Not Actually About the Food
I'm in a meh! period. Weight loss has slowed, and I just wanted to surrender to everything I've been swerving. Then I asked myself what I actually fancied, with no consequences attached, and the answer wasn't food at all.
I think I’ve hit a meh! period. The weight loss has slowed, there’s so much good stuff I’ve been swerving, and some evenings I just want to surrender to all of it. Pizza, chips, chocolate, the lot. I don’t think my willpower’s actually going to let me, but the wanting-to is real.
Then the scales handed me 14 st 4 lb. Two pounds up from the 198 lb I’d been quietly pleased about. That’s a fairly rubbish bit of timing, right in the middle of already feeling fed up with being sensible.
The two pounds annoyed me more than they should have. I’m still about 34 lb down from where I started — crossing 200 lb felt like a genuine milestone, and now the scales have nudged back over it, which feels like going backwards even though it barely dents the bigger picture. Water, food still working its way through, ordinary fluctuation, who knows. It doesn’t undo two and a half stone.
But it’s exactly the sort of number that makes restraint feel pointless on an evening when restraint already feels tedious.
I said, half-joking, that I’d have a glass of red if there was any in the house. There wasn’t. So I said I might have a rum instead.
That’s when it got interesting, because somewhere in that exchange I’d stopped talking about food entirely. No mention of pizza, chips, or chocolate. Just wine, or failing that, rum.
So I asked myself properly: if there were genuinely no consequences tomorrow, no effect on the scales at all, what would I actually choose to eat or drink tonight?
I thought the answer would be food. I was fairly sure of it, right up until the question forced me to actually check.
It was a bottle of red. And I didn’t want any food at all.
That one caught me off guard. I’d spent the whole conversation convinced I was craving all the things I’d been swerving — pizza, chips, chocolate, the full list — and it turned out none of that was actually true. What I wanted was a specific drink, for its own sake, nothing to do with switching off after work or rewarding myself for anything.
The meh! feeling wasn’t really about food at all. It was about being tired of having to think about any of it, which is a different problem with a different answer.
I’m not about to pretend a two-pound bump and a craving for wine add up to a crisis. They don’t. But it’s worth remembering, next time I feel like surrendering to everything at once: the thing I think I’m craving and the thing I’m actually craving aren’t always the same thing. Sometimes it’s worth asking the question properly before assuming I already know the answer.