Wii Fit U: One Year of Fitness

Hard to believe that a year ago, I was 253 pounds and running out of breath going up the stairs in my house.

It's also hard to believe that eight months after that, I was 153 pounds.

Its a bit easier to believe that in the last four months, I've kept my weight in the ballpark I set for myself, because Wii Fit U is too shortsighted to give you the option.

Now, let's consider what I've done in these past four months, food-wise.

• I went to the Highland County Maple Festival, where I ate buckwheat pancakes with butter and 100% Grade A Dark Amber maple syrup, with a side of sausage and sausage gravy.  Ate a single maple donut.  For lunch, missed the maple chicken but had a kind of underwhelming "consolation" hamburger.
• I've been to Cook Out, Five Guys, Wendy's, Brixx (which is a total shit pizza place, get a real crust instead of serving pizza on a cracker), and a few other restaurants
• I've been having various desserts after dinner, including M&M's Ice Cream Sandwiches (the ones I compared to premature ejaculation in a review a long time ago), and the Reese's ice cream bars; but also toast with apple butter, which is fucking amazing
• Snacking with walnuts and 60% bittersweet chocolate chips maybe once or twice a day, usually while watching YouTube videos
• Drinking a fair amount of alcohol, both beer and liquor, and noticing the odd reality that the beer affects me far more than the liquor despite the liquor being higher ABV

Pretty good?  Well, on the surface, yes, but mentally, it's a struggle.

Anyway, after a year of caring about my physical fitness, what do I think about the future?

Well, I definitely need to figure out with a bit more certainty how much leeway I have for the things I can eat.  I still feel like it's a giant guessing game and I hate feeling like I have to pay attention to the numbers.  I feel guilty whenever any one given meal is larger than normal and the "now I gotta work this off" thought very quickly enters my head and stays there.  It leaves me completely uncertain as to whether or not I can maintain the weight that I've gotten myself down to, especially if I want to have a job or maybe not have to exercise every single day for the rest of my life.

Restaurants are a huge problem, because they almost universally don't care about nutrition.  I feel like there's only two restaurants I can ever go to and not have to worry, they're Bodo's and Sticks.  All the other establishments just cover everything in oil, throw in tons of sugar and fat, coat it with salt, and deep fry it all.  It's like chefs and corporate test kitchens need to be bitchslapped back to reality.

It's no wonder America has an obesity epidemic.  Our restaurants are serving up nutritional nightmares, and people grow up on "traditional" food that's absolutely terrible for them.  Anyone who wants to live a healthy lifestyle is the odd person out, and nine times out of ten, gets treated as such.  We're the nutjobs that don't want fried chicken in our salads.  We're the crazies that don't want our cornbread to be sweet.  We're the radicals that prefer the natural taste of food to when that food is covered with fat, salt, oil, and sugar.

Anyway, it's been a year of fixing what was likely two full decades of nutritional missteps, and while I feel like I can maintain it, I also feel like I'm way too restricted on what I can enjoy, and like I'll be tethered to one or another form of tracking my weight for the rest of my life.  I'll never be able to relax, and I'll always have a mental anxiety that causes me to act and eat very differently in the 24 hours before I weigh in.  The weight loss part is done, but life ain't easy.  Fuck my life.