Day 20: Jiggering and Poking

It's been twenty days, and I've lost a little more than twenty pounds. Despite intermittent ups and downs largely associated with fluid gain and loss, I've averaged a loss of a pound per day. (I suspect this rate is unusually high for the typical person because I'm the type who uses more calories than average.) I've one day to go until I've reached three weeks on the diet, the point at which, at least according to urban legend, quitting something you like becomes less hard.

The main obstacle to further weight loss is still homeostasis, the body's attempt to maintain the old equilibrium in the face of a change. When dieting, homeostasis kicks in through a lowered metabolism rate and other tricks the body uses to conserve fat. This reaction is healthy in the wild, as the closest thing to a diet there is the onset of a food shortage. We're built to survive on a day-to-day basis, not to diet efficiently.

Despite this conservation, our equilibria in terms of weight do shift. We become fatter and thinner depending upon our net calorie intake. So, homeostasis is merely an obstacle.

It's one, though, that may be outfoxed. I've recently switched from eating five meals a day to four, in the hopes that any homeostasis reaction is reflexive - meaning, that the body adjusts to a specific new schedule of calorie intake but not to a new calorie level in general. It may be possible, by eating bigger and fewer meals which collectively add up to the daily calorie limit, to fool the body into thinking the "good times" have arrived again and to shift out of calorie-conservation mode.

Of course, homeostatis works both ways, so I may be fooling myself into thinking I can hasten the weight loss in this way; I may very well slow it down. There's only one way to find out, though...


Weight as of approx. 6 PM today: 239 1/2 pounds.