Dieting and Me, or, Desserts and Pedometers


Confession: I love to eat.

A lot.

Back in the day, I could kick back a large pizza by myself. I’m not saying I’m the eating champion of the world, but I’m a real sucker for anything chocolatey. (Not pizza, though. Unless it’s dessert pizza.)

So, the natural result of loving to eat is . . . eating too much. At least, it is when you have a low tolerance for self-restraint when it comes to food. And when you eat too much, you get fat. Or is that just me? In any case, I’m on this constant search for how to eat a lot, not exercise, and still stay skinny. If any of you find that, let me know.

In the meantime, I’m doing my best to get down to a healthy body weight. Again. Because yes–I did this a couple of years ago. And yes–the weight has come back. Not as much as it was (when I started dieting last time, I was up to 228. Since I’ve been off my diet, I got back up to 214 one day). But I’m in an active “try to get the weight off” mode again, and I’m trying some different approaches.

First off, I have a pedometer. This one, in fact:

I love it. It’s easy to use, accurate, and it remembers your totals for the last week. It also calculates distance walked and calories burned. And for a while, I thought this would be enough. I’d just walk walk walk the pounds away.
Problem: I discovered that walk walk walking made me more hungry, and it made me feel justified in eat eat eating the desserts each night. (Hint: this is not the recipe for successful weight loss.)
What to do?
Well, I’ve now come up with a novel approach. I don’t eat desserts or sweets during the day. At all. At the end of the day, I get to look at my trusty pedometer. It tells me how many calories I burned walking. I can eat that many calories worth of dessert.
So far, I’ve lost three pounds this way. Who knows how good it will work long-term. I do know that my biggest weakness is those desserts. If I can constrain them–and exercise some on top of that–then that should be a good environment for weight loss.
Or maybe I’ll just be blogging about how fat I am in a few more months, post-Thanksgiving and Christmas, when I’m back to 228. If it gets that bad, I’m going to have to further incentive myself. Possibly with public humiliation. You hear that, subconscious? Public humiliation!
Have a nice weekend, all!

*Bonus points to whoever can get the connection between the pic and the topic today.

3 thoughts on “Dieting and Me, or, Desserts and Pedometers”

  1. Dasha–you win! 🙂

    Hilary–It hasn’t worked wonders yet (it didn’t help that I cheated over the weekend, and once I’ve cheated for the day, there seems to be little to stop me totally cheating the rest of the day). However, I’m definitely eating less junk food and sweets, so that’s gotta be a good thing, right?

Leave a comment

×