Tailgating is great, but it is not your friend

Last weekend I decided to make one of the many trips I do annually to see some professional sports team I've never seen before. Anyone who is reading this blog is probably already familiar with it, but as I headed down I-95 to visit friends in Washington, D.C. and then see my Giants get the fucking shit kicked out of them in Baltimore, it hadn't occured to me that weight-loss on a vacation -- even one that lasts all of 60 hours -- is astonishingly difficult. As soon as I arrived I was completely out of my element and out of my routine as far as regular exercise and watching my diet goes. At one point, I actually offered to cook dinner for my friend Lindsay and her brother so I could ensure that whatever I was eating wasn't awful for me.

For whatever reason I was not taken up on this offer. Oh well.

The tragedy of all of this is that right before leaving for the trip last Friday I had worked my way down to an impressive new low in my hunt for that magical number of 175. On Thursday afternoon following a round of jogging and swimming I had dropped down to 206.6 pounds, the lowest I had been in, well, I have no idea since I didn't have a functioning scale for the last three years. The point is that I had made progress. Precious, precious progress. But one meal at DuPont Circle eatery BGR and an impossible to ignore BBQ pulled pork mac-n-cheese at Noodles and Company and suddenly extensive damage had been done, even if I tried my best to keep the diet reined in by having an extremely mediocre sub-600 calorie Moroccan chicken dish at Gordon Biersch Saturday night.

This was already a weekend doomed to ruin me as the previous paragraph suggests, and in the midst of it all I only managed to get one 45-minute stretch of exercise squeezed in. And then the tailgate happened. Now this wasn't as bad as your standard tailgate before a football game considering we had no grill at our disposal, but that didn't exactly make our chosen spread a healthy option either. After our initial tailgate plans had fallen through, Lindsay and I hastily went to a supermarket and bought loads of cold cuts, rolls, cookies, potato chips and a remarkably potent new brand of Doritos Lindsay's brother Robert suggested. And since this was a tailgate, of course there was a bundle of Yeungling and Blue Moon to help numb the eventual pain of the football game.

Let's just recap all of this: eating like this is not good regardless of whether or not you're trying to lose weight. Eating like this when you're trying to lose weight is definitely not good at all.

Your scale is a drunken mess

Power, liquor, it doesn't really matter what your bathroom scale is drunk on, but you ought to know that it is jumbled indecisive disaster. All of us have that friend who just can't seem to make up their mind when they've had a few. They might want to go to this bar or that club or get that slice of lasagna pizza or those cheese fries, but the point is that they really don't know what they want and even if they do they can't decide how they're supposed to articulate it.

The scale in my bathroom isn't all that different. Now, I know many think this is somewhat indicative of mild obsessive-compulsive disorder, but with my scale working again and my weight-loss plan in full swing I've taken to weighing myself just about every time I enter my bathroom. For most people these probably sounds like a problem. Some weight-loss gurus believe you should only weigh yourself once a week to avoid driving yourself crazy and most say to only do it once a day and at the exact same time, but I have problems with both options. As far as weighing myself once a week, one of my big problems has been being able to keep myself in check by keeping regular track of my body. Once a week, in my mind, leaves too much time to inflict damage with a bucket of fried chicken if I don't know the next day that I'm three pounds heavier. Once a day, however, can be too random because weight fluctuates over the course of a day.

So where does that leave me?

I have decided the only rational conclusion is to weigh myself at every possible opportunity, not because I'm petrified of not knowing if I lost 1.5 pounds of water weight during my jog, but because if I see the scale often enough and see how much the numbers can vary over the course of a day on a regular basis, I will learn that my weight is difficult to pinpoint and is likely just going to fall in a slight range at any given time. And if I do that, I take those three digits on the readout far less seriously.

This leaves one problem, though. What if your scale gives you different numbers within a span of five seconds? What should you make of that?

I should have started writing this two weeks ago

Around three years ago the lithium batteries in my scale died. This was not really a problem to me. After all, lithium batteries seem just so hard to find and replace. They aren't, but the fact that they aren't long cylinders like the others somehow convinced me that they are. As a result of this mental block and my own laziness, I never bothered to replace them and so my scale just sat in the corner of my bathroom unused collecting dust and, as things are wont to do in bathrooms populated by people with body hair, collecting stray follicles.

It looked disgusting.

Beyond looking disgusting, though, it also allowed me to loosen the strings and get lazy. Weight is not an easy thing for me -- not easy to think about nor easy to maintain. In fact, three years ago I simply accepted that this would be a battle I was fated to fight for the rest of my life, a struggle to keep those three numbers in a somewhat reasonable range. This is easier said than done in most cases, and as I had no way or reason or bother to check those numbers on a daily basis I got lazy and the battle started to be lost. Considering I already had weighed more than I wanted to, this was a bad thing. In college I had weighed as little as 167 and spent most of my time in undergrad around 170. I didn't overeat, I exercised daily and while my diet still wasn't great, it wasn't horrendous either.

By the end of college I had creeped up to 190, a result of spending every night at the newspaper office and having a girlfriend who worked at Coldstone Creamery, though she is hardly to blame for my own lack of self control. I always had it in my mind to get back to 170 "one of these days" but I never really put the pedal to the metal and as long as I weighed myself regularly, I didn't go above 190 too strongly in one direction or the other. Until the batteries in my scale died, anyway.

In the three years since I paid no bother to checking my weight, I enjoyed the social aspects of being in my mid-20s and, well, beer tastes good. Really good. So over time as the pounds started to creep up and I reluctantly acknowledged that I'd need to go one notch looser on my belt, I always assumed that I'd simply lose the weight at some point and failed to notice that I was starting to lose the battle again. I had grown lazy, larger and in some ways, physically, a little unseemly for my taste.

After hosting some friends for dinner a few weeks ago, more than one of them made light of the disgusting scale in the corner of the bathroom and I started to realize that I was just like that scale, left to become disused and accrue unappealing physical characteristics. I am probably being too hard on myself. I'm not an ugly man -- I don't think anyway -- but in my mind I saw a clear parallel between that scale left unmaintained and my own body.