Day 17

Today I am one week away from the close of The Great Experiment. I've settled into a routine. The feeling of disappointment associated with making healthy choices is tapering off. The positive reinforcement scales are starting to tip away from the immediate gratification of tasty food and towards the realization that what I'm doing is working. Make no mistake, the Experiment seems to have worked thus far. I took something I've long needed to do and infused some immediacy into the situation by holding myself accountable to anyone who wants to read this blog. The question becomes, where do I go from here. In the end, it doesn't matter how successful this is in the short run. Without long-term success, its a failure.
I'm in a strange position. First, while I intended that some forms of "diet" or lifestyle changes would last longer than The Great Experiment, I didn't account for the impact actually blogging about the experience would have. I'm a little concerned about letting go of it from that standpoint. On the other hand, I have no desire to write a blog about what I eat for any appreciable length of time.
Not sure how I'm going to resolve this.
In the short run, my plan is to allow some indulgence on March 19th and 20th, then try to run a real tight ship again up until I leave for spring break on March 27th. For spring break week (Cocoa Beach if your are curious), the goal will be strictly maintenance. I figure I can eat sensibly 75% of the time and exercise a ton. Hopefully this will offset the cocktails I have every night, because if you aren't going to drink while you're at the beach, you may as well go to the mall instead.
Smooth sailing recently. Yesterday, grilled chicken sandwich and veggies for lunch, some leftover chili with lowfat cheese for dinner, a couple glasses of red. Today I forgot breakfast, and had a decent lean cuisine for lunch.
With a week to go, I weighed in this morning at 236.5 for a weight loss of 10.5lbs. thus far. Two-thirty four sounds like a realistic place to end up next Friday, and hopefully I could take about 2 more off of that before I leave for Florida. We'll see.