Breakfast in the Colonies

I'm fast approaching, with any discipline today, a "10 Pound Loss" mark on Weight-Watchers. Actually, it's a little more complicated than that. I started an account with Weight-Watchers online about eighteen months ago, and lost ten pounds over about 12 weeks. The resulting increase in energy and the reduced blood pressure made me feel something like the Papa figure in The Incredibles and I entered a long Holiday eating binge that lasted from Thanksgiving of 2007 to about Labor Day of 2008. (The Holidays are always tough.) The shameful truth is that I charged right on past the original "panic weight," (the weight that made me say to myself 'you, Jim Riley, are a big fat DISGUSTING slob'), and proceeded to take on another ten pounds of ballast by way of celebrating my previous discipline. Well, my nephew, Quinn approached me one night at Sunday family dinner and said:

"Uh, Uncle Jim?"

"What is it, Quinn?"

"You need to get some exercise."

"Quinn," I said. "Thank you very much for that. I know you are mad at me for changing the channel, but there is a grain of truth in what you are saying to your dear old Uncle. Would you get me another one of those peanut butter cookies?"

What followed, over the next few months, was kind of a rolling ocean wave of up and down--peas and popcorn one week, triple lasagne and family sized jars of roasted almonds next week--followed by another period of steely resolve that now brings me back to the starting perch again--the platform, the weight base camp--where I can make the assault on that far away goal of my desired mass--which in truth is about 20 pounds more than the goggle-eyed, death-march dieticians would say is my ideal "healthy" weight. I am 6' 4" and by some weird calculus I'm supposed to be, like 190-200 pounds, but I would settle for five pounds less than my honeymoon, twenty-eight year old weight of 225 pounds. 'The Mighty 220' I call it.

The trouble is that we bake something like 150 apple pies a day, and we feature really good sausage and omelet breakfast platters, and it's not that you can't have that from time to time. You can. But taking just one or two sausages, for me, is something like giving yourself just a tiny little peak out the window at Yosemite, or allowing yourself five seconds of The High Kings' Parting Glass. If something is good, I mean you want to kind of indulge.

Those big one pound bricks of Trader Joe's Milk Chocolate. An entire box of Costco Croissants. A salty, buttery jar of Planter's Dry Roasted Peanuts.

Do I reach the Mighty 220 and then kind of pig-out for the Holidays, or can you make an indulgence out of discipline itself? Can moderation ever be as belly-rich as two plates of Penne Rustica at the Macaroni Grill? It must be part of our condition as humans.



Mother Eve would have something to say on the matter.