It's not the how, it's the why

This was supposed to be from Sunday, 11/05. I forgot to dupe it here.

I am currently in week #68 of my Weight Watcher's journey. I know this because I number all the little weekly tracker things I get. It's kind of nuts, I know, but it's what I do. I have them all stacked up upside down (they're face down with week #1 on the bottom) on a shelf in my room. As of yesterday, I was down 55.4 pounds since July 20, 2005. I've been as much as 61+ pounds down, but I started to gain and lose and gain and lose and gain and gain for a few months, and it's making me nuts. I've still got almost 59 pounds to lose to hit my eventual goal, but I'm hung up at another very important interim goal. I flirt with weighing less than 200 pounds. I was within 3 pounds of that goal as recently as mid August . And then I started with the plateau/slow gain from hell.

Clearly I have a mental block of some sort. I know how to lose weight. I know what I need to do, and I've done it successfully in the past, but for a reason that's not currently clear to me, I keep fucking it up. I'm eating more and eating crap, and for all my good intentions, I'm not working out enough. I don't want to have to read Dr. Phil's book, but I may have to. I have the book in my room because it was available on paperbackswap.com. I like to believe that I would never actually have purchased on my own, but I could be wrong about that, too.

I love looking better. I love shrinking clothes sizes and feeling better, but obviously there's something holding me back. I suspect it's fear, but I'm not entirely sure of what. Well, that may not be true. I think that what I'm afraid of is getting my heart broken again. At my current weight, I still feel mostly invisible to the opposite sex. I haven't had that feeling you get when you know someone's checking you out in a really long time. I miss it. Kinda. I miss having someone in my life, a partner. I miss sex. But the thought of it is very, very scary. Since my divorce, I've essentially been single, and it's been 8 years. I've had a few "encounters" in those 8 years, and with a notable exception, they've been unmemorable at best to just bad at worst. I used to think that the term "bad sex" when used in a consensual manner was an oxymoron. Sadly I was wrong, wrong, wrong about that.

So is it my desire to protect myself that keeps me eating McDonald's french fries? My addictive personality? I do know I have one of those; since giving up smoking, food is my drug of choice. I'd drink, but I'm really not a good drunk. I either puke and cry or turn into a raging slut, and in either case, work suffers and since I have to work to survive . . . Besides, altering my mood isn't going to fix my issues; that's probably going to take altering my mindset.

CURRENTLY READING: Valley of Silence by Nora Roberts