Dan Nied's Fortress of Weight Loss: Day 30

The temptation gets to be too much

Everything in my mind told me not to write tonight, to just leave you hanging through the weekend until I triumphantly return on Monday.

But if I were to do that, I would only be cheating myself.

Part of this blog effort is to showcase my failures as well as my losses. As a journalist (well, sportswriter), I am often faced with the task of reporting someone else’s failure. I have to do it, too. That’s my job. So in my personal writing, as informal as it may be, I need to keep the same standard.

Thursday was not a good day. I gave in. A little too quickly. So quickly, in fact, that I am more ashamed of speed with which the decision was made than the actual decision itself.

You want the story? Here:

In the office at 4:30 p.m., someone shouts out “Food at Five!” I am annoyed, I am flustered. Why do these office people constantly insist on bringing in food? In the last few months, there has been caramel popcorn, a big ass jug of Red Vines, all the Christmas candy you could ever want, and vegetarian, cheese, supreme and pepperoni pizza.

These fucking people have a death wish for all of us. Someone needs to look around my office. There are not many attractive people there, The majority are old mid-level writers hardened by either the blood of murder scenes or the boredom of city council meetings.

We don’t even have windows in our newsroom. Believe me, the last thing we need is four kinds of pizza.

Anyway, it turns out that today was “Office Space” day, or as they called it, “Employee Appreciation Day.” Because I generally avoid these things at all costs, I was not aware of this event before I was called into the sparsely decorated advertising room with the rest of the staff.

On a table were chicken wings, cake and cold cuts. Beyond that was our publisher, who had written out a state of the paper address to advise us that our newspaper was losing money, but assured us that staff layoffs were “the last resort.” I’d say I’m not worried, but… Well, we can tackle my feelings on the newspaper industry another time.

Anyway, I seem to be getting off of the food part. Wait, just one more thing on the inanity of all this: This happened at 5 p.m., right after the advertising people were done with work, and right when the news editorial people had their deadline. So basically, we had to sit around at this thing for 45 minutes while the people off work weren’t getting paid, and the people who were working weren’t allowed to actually put out the paper. I mean, thanks?

Ok, done with that. Now, back to the matter at hand. I stayed away from the food for the most part, not really wanting to mingle all that much. But after an hour or so, everyone cleared out, leaving a healthy amount of cold cuts and chicken wings.

I went for it. What can I say? I wanted some wings. They were good, and I didn’t fight the urge much. Oh, and the cake was amazing.

So what do I read into this? Well, for one, I am not perfect, and I don’t think I should expect myself to be. I also don’t think anyone else expects me to be perfect.

But I also know that this is a pretty critical part of the diet. I’ve certainly jeopardized my chances of reaching the 283 pound goal weight on Sunday. It doesn’t help that I haven’t exercised since Monday, or that I haven’t been totally happy with my eating choices this week. I haven’t fucked up until this, but I also haven’t turned in a string of perfect days either.

A bit of refocusing might be in order. I am going grocery shopping on Friday, which should give me a good opportunity to get back on schedule. Perhaps, for my own sanity, I could push the Sunday weigh-in back to Tuesday, and get on the elliptical at least three times before then.

But this isn’t really about fixing my mistake. It can’t be fixed, because it will be gone by tomorrow morning. But what does need to be fixed is the ease in which I permit myself to cheat. This all works perfectly in my own little structured setting. I know how to avoid temptation in my own house and, for the most part, at work. But it’s the rare instances when someone just offers you something for free, and it looks really good at that, that I have to get through.

The next scheduled off day is Super Bowl Sunday. I need to make sure that is the next off day altogether.

I suppose part of this is about exposing weaknesses and then taking the necessary steps to fix those weaknesses. Certainly a little bit of mental toughness wouldn’t hurt on this endeavor.

So I gotta start working on that.

Back Monday.