After four days I could now shuffle around the house at about 3/4s of a mile per hour.  This mobility was exhilarating for someone used to running and I did repeated donuts between the kitchen, living room, and dining room to celebrate.  In the mid afternoon, I was visited by the mother of a friend of mine from middle school.  She asked me a question I’ve chewed on a lot, “when did you decide to start losing weight?” and I finally answered it:
I never decided to lose weight. Â There was no Damoscene moment where I resolved to be slim, in fact it was the opposite of a planned choice. Â I had taken a very long road trip and managed to lose 10 lbs during this time by simply eating two large meals in a day instead of foraging interspersed with proper meals. Â I hadn’t decided to start doing anything, but only to continue doing things that I had done almost at random out of the necessities of travel. Â Each subsequent change was largely like this, I had found myself doing something that seemed to work and resolved to make it a habit.
This reminds me of how the body evolves defenses to infection. Â The body spews out white blood cells until one of the variants works. Â That one gets to reproduce and the other die. Â Here, I tried a bunch of things at random from changing my treadmill speed to not eating hot dogs and if something seemed to work I stuck on with it. Â Some odd things came out of this like learning that I do better having a very rich dessert after dinner but only if I eat three hours or so before bed. Â This calorie burst seems to sedate me for the evening and I have no urge to snack before bed.
I didn’t choose to lose weight, I simply chose to habituate things that seemed to lead to weight loss. Â So far that’s worked. Â I hope it continues to. Â She brought me fruit salad. Â I hate grapefruit but the thought was nice.