I’m taking a page from Lent (where I normally give up giving up things) and am resolving to be resolution free this year. That said, I do have two things I need to do this year: keep going and make a dent in the 140 or so lbs left to lose, and learn more about what leads me to want to eat compulsively.

I’m doing my first 2006 weigh-in on Monday. My last weigh-in was 6 weeks ago at Thanksgiving, where I tipped the scale at 282, a 93-lb loss from my start of 375. I’m hoping to be down a bit. My next temporary goal is 275, which was my previous high weight. When I hit that in 1991, I went on a fast, motivated by being invited to be in the wedding parties for my sister’s and brother’s weddings in the summer of 1992.

One of the things I do have to face is that I have done very well staying on track when I stay on track. When I have fooled around with allowing myself to eat lot of junk, I’ve wound up slip sliding down the slope faster than you can say “binging again.”

In his books on smoking and drinking, Allen Carr uses the metaphor of the pitcher plant and the fly. What must seem like a great thing to the fly (all this easy nectar on the sides of the plant), turns into disaster, when the combination of the steep sides of the plant and the engorged fly — now too heavy to fly out — turns the fly into the pitcher plant’s dinner.

That’s certainly been my experience this year. Four times I’ve gone on vacation, and done the “heck, I can go off track and get back on.” Only one time was this easy for me (the first time). The next three times, the way I got back on track had more to do with having some real medical problems that provided the force to get me past the overeating inertia…it wasn’t any great strength of will.

What’s so bizarre about this is that it isn’t like I didn’t know that I would feel better being on track. So why couldn’t I get back there easily?

My current feeling is that the more crap you eat, the more you screw up your biochemistry, and that’s what causes the “one more day…” syndrome, which uncontrolled turns out to be months or years and more physical evidence for getting really down on yourself. I don’t know what it is. It could be insulin, it could be serotonin, it could be endorphins, it could be dopamine. All of these seem to be part of the equation.

What seems to make sense to me is that the craving, which seems to be for sugar and starches is probably really for nutrients. You know how they say that sometimes you feel like you’re hungry and what you really are is thirsty? Maybe it is like that. Your body is craving nutrients–and not the macronutrients (protein, carbs, fats), it’s the micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients).

All I know is that it seems like the more quality food I eat, the less I crave.

And for me, this doesn’t mean OA HOW abstinence. Eating the apple pie on New Year’s turned out not to be a problem. I have brown sugar in my oatmeal most days, I have dark chocolate every day, and I have pasta and rice (no more than 1c) often at lunch or dinner.

What seems to cause the slip-sliding away is something more than that. Maybe it’s a question of days: the time I got back on track by myself earlier this year was after just two days of being away. But I think there’s also a psychological component too. When I got off track in August, it was on the last day of vacation…I should have been content to get back on track when home, but I wasn’t. I used the excuse of being tired after the long drive home from North Carolina to do one of my old-style dinners of wine and really bad (meaning not healthy) Chinese food. From there, it was three weeks of “just one more day” before my health intervened and made me get back on track.

Anyways, for now, I’m on track. (We’ll see what happens when I make up my missed Xmas vacation.) I think I’m down from Thanksgiving. And since I’m pushing 100lbs lost (and wearing some smaller clothes out of the closet), people are starting to say more to me about it. Friday at work, a woman I don’t know well made a comment, and what she really wanted to know was what the heck was I doing (she was slightly overweight). I feel stupid saying that I’m eating healthy, but I don’t know what else to say. That too is something I hope to be able to do better in 2006.

I also am hoping I don’t have the problems that Jennifer had. She was on Dr. Phil last Wednesday, and had saggy skin city after losing 160 lbs. What bummed me out was that she supposedly had lost the weight over three years. I had been hanging onto the hope that the saggy skin was more of a problem with fast weight loss. I know that the drs sometimes say it’s just that when you go too big, the skin can’t bounce back.

Ah well, I’m still going to hope that with the good diet, the slow pace, and the lotions (not sure whether the massaging or the lotion might help) that I wind up in a place I’m okay with!