Day 9: Canary In The Mine

It may seem odd, but while shopping for food last night, I also bought a 1 lb. package of red licorice, of the kind that I've eaten regularly (if infrequently) for at least a year.

The reason I've done so is to keep it on my shelf as a kind of canary in the mine. If I'm truly not committed to losing weight, it's best to find out through cheating with a sweet but relatively low-calorie bag of treats. The entire bag has about 2000 calories; if I gobble it down, then I've bumped by daily intake up to about 2,850 calories, which is a little more than a man of my size uses in a day. In retrospect, the water I had gorged was an attempt to deflect any cheating reflex I have, although some people may prefer to use cabbage, lettuce or a low-calorie protein drink, as "mk" has suggested in the comments section of yesterday's entry. You may be interested to know that, after I laid down subsequent to coming back from the store, I had a "taste memory" of the licorice. So far, the package is unopened.

Despite the plateauing I went through yesterday, my belly is noticably shrinking. Thankfully, the loping path of weight loss contains enough partial evidence to provide a little good news each day, or a plausible reason why there'll be some soon.

As far as the stomach itself is concerned, I might as well disclose the reason for my going through a hard crash-diet phase: it's another cheat trap. If I shrink my food processor as much as possible in the early stages, then any subsequent cheating will top out sooner, thus limiting the damage done. (It'll also make it easier to keep the weight down when finished.) This approach will only work if a few (or several) small-calorie and small-volume meals are eaten during the day. Of course, the use of the cheat-reflex deflection technique does work at cross purposes to this secondary goal.


Weight as of approx. 6 PM today: 249-250 pounds. The current plateauing may be over.