the corrections

Through 7 weeks, I'm down 20 pounds on my diet. If you recall, two weeks ago, OWW told me I had lost sufficient weight that I needed to cut my consumption by another 100 calories daily in order to keep with their plan. Last week, OWW told me I was losing weight too fast and needed to increase consumption so that I was losing less than two pounds per week. This week, I lose less than two pounds and OWW tells me even more sternly that I need to lose less than two pounds per week.

I am not yet concerned with how quickly I have been losing weight. To be honest, though, I was quite surprised that I had lost 1.4 pounds, because I had a run of bad diet days on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and was considerably over my point allotment for the week. Then again, broadly speaking, there are two types of dietary lapses. Type I Lapses occur when one is either still eating healthy stuff, just is too large a quantity, or one eats something unhealthy, but in a socially understandable context (like someone who crumbles when confronted with cookies over the holidays). Type II Lapses are the lapses where one is shoving 3/4 of a lasagna or an entire chocolate cake (or both) into one's face in some complete sublimation of executive control to the primal feeding imperative of appetites gone amok. I am, most assuredly, familiar with both kinds of lapses, but during this diet I've had only Type I lapses and fairly innocuous ones at that. Last night, for instance, I went on a weird Raisin Bran binge while simultaneously re-watching and re-reading American Splendor.

Anyway, the most pleasing development of the last few weeks is that I've been doing pretty well with exercising. I jogged another five miles again last night. I've gotten over the hurdle where jogging stops being an ordeal of physical pain and psychological torment and starts actually being enjoyable and providing me with a warm glow of generalized enthusiasm when I finish. (Yes, really, that was me who just typed "warm glow of generalized enthusiasm"--and about myself to boot!)