I’m pissed off.
There are other words for what I’m feeling right now. Disappointed. Discouraged. Defeated. Those are all true. But mostly, right now, I’m pissed off.
I stepped on the scale today and I’m back at the weight I was when I started this diet.
What the fuck?
I’ve been doing this for a while now. I’ve been logging everything I eat. I’ve been watching carbs like they are the literal plague. I’ve an app that tells me what I can eat, what I shouldn’t eat, how many carbs and calories I’ve consumed, and how much room I’ve left for the day.
I’ve followed the rules.
Okay, almost all of the rules. There was the bowl of bow-tie pasta. But I’ve written about that already. I had reached a point where I felt like none of this was working, put a pot of pasta on the stove, stared at it for a while, and eventually ate some of it. I’m not going to pretend that didn’t happen just to make my argument stronger. It happened.
Once. Then I went right back to this.
Every other day, I’ve done everything I know how to do. I haven’t just been keeping my carbs low. I’ve been ending every day at a calorie deficit.
Every. Fucking. Day. At some point, shouldn’t the math start to matter?
I understand that bodies are complicated. I understand that weight fluctuates. I understand that water exists. I understand that the number on the scale can move up and down for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with gaining or losing body fat.
I know. Please don’t explain it to me, because right now, I don’t need another explanation for why the thing I’m doing isn’t producing the result I was told it would produce. Right now I’m standing on one side of this equation having done everything I was supposed to do, and the scale is standing on the other side telling me it didn’t fucking matter.
What the fuck else am I supposed to do? Eat fewer calories? Already doing that. Cut the carbs? Done. Track everything? Done. Be more disciplined? I’ve been. Be patient?
I’ve been fucking patient.
And here’s another thing that is really starting to piss me off: eating healthy is not cheaper. People love saying that it is. They’ll tell you that healthy eating can actually save money, and I’m sure there’s a spreadsheet somewhere that proves it if you buy exactly the right things in exactly the right quantities, cook every meal from scratch, never let anything spoil, and apparently live a life in which time, energy, transportation, storage, and convenience have no value whatsoever.
That isn’t my life.
And keto certainly isn’t cheap.
Do you know what’s cheap? Pasta. Rice. Bread. Potatoes. A box of macaroni and cheese is cheap. A frozen pizza can feed me without requiring half the grocery budget.
Do you know what isn’t particularly cheap? A grocery cart full of meat, eggs, cheese, Greek yogurt, and all the other things I’ve been buying because the cheap foods that stretch a grocery budget are precisely the foods I’m not supposed to eat.
I’m not in a particularly good financial position right now. I don’t want to get too deeply into that here, but it matters. Every dollar matters more than I would like it to.
So this hasn’t just cost me willpower. It has cost me money.
I’ve spent more at the grocery store. I’ve bought foods specifically because they fit this diet. I bought ketone test strips because I wanted some tangible evidence that I was actually doing this correctly. And what did those tell me? I’m not even in ketosis. Fine. Maybe the strips aren’t perfect. Maybe there are explanations. There are always explanations.
But then I stepped on the scale and I’m back where I started.
So now I’m eating food I wouldn’t otherwise be buying, spending money I really shouldn’t be spending, saying no to food I actually want, tracking every damn thing I put into my mouth, keeping my carbs down, keeping my calories down, and somehow I’ve managed to accomplish absolutely nothing that I can see.
I can’t afford for this not to work. I mean that more literally than I wish I did, but I also mean something else. This was never just about a number on a scale. I wish it were.
If this were simply about wanting to fit into a smaller pair of jeans, or catching the eye of the guy at Starbucks, maybe I could laugh today off. Maybe I could put the scale back in the corner, have a cheeseburger, and decide life is too short to care this much.
But my weight has become tangled up with things that hurt considerably more than a number. I’ve lost relationships because of my weight. One of them even lasted twelve years before he threw me away. Twelve years together, and in the end I was left with the feeling that this body — the same body that had apparently been acceptable for all those years — had somehow become a reason I wasn’t worth staying for. Things like that stick with you.
They turn a number on a scale into something more than a number. So when I stepped onto that scale today and saw that I was back where I started, I didn’t just see a number. I saw rejection. And I got angry. Because I’m trying. Jesus Christ, I’m trying.
And apparently I’m supposed to smile and remind myself that weight loss is a journey.
Fuck that.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll look at the numbers again and figure out what else I need to change. Maybe there is some perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this. But that’s tomorrow.
Today, I did everything I was supposed to do. Today, the scale told me it didn’t matter.
And today, I’m pissed off.