Taco Bell. I was half drunk. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I picked Taco Bell. I got five things, though I don’t remember them now. I enjoyed those five things very much as I sat on my ass in my living room, clad in boxer briefs and a five-year old T shirt, flipping back and forth between Scream, Saw and the Olympics.

I awoke today and things were fine. I hadn’t gained back the weight I had lost (not all of it at least) and, intestinally, I paid for the Taco Bell only minimally.

But there was a nagging tone inside my head, throughout the day. It was something I had to know was coming eventually. Even though things are great right now - with people noticing the weight loss, formerly tight clothes beginning to fit again and the overall sense that I finally have things straight in my life – there was a very large part of me that wanted to end this whole thing. Today I got as close as I possibly could to quitting. I actually decided, for a second, to take a few days off and see how I feel on Wednesday. At that point, I would decide whether to quit or keep going. If it hadn’t been midnight on a Sunday, I would have probably ordered a pizza at that moment. Instead, I found the bag lunch and took two bites of a sandwich.

Right before I sat down to write this, I looked at myself in the mirror for 10 minutes. I talked to myself, out loud, and tried to figure out what to do. Here is what I can remember about my conversation with me:

“So what do you want to do? What is important now? Do you want to eat like crap? Do you want short term gratification? Or do you want to be able to live out the rest of your youth as a healthy, attractive man? You have to decide that because, if all you care about are hamburgers and melted cheese, then go get some. But you’ve been doing that for years and look where it’s gotten you. We already know that doesn’t bring happiness. But we also know that you are great at being lazy. It’s been so easy for you to do nothing. You knew this point would come. You had to know. And you have to ask yourself if you are willing to give up these last 50 days of motivation just because you are hungry. Look, it’s hard. You knew it would be hard. But what about the rewards? What about going home this summer and having that girl like you or having your family fawn over how good you look? What about when you move away from this town and set up a new life somewhere else? Don’t you think constantly about making that good first impression? What do you want? Figure it out?”

Myself is very smart, and very good at asking rhetorical questions. Hopefully, one day, I can be as smart as myself.

From what I can tell, this current urge to quit came from two sources. First, it became obvious to me this week that 100 pounds in 100 days isn’t going to happen. The next best I can hope for is 100 pounds by June, when I go home. So with that I kind of alleviated some of the pressure on myself.

But the main reason for the urge, I believe, was a slight frustration with the possibility that I have been gaining weight over the last few days. The only reasons I think that is A) I got on the scale again Friday, after breakfast and drinking water, and it read 334, up two pounds from the last weigh in. Although, I don’t put too much stock in that. B) I found that my belt was tighter Saturday than it had been the week before. Again, not a big deal, but enough to put doubt into my head.

So, I am hungry and I still want to take a break. But I decided that I have come much too far to give up now. One of my favorite lyrics is from a Counting Crows song called St. Robinson and his Cadillac Dream and it goes like this:

“I keep thinking tomorrow is coming today, so I am endlessly waiting.”

I always applied that to my weight problem because, as I was in the drive through of another fast food restaurant, I would tell myself that tomorrow I would start my diet. Of course, I always failed the next day. But, no matter what, there was always tomorrow. Tomorrow offers so much hope. Anything can happen tomorrow, all you have to do is wait for it to come. And in my life, the existence of tomorrow just made it ok for me to keep eating today.

And yes, Annie does say that tomorrow is only a day away, but sometimes tomorrow is light years away. Sometimes waiting isn’t enough. Sometimes you have to make tomorrow come. You have to suffer through today and get to that tomorrow you’ve been dreaming about. If you don’t, then you are endlessly waiting.

And you know what? My tomorrow is here, and I got really sick of waiting.