Back on Track?

If you’re not familiar with the Four Physical Laws of Dieting, I’ll give you Law Number IV: Informing others of your progress immediately halts progress. Here’s a description from something I wrote last year:

I can’t be the only one this has happened to. You start your diet on Monday and by Thursday morning you’re miraculously down six pounds. You’re so excited you tell everyone you know, whether in person or by keyboard. But come Friday morning, you’re suddenly five pounds heavier. It’s a sinking feeling, but you brought it upon yourself. What to do: This one is obvious: never, ever tell anyone how well you’re doing. Even when you’ve lost fifty pounds and everyone asks, “Have you lost weight?” tell them, “No, I’m just wearing vertical stripes.”

But now I want to amend this law by adding, “It only takes effect when you tell someone in person.” Therefore, blogging doesn’t count, which is good news for all of us. Because if it did, I would be violating Law Number IV on a weekly basis and I would probably weigh somewhere in the vicinity of 1,847 pounds.

But check out last week’s graph. It’s rare to get a week that’s all downhill. Not a single uptick.

So what happened? Was it the virtual book tour? Because those things can be arduous. Probably not, but I will tell you one thing about this past week: it sure contained a lot less pizza than the prior week. In fact, I think the exact amount was … zero. And whereas my average daily intake the week before last was around 2200 calories, this week it was down to 1900, and—surprise, surprise—the weight started going down again. Funny how that works.

In fact, I might just try something crazy and do this two weeks in a row. Even if it does mean—gasp—going another week without pizza. It can’t be that hard, can it? CAN IT?

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