How do you decide whether to give in to a craving or put up a fight?
I used to almost always give in, figuring that as long as I wrote it down, it was better to absorb the extra calories rather than feel deprived and risk eating more later.
I still do that sometimes. (Well, a lot of the time, actually.) But lately my experiments with midday scale checks have proven extremely effective at shutting down the eating impulse.
On Tuesday afternoon I was all set to pick up a Taco Bell crunch wrap I definitely didn’t need on the way to swimming. Before I left the house, I decided to do a scale check.
All it took was seeing that I was up 3 pounds from my morning weight — nothing out of the ordinary, given that I eat and drink more in the morning than at any other time of day — to snap me back to reality. Suddenly I was much less focused on the TASTE of the crunch wrap and a LOT MORE FOCUSED on its HEFT. Did I really want to add 254 grams — that’s 8.9 ounces, more than half a pound — to my body weight? Not so much.
This little focusing aid helped me take a couple of pounds off this week, which hopefully puts me in position to achieve a 10% loss by next week’s official weigh-in.
As for my teammates, Colleen stayed the same, Grandpa lost another half a pound, and Traci apparently never got around to hopping on the scale. We’ve got five weeks to go. Can we stay focused? Stay tuned….