Day 1: Acclimatizing

Most of the first day of the new regimen is now over. I've stuck to the plan that I've set for myself.

The difficulties at this point are mainly physiological, in the sense of the body adjusting to the reduced intake. My stomach has been sending out hunger pangs off and on for most of the day, and my second meal allayed them for little more than half an hour.

There has been, though, an effect that seems psychosomatic: the kind of headache that comes with the scalp muscles tightening up. I believe that this kind of ache is a willpower matter: if you find this kind of pain (if it pops up at all) daunting rather than bracing or ignorable, then you're going to have a tough time with a diet.

To the end of getting through it, I unconsciously gave myself an ego boost this morning by imagining myself to be thinner, even if a weighing revealed this feeling to be illusory. My memory was reminding me of what I felt like when I was thinner, so I 'felt' less heavy even though I wasn't. This psychological boost made it easier to start off, through giving me a beforehand taste of a thinner state. This illusion was butressed by me carrying myself in such a way that I looked a little thinner, too.

The second ego-reinforcing technique I used was to accept myself as fat. Rather than use throttled aggression, regret or shame, I decided to treat it as a simple shift of course. I wanted to be fat earlier, and now I want to be thin. Evidently, I need a feeling of control to get me through it. Part and parcel of this control is not only picking your own diet, but also choosing the starting time. You can't have control if someone else is controlling you.

To assuage the feeling of hunger when it got particularly bad, I tried a suggestion left by this commenter and drank a lot of water; it seemed to help. There's also a background sensibleness to this technique: since most of the early weight loss in a diet is water loss, anyone who uses it loses less intially but has the benefit of a smaller plateauing phase later on. It smooths out the weight loss process.

The new part of my menu tasted quite good. Eating something new does help in distancing yourself from your old habits of indulgence, in part because of the new taste variety.


Weight as measured at approx. 6 PM: 260 pounds. I've a long way to go.