Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Trench Warfare

Dieting is like trench warfare in World War I.

Obviously, dieting can't compare to actual trench warfare for sheer horror and misery - but there are similarities. Trench warfare was an agonizingly slow process, where one side could spend months struggling to advance only a few hundred yards across a battlefield strewn with barbed wire; then, of course, the other side would often recapture those few hundred yards, equally gradually, and after months of struggle, everyone would be in the same trenches where they'd begun. Even worse, sometimes those soldiers who first advanced, then retreated, lost even more ground.

You see where I'm going with this, don't you? Dieting feels like that to me: months of striving to take off however many pounds, followed by gaining most or all of it back and then desperately trying not to surrender any additional territory beyond that. It feels as though I were back to Square One, but scarier than that is the anxiety that I could end up back to Square Minus-One!

On the other hand, fighting in the trenches is better than surrendering, right?