Why Losing Weight Will Be Harder For Me Than Quitting Drinking

In honour of back to school season, can you solve this equation? Good food choices + me = ??.

Hello, everyone. Happy Friday.

I do love Fridays, for all the obvious reasons. Way back when, I used to love Fridays because it was “party night” — the night to let loose after a long week of work and/or parenting.

These Friday nights often began for me around dinnertime, when I would start making a batch of hot wings in anticipation of my husband’s arrival home — the herald of the official start to the weekend.

Pretty much without fail, I would crack my first beer of the night while the wings were dancing in a pan of boiling hot sauce (that’s how I do ‘em).

I would normally stick to just three beers — half the six-pack I bought for my husband and myself to share. Three beers is not so bad, right? Sure, on the nights I stuck to that, no big deal.

But often enough, after the wings were devoured and the beers were emptied and the kids had been put to bed, I would move on to something else. White wine. A shot or two of the Sambuca I kept in the freezer (it’s dessert, don’t you know?). Or maybe a generous splash, or two or three, of Bailey’s on ice.

Not all Friday nights were like this, but enough of them were. Enough? No, too many. And too many Saturday mornings (and sometimes afternoons) were sweat out in pain and and shame and regret.

Things went this way for a few years, until I finally decided I’d had enough. Just enough.

I didn’t quit drinking all at once. It was, in fact, a little more than two years between the very first time I decided to give myself a drinking sabbatical of just 45 days in September 2017 and the day I had my last drink, on October 16th, 2019.

All of this is to say that by the time I actually quit for real, and started writing about it here, I was ready. I had spent a lot of time contemplating my relationship with alcohol, its use (or complete lack of use) in my life, and the ways in which I would be better off without it.

And I had practiced. 45 days without alcohol here, 100 days there, 200 days there, and so on. I spent two years developing my sobriety muscle. It wasn’t always easy, but by October 2019, that muscle was Schwarzenegger-ed, and I had a lot of confidence in it.

But what does that have to do with fitness, and food, and this challenge that I’ve extended to myself for the next 52 weeks to lose 30 pounds?

Well, here’s the truth bomb: I have no confidence going into my 52 weeks of fitness and sensible eating. I come into it with a pathetically underdeveloped food resistance muscle. And while I have empirical evidence that I can lose weight (done it a million times!), there is no such evidence that I can keep that weight off for any length of time (regained, with interest, a million times!).

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Food and alcohol are different. Food, in its inconvenient necessity for human survival, is unavoidable. And while you could argue that some foods — as in the foods I shouldn’t be eating — are avoidable, I still see these foods in the grocery stores and restaurants I frequent and on the plates of the people with whom I live. I am not sure that I am strong enough, not yet, to resist them.

It’s true that I have proven to myself that I can resist alcohol (oh, and there were temptations). I don’t even think about alcohol anymore. It’s easy to not drink because I’ve internalized a very simple equation: Me + alcohol = me + feeling bad.

The inverse of this (I know enough about math to know that this isn’t actually the inverse, but let me have this one, please) is this: Not drinking + me = Me feeling good.

Therefore, I don’t drink.

I’m not there with food. I’m nowhere close. I’m not saying that overeating feels good.

But it never makes me feel as bad as alcohol did.

While my food choices sometimes lead to regret, they have never lead to me not being able to get out of bed on a Saturday. And while when I make better food choices, I feel good, I don’t feel as good as I felt when I quit drinking.

There is a slightly more complicated equation when it comes to my ability to resist food: Bad food choices + me = Me feeling bad (but not as bad as I felt when I drank).

And its inverse (I know, I know, you smarty math people. Let me have this!): Good food choices + me = Me feeling good (but not as good as I felt when I quit drinking).

These are messy but still good equations, worth internalizing.

Over the next 52 weeks, I am going to work on exactly that.

And I’ll let you know how it goes.

In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful Friday.