Back. Better. BOOM!

Okay, so that was a little break.

Here’s the thing. The whole time I’ve been doing this, I’ve worked in steps. Lose a bunch, go full-out, then lose a little ground. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Mid-September was the beginning of the “Lose a little ground” phase. Now when I saw “lose ground,” I’m talking about gaining back, like, maybe five to seven pounds, two or three of which are already gone again. It’s not a collapse. But I’m not really doing it, either, and I tend to stop working out, and I kind of don’t want to talk about it, and I’m just too busy, among other things, to put a lot of time into cooking and so forth. And the thing is that I don’t even feel really down about it. I’m just on hold.

But at the same time, I don’t really want to keep doing it that way. For one thing, stopping working out is always a bad idea, because not only do you lose your fitness improvements pretty quickly, it just makes me less energetic and less happy. So I’m not happy with the status quo, no matter how easy it is to see that I’m still doing really well, and will end the year easily 20 pounds down from where I started. And I have kept a substantial and ever-increasing amount off for, like, five years now. And it’s not coming back. I don’t even worry about that, because as soon as I get to the five-to-seven stage, it’s like . . . okay, well, enough slacking.

So I got thinking about what to do, and how these periods begin in the first place — these times when I just kind of hold rather than continuing to progress, and I realized that it’s always when there’s some interruption. I’m interrupted by a trip or a change in schedule or something, and it’s not at all that I’d ever claim that I can’t stay on track when that happens; I just don’t. And in diagnosing why I don’t, I had this revelation.

I don’t want to be on a plan anymore. I don’t want to be counting anymore. I don’t want to be on Core or Flex, even though I think they’re both really good. I was at the grocery store yesterday, and I was trying to restock the house after living on Lean Cuisines for a while, and I was thinking . . . “Well, I learned on Core that I occasionally really like a piece of lean meat, and really like the shot of protein. But . . . Core is so hard on bread, and I really like to be able to have bread . . . and I have to count all my lowfat flavored yogurt, so . . . ” And I stood there, debating about which one I wanted to try to be on.

And then I just thought . . . I know how to eat. I know how to have a good breakfast, a good lunch, a good dinner. I know how much is too much. I’ve counted points for so long that I know what benefit you get from not putting cheese on your sub, or getting the small instead of the medium. I know from Core that lattes are really nice and are basically milk, so they’re a very good idea. I know from years of experience that whatever my opinion of the anti-carb vigilantes is, a bowl of pasta may be very tasty, but I will indeed be hungry half an hour later.

I know how to eat. I don’t always do it, but I know how to do it, and I think I’m tired of being on plans where I invariably feel like I’m either on or off, either doing or not doing. I just want to do what I think is healthy for me for a while and see what happens.

So I’m inventing my own “plan,” which I am calling the Eat By The Seat Of Your Pants plan. I want to emphasize that I don’t condone this, as I haven’t even tried it. Maybe I’ll gain five pounds in the first week and come back here all, “Uh, no.”

But I don’t think so. I think I’m just . . . ready to stop eating like my eating is disordered somehow, which it isn’t. I snack on yogurt and fruit or whole wheat crackers, naturally and easily. At worst, I snack on, like, Baked Doritos. When I gain a few pounds, it’s because I take a couple of trips and eat really good food that I really enjoy and drink margaritas and lie around. And I’m not sorry about any of that, and it comes back off when I go back to normal.

We’ll see. We’ll see what happens. All I know is that I look at myself, and I feel like . . . honestly, what is anybody with a book or a plan or a graph going to tell me that’s any better than what I already know? I have a lot of confidence in my experience. I have a lot of confidence in what I’ve learned about myself. That’s why when Core came out, even when I was having a lot of success with it, I was modifying it a little bit. I never counted my occasional handful of raisins. Because I know myself, and I know that isn’t the problem for me. I know I can have lowfat raspberry yogurt and not binge on it.

I’m wanting to do it myself. I hear people who like points talk about “accountability,” and it just baffles me, because . . . how am I ever going to be any more accountable than I am when I see every day whether things are going the way I want or not? And every time I think that, I think, “Right, but they say that at Weight Watchers all the time — that everybody thinks they can do it themselves, and that’s when they gain it all back.” Respectfully . . . I’m not everybody. I’ve already done this. It may not all be gone yet, but it doesn’t come back. I don’t have to go twenty years before I get to say that perhaps having learned the lessons I did from following all these things, I am ready to apply them in a way that might be right for me even if it wouldn’t suit everybody. If I do best with some Core/Flex hybrid, who’s to say that’s not right for me? What if I had invented Core while Weight Watchers only had Flex? Would that have been bad?

I want to make it clear that I encourage people who are in the early stages of this to follow something like Weight Watchers. I think it’s incredibly helpful to have that structure, and like I said, I’ve learned a huge amount from following those plans and from learning about trade-offs in a way I never would have if I hadn’t been on a counting-type plan.

But I know how to eat. When I don’t do it, it’s not because I don’t know what to do, and it’s not because I’m not committed enough. It’s because I choose to prioritize something else, and however I feel about that, that’s the level where I’m going to have to handle it. I don’t want to count anymore, and I don’t want to obey rules I think are overly restrictive for my personal lifestyle anymore, either.

It’s the Eat By The Seat Of Your Pants Plan. And now that I’m back, you will get to hear all about it.