Today is the first day that my weight trend has completely flat-lined since the first three days of my diet. It’s mainly due to my eating a midnight meal at Casa Vega last night (the very type of full scale late-night eating that contributed to my weight gain for years). Yesterday was also the first time I’ve been over my goal by 1,000 calories plus in over a month. Definitely not a great day.

I read somewhere once, that one of the difficulties with being on anti-depressants is that once you start taking them you feel fine, and begin to think you don’t need them anymore. In a way, I feel like I’ve reached a similar point in my weight loss; a dangerous point where I feel good about the progress I’ve made, and start looking too far forward, at the expense of the present. In past weight loss attempts, this is the point where I would lose my way. I’d justify eating one bad thing “Because I’d been doing so well,” and that one bad thing would lead to another, which would then lead to more, until eventually I’d be right back where I started (or worse).

Luckily, I have a much more accurate and objective response mechanism for my weight than I ever have in the past – this site. I can’t just dismiss last night’s binge in the way that I used to, because now I have the evidence of its impact staring me straight back in the face. Even better, I have the ability to see that yesterday isn’t the whole story.

Looking back at my food intake for the last 3 months, I can see that I’ve broken my calories goal by more than 1,000 calories more than once, and none of them caused my weight trend to come to a crashing halt like it did today. After evaluating my rate of weight-loss over the last two weeks, I see that it has been steadily slowing. I also see that I have more day’s over my goal than I did the previous four weeks combined. So even though I’ve been averaging below my calorie goal, the big changes in caloric intake from day to day have had a negative effective on my metabolism; my midnight meal was just the nail in the coffin.

Armed with that data, I’m hoping that renewing my focus will be an easier process. I knew there would be obstacles and plateau’s to face along the way, and I never intended for this to be some sort of sprint to the finish line, but I didn’t expect to run into something like this quite so soon.