Dear People Who Want to Know How I Lose Weight

Dear People Who Want to Know How I Lose Weight,

I have a secret: the weight you’ve noticed me losing over and over again for the past year is, in fact, the same five pounds.

Yes, that’s right.  I simply lose and gain the same five pounds repeatedly, and yet, every time you notice that I’ve lost weight, you think I’m getting skinnier. Today, when one of you asked me what my secret was, I played it off like I didn’t know what you were talking about, but I did know.  I waffled on disclosing my secret to losing and gaining the same five pounds over and over again because it is incredibly complex and took years for me to master.  However, I have decided that I will reveal the time-tested methods I have developed that will ensure that you, too, can have people tell you that you look skinnier every four months or so without actually dipping below whatever weight plateau you are currently on.

First, there a few simple rules to my plan:

1. Drink a smoothie containing at least three different varieties of vegetation every morning for breakfast.

2. Never weigh yourself, except for maybe when you’re at the gym (and you’ll see how often that happens later).

3. Make sure that your wardrobe contains no less than two but no more than six different sizes of clothing.  You’ll see why this is important later.

4. Make baking your hobby so that, no matter what part of the plan you’re on, you’ll always have a steady supply of cookies and cupcakes.

5. Buy only organic fruits and vegetables.  Eat a lot of those, but don’t let your consumption of them get in the way of the rest of the plan.

All right, now that those rules are out of the way, here is my life plan:

Month One

For at least a week, eat chips, with or without dip, for four to seven meals.  For your other meals, eat large quantities of the same vegetable, i.e. an entire head of cauliflower, an entire bunch of kale or a large sweet potato.  Supplement any missing calories with baby carrots, peanut butter on apple slices, molten lava cakes eaten at midnight and/or spoonfuls of ice cream.  Watch a movie that contains ballet and briefly dream about a life as a dancer.  Decide that potatoes and bread are evil for some reason and stop eating them.  Give up the dancer dream when your realize how much more work and how much less cookie eating you would have to do.

Pizza is your friend.

Month Two

Eat so much meat in a three day period that you feel queasy at the mere thought of eating beef ever again.  Become increasingly fixated on a particular spice or condiment (my latest obsession was sriracha) and find ways to eat it with everything.  Mix it into mayonnaise and fabricate reasons to dip vegetables in the concoction, sprinkle it on your baked sweet potatoes for some reason, douse chicken in it.  Whatever gets that goodness in you.

Stand and walk throughout your six-foot work space at your job.

Pizza is your friend.

Month Three

Start to feel like you’re on the upper end of your weight fluctuation.  Wear slightly baggier clothing because it’s more comfortable or because you like the look this month.  Whatever the reason, just be sure your clothing is baggier than usual.

Join the gym/pick up some sort of activity.  Go to the gym multiple times a week for two to three weeks.  Forget you have membership.  Lose membership card.  Lose track of whether the gym is still charging you for your membership.

In the meantime, eat lots of vegetables and fruit throughout the day, with random comfort foods dispersed throughout the week.  A sample day might contain your obligatory breakfast smoothie, a salad and a heaping serving of baked or sauteed veggies for lunch and chicken nuggets and fries for dinner.  Potatoes and bread are now akin to manna from Heaven.  Realize that your previous condiment fixation was kind of weird.  Go back to using normal spices.

Pizza is your friend.

Month Four

As a result of stress or busyness or just life happenings, change your eating patterns drastically.  It doesn’t really matter if you’re eating less or more; just shake things up for a week or so in one direction and then switch to the other direction the next week! This confuses your metabolism and tells your body that it should probably take over from here because you don’t know what you’re doing!

Take vitamins for the first time in three months.

Pizza is still your friend, but doesn’t play as large of a part in your life as it once did.  Start craving soup inexplicably instead, but only eat it from Panera, in a bread bowl.

Instead of all of that drab standing and walking at work, begin getting around by shoving yourself across the room on your wheelie office chair.

Start wearing clothing that is less baggy.  Have someone at work comment on weight loss that you’re pretty sure is imaginary.  With their friendly comment in mind, go home and eat cookies or ice cream for dinner.

And that’s it! If you repeat this entire process, you can literally gain and lose the same five pounds repeatedly (which is, arguably, a part of normal weight fluctuation), but reap the constant rewards of people from work who you barely know commenting on your appearance!  It’s grand! Plus, you get to eat cookies for dinner at least three times a year!  What is there to lose?

I hope this letter has been enlightening to you about how I manage to do what I do.

I’m going to go eat cookies for dinner now.

Sincerely,

Chelsea