Smile-breaks
Low Carbs and Sneaky Scales Keep Me – Um, Not So Fit
Okay. No New Year’s resolution to lose weight for me this year. Knew I couldn’t do it. But all of a sudden it’s February and I’m working like a sonofagun to lose – um – a few pounds.
Been trying for years to get rid of those pounds. No luck. My scale is the Great Manipulator. One day it says I lost a pound. Wow! Great! I’m all hyped up. Ready to roll. Next day I starve myself. For good measure, I actually go out and walk. Thirty minutes. Just like they say.
Next morning I hop on the scale filled with hope. Like the guy in the commercial. I stand still as a mouse. I wait. The digital red numbers slowly appear. I look down.
Not one single ounce. I didn’t lose one single ounce. I weigh exactly the same as I did yesterday – before all that starving and getting sweaty. I step off – wait! The numbers are changing!
They changed all right. Went up half a pound.
If starving and exercising is going to make me half a pound heavier, the heck with it. My scale is hopeless. Only knows how to add. So that’s why I didn’t make any New Year’s resolutions about losing weight. But then one fine morning last month a friend of mine mentioned she’d lost eleven pounds in three weeks.
“Wow! How’d you do that?” I asked.
“I just went on a low-carb diet. I didn’t change my exercise habits or anything.”
Whoa! That sounded good to me. No change in exercise and just stay away from bread and pasta and all that good stuff for a few weeks – I can do that.
Did I mention that my friend plays tennis two days a week, goes bowling two nights a week and teaches dance lessons? She didn’t change her routine a bit. Just stuck to a low-carb diet. Like I was going to do. And I didn’t plan to change my routine a bit, either. Commute to work five days a week; sit at my desk five days a week; sit in front of the TV every evening when the news comes on, and when “Law and Order” comes on, and when “Judging Amy” comes on…
For two weeks, I didn’t go near a carb. I didn’t lose any weight, either. But I didn’t give up and by the end of the third week I lost one whole pound. Maybe there was hope after all. Maybe this thing would work. I hung in there and the next morning I gained a pound and a half.
I still haven’t figured out how she got it to work. Didn’t work for me. But now I was into this losing weight thing so I threw out the low-carb diet and glommed onto the old twelve hundred calories a day plan.
The first day I hit twelve hundred calories practically before noon and I only had juice, toast and an egg for breakfast. One toast, one egg. A very small egg. That night the scale gave me more pounds than I’d ever seen in my life.
At that point I Made A Resolution. It wasn’t about the pounds any more. It was about The Scale. I was gonna beat that manipulating scale. I’m now on a liquid diet and I exercise thirty minutes a day. Every day. Mostly I walk but sometimes I actually jog a little. And I’m not going anywhere near that scale ’til my clothes start slipping around those parts where they fit so snugly at the moment and then that scale will have to tell the truth – you’ve lost weight!!!
If this works, I’m gonna write a book and make millions of dollars and travel around the country telling people how to lose weight. If it doesn’t work, well, I’ll be back here next week in the usual spot. Big as life.