Here's the thing. I think losing weight can be easy. Once a proper plan is in place, it simply becomes a matter of following the path. The truth is, though, that I hate following paths. I can't follow paths. Not marked ones. Especially not lifestyle-changing marked ones. The second I start going Yoda on lifestyle changes, my Mediterranean heritage kicks in, the mini-Med that's living inside my brain screams, dashes her Greek coffee cup against the wall and short-circuits any rational decision I had hoped to make. A good way to start this is not.
Mini-Med, who doesn't take kindly to being told what to do, has grudgingly complied with my requests to sleep earlier and eat at regular intervals. For the moment. She knows the situation is only temporary. As soon as I happen upon some trigger, like a few less hours of sleep, she'll be right back in the game, giving common sense, which I've begun listening to again, a good kicking. Common sense: "Why do you want to drink coffee? You know how it makes you crazy. And you know coffee means cookie, which means 50 cookies. Do you really want to play that game?" Me: (sighs). "You're right. Thanks for looking out for me, CS." (I set the mug down.) Then: Thwack! Common sense groans and slumps to the floor, speared in the heart with a kebab skewer. Mini-Med enters, finishes licking the inside of a Nutella jar and smashes the glass against Common Sense's slumped form. Mini-Med grabs me by the collar and pins me with her crazed eye. "Meet me at 3.00am in front of the fridge. We have business to take care of."
Imagine my joy then, at having to break to Mini-Med that we must measure food portions on this plan. For the past week, there has been a perpetual Ultimate Death Match going on in inside my head, and it doesn't look like it's going to end any time soon. The endless reel of complaints I get are all the more painful because they are true: "Measuring food is a pain; it's time consuming; it's using up energy and mental space you don't have. Why are we rationing out rice like it's the Great Depression?
Why do we have to compare protein to a deck of cards - do you know how disgusting that sounds? Don't you have better things to do with your time? Won't you throw this all away the second you go on vacation/the weekend arrives/you have a bad day? You're working out anyway - why bother measuring things at all?" I agreed with everything Mini-Med said. So I put the measuring cups away. Then, I received an e-mail from a fellow dieting friend in Dubai one night. "Habibi," it said. "Crashed last night. Hard. Ended up with heaps of chicken followed by fries, milkshake at Ruby Tuesday's, and then, even when all I wanted was to stop eating, I ended up at Cinnabon in the Marina at 11.00pm ordering chocolate cake and five Cinnabites."
I promptly took the measuring cups back out. The beauty of measuring cups is that, after a while, they become just as mindless as the original mindless eating that got me here in the first place. Having the same proportions of food for breakfast or lunch builds a routine. Soon, your body becomes accustomed to the regularity of it. You relearn when you are actually hungry and when you are just fishing for something to get you through the next couple of hours. In an ironic twist, the mindlessness instils awareness, which is a fundamental part of permanently altering bad eating habits. Measuring can also be a cornerstone to mindful, or conscious eating, an approach we will discuss next week, after I have pulled out the measuring cups for seven more days. Let's see how far Mini-Med will let me get.
