Day 5

This is Day 5 without caffeine - or a whole bunch of other stuff, for that matter. No caffeine, no soda, no chocolate, no junk food, no fast food. It's all going okay, except for the lack of caffeine. I can't stay awake at night and I can't wake up in the morning. One of these days, my body will be caught up and I'll no longer crave the stuff. Fortunately, this is a good week to go to bed early and sleep late, work-wise.

Meanwhile, the benefits of cutting all of this crap out are wonderful: I'd feel lousy if I were only cutting out caffeine while continuing to fill my body with garbage. Instead of eating McDonald's and other junk food, I've been subsisting entirely on things like chicken breasts, brown rice and beans, homemade tamales (high in salt but low in calories), yogurt and fresh fruit and vegetables. The scale is showing a weight loss (I'll report that officially on Friday). The bags under my eyes are nearly gone. I have more energy for swimming at the Y, which I've been doing since January. I have more energy for doing stuff around the house.

And all of this after just five days of eating properly.

That choice of words was deliberate. I'm not on a diet. Lord knows I've been on a hundred diets over the past 25 years, and all of them have ultimately failed. When I started this in November 2008, and once again now, I'm making lifestyle changes. I'm eating the right things instead of the wrong things. And, yes, I'm tracking what I'm eating, primarily because I have to in order to keep myself accountable. A year ago, when I stopped tracking, I did fine for a while, but eventually I crept back into my old habits, and by last month, McDonald's and I had become good friends again.

Tracking my food is something I will have to do for the rest of my life. It will probably be more difficult to do that than it will be to eat the right things, because here's what I discovered last year: good, healthy food tastes better than crappy, fat- and sugar-filled food.

So, when good, healthy food tastes better, and since I felt so much better when eating good, healthy food, why did I eventually fall back into my old bad habits?

I have no idea. If I had the answer, I'd probably be normal-sized rather than, as skinnyr.com put it to me yesterday, "super-obese."

But here's the good stuff: I think I'm getting closer to solving that puzzle. When I've tried to lose weight in the past, I found dozens of ways to cheat, thinking I was pulling one over on Weight Watchers or my dietician or whoever, and never realizing that it was really me I was cheating. When I started this journey 18 months ago, I never had the desire to cheat, at least for a few months. And when I did finally cheat, it was a benign kind of cheating, rather than a mindful kind.

The result was the same, of course: I fell off the wagon and gained some of my hard-fought loss back, but my attitude was correct last year, and it's correct this year.

And it will work this time around.