The meh diet.

I have discovered that the secret of successfully losing a little bit of weight each week is to be so totally busy and stressed out you just think "meh" at the idea of food. I used to be completely resentful and envious of those girls who would always say "When I'm stressed, I just can't eat. When I break up with someone, I lose like 10 lbs. almost instantly." For me, breaking up or being stressed or upset about something means all the pint containers of Super New York Chunk in the Kansas City metropolitan region better run for cover, because I'm on a rampage that can only be quelled by fudge ribbons and high fructose corn syrup.

But I figured out in the last couple weeks that there's a big difference between being depressed-stressed and just busy-stressed, and that maybe I haven't been busy-stressed in awhile. This past week though I've been scrambling to pull things together for school programs, driving to and from meetings, and doing some preparations for a long-term career change, and since I've been running around like a crazy woman, food hasn't really occupied a high priority in my mind unless I'm just really, really hungry. It's kind of exciting to be involved in things that consume me enough to make my neuroses fade into the background a little bit.

Tonight, since round one of the hellacious programs was over, I decided to pig out, but I did it New Erin style. In the olden days when I was happily contributing to the stockpiles of fat on my ass (you know, if I were to ever be stranded out in the wilderness and needed the body heat and extra fuel to survive JUST IN CASE), pizza night would've involved a pizza, breadsticks, a 2-liter of Pepsi, and a Dairy Queen chaser at the end of it. I'd finish the night prostrate on the couch, glassy-eyed and vaguely wondering if my heart should be pounding so hard while I was in this horizontal position.

New Erin tonight ate a few small pieces, nixed the breadsticks and the coke and decided on an apple for dessert instead of a Blizzard.

Who AM I? Sheeit.

This is a totally cool new development though, because the time that I wasted wondering what I could eat for lunch, and then how I could manipulate dinner to include the maximum amount of fat and calories and then the subsequent guilt and shame the following morning could totally be converted into something useful and productive, like napping through more reality TV or seeing if I can hit myself in the face with my ponytail.

Awesome.