Heading in Reverse Directions

If every time you backed out your driveway your car bottomed out, you'd take another route, right? Maybe you'd take a sharp left or go much slower. But chances are you wouldn't do the same thing twice, right? If only the same was true for weight management.

Instead of recognizing that we are on a path headed for a loud thud, we forge ahead blindly time and time again, taking the same path we did last time, somehow expecting a different outcome.

Let me paint you a picture. It's Saturday night. We've rented a movie, bought a bottle of wine, have a fridge stocked full of groceries. I know, based on history, that if I open that bottle of wine and that new stick of cheese and box of crackers and they are all placed on the coffee table that things will quickly get out of control.

Yet, I silence that inner voice. Instead, I channel a food network hostess who would always put out an ample supply of snacks and choices for her guests. I imagine parsley garnishes, decorative toothpicks, and smiling friends around a fondue pot. I search for the grapes and a paper doily. Well, it's just me and my husband. He wouldn't notice if I was slicing cheese with my toes, instead of my fingers. I am not entertaining for eight. An entire box of crackers and a brick of cheese, just for two? Who am I kidding? There's no weekly series about that on the food channel, although I think there was a place for us in Dante's Inferno. With a two-hour movie going, we'll do some serious damage to that block of cheddar, way more than we should. Much worse than if I had simply prepared small side plates for each of us.

Is it magical thinking, denial, stupidity, or, worse, self-sabotage? If I am trying to lose or maintain weight, why would I will place myself on a known path of self-destruction? Whether it's a pizza place, all-you-can-eat buffet or ice cream stand--I put myself there with little more than hope and a prayer hoping somehow it will turn out differently. Color me surprised when it doesn't.

It doesn't take but one hit to back end of my vehicle when backing out of the driveway to learn that I need to take a different path. Yet, I can bottom out time and time again in my weight management before I realize I need to bypass that bump with a different approach. Could it be I care more about my car than my own body? Or is it that I am not really ready to change what I need to to accomplish what I want? How can that be? My main carriage is my body and it is taking quite a beating. Last I knew the Cash for Clunkers program didn't apply to me. I don't get to trade this one in. I'm stuck with it.