Week #4 of My Liquid Diet: Dreaded Plateau!?

A love-hate relationship with my bathroom scale reaches a crisis point.

Plateau. (Photo by Gabriel Tovar on Unsplash.)

How it’s gone so far (with 26 weeks to go):

• Beginning weight (July 14): 230 lbs.

• Weight at start of Week #2: 222

• Weight at start of Week #3: 218.4

• Weight at start of Week #4: 215.3

• Weight at start of Week #5 (current week): 215.1. WTF? WTF?? WTF?!!!!!!

Total weight loss so far: 14.9 lbs.

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I’m not saying that my bathroom scale hates me. I’m not saying it’s evil. What I’m saying is this: My bathroom scale has lost my trust.

My diet had been going so well: I’d been losing a little over three pounds a week. These days I weigh myself every Friday morning, when a new diet week begins. I do this shortly after I wake up. I head to the bathroom and do what my wife, Sara, calls my “morning Kornblutions.” Without getting into yucky details, this involves me sitting for a rather lengthy time as my body slooooowly figures out how to get rid of its digestive byproducts. When you think of it, it’s kind of a reverse Sisyphus situation — only the task is pushing the boulder down the hill. Probably best for neither you nor me to overthink this analogy — or, for that matter, to dwell, in this context, on the word “analogy.” (Okay, I did get into yucky details.)

A Reverse Sisyphus.

I’d gotten up earlier than usual, as my wife, Sara, was going out of town and I was going to accompany her to the airport. (As one does!) And when I don’t get my full eight hours of sleep, my excretory internalities tend to slow down even more than usual — to the point of actual stillness. (I think you get the point.) So it was a nervous Josh Kornbluth who stepped onto the bathroom scale, knowing that the usually jettisoned ballast still remained onboard. But can that alone account for the fact that, after a week of liquid-dieting, on only 960 friggin’ calories a day, I’d only lost two-tenths of a pound???

I stared at the glowing number “215.1” — but not for long, as this digital scale only shows you your weight for, like, a second or two before it shuts off. Maybe, I thought, that weight reading was an outlier — a glitch in the Matrix or something. So I got back on. And now it was telling me I weighed a couple of pounds more! Deep breath. Many deep breaths. Beginning to hyperventilate. I weighed myself yet again — and this time, the reading was somewhere in between the first two. No matter how you sliced it, I’d hardly lost any weight in the past week. How is this possible? I wondered. My thoughts were all over the place. On the one hand, they’d told us there would be plateaus in our weight loss. On the other hand: No, dammit, I want to keep losing lots of weight constantly! That’s what keeps me going, along with my oboe-playing, and oboe-reed-making, and learning how to draw, and finally reading War and Peace (which is awesome, by the way — though I’m still only in the War part). The carrot at the end of the liquid-dieting stick — which, unfortunately, will be a carrot, and not a cheeseburger — is that I will end up supermodel svelte, which can only happen if I keep losing weight!

Okay, yeah, I was panicking. But instead of continuing to freak out, I took a more mature and measured approach: I ordered a new scale. Because obviously, this was all the scale’s fault. This new scale I ordered is a “smart scale,” so I expect it to work out the remaining kinks in string theory while also giving me a super-accurate accounting of my poundage. It’s expected to arrive sometime later today.

In the meantime, yesterday morning, the day after what history will call “The 215.1 Disaster,” I got back on my old scale to weigh myself again. I was hella-nervous, let me tell you! And it said that my weight was … 212.7. Oh. That’s better. Kind of what I was expecting to see the day before — around two-and-a-half pounds down from the previous week. So maybe that Friday-morning reading was an outlier. Maybe I’m still totally on track with my diet. Seriously, though, I cannot begin to tell you what an emotional difference it makes, feeling that I’m still steadily losing weight, rather than plateauing. The sky outside is bluer, and I feel much more resilient and hopeful. Shouldn’t be the case, but it is.

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I do still feel quite lonely, though, with my wife so far away. Before she left, she worried that I might fall into bad habits without her constant, um, guidance — so, taking a Sharpie in hand, she thoughtfully deputized a butternut squash, which she named “Kibosh Squash.”

While Sara’s away, Kibosh Squash keeps me in line.

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I guess that’s all for this report — though I do want to mention a new diet-related fear I picked up yesterday, after a performance of my solo show Citizen Brain. An audience member, who’d just attended the show for a second time, noted that I’d clearly lost a lot of weight since she’d last seen me: it was especially notable, she said, in my face. Though she added that, as a result, my skin was a lot looser. This alarmed me, as in the best of circumstances I have between three and seven chins. Suddenly I had a vision of myself after losing, say 40 more pounds — looking something like this:

Am I turning into a Neapolitan Mastiff? And if so, do I have a chance at winning Best in Show?

I was still fretting about this after I got back home. And with Sara away, I briefly had the impulse to do something crazy. I mean, not too crazy — maybe something like going to sleep without brushing and flossing. Something just mildly self-destructive.

Fortunately, Kibosh Squash was there to say, No!