I finally realized something yesterday, even though I have been reading it for years. That is the fact that skipping meals, eating snacks instead of real meals, and essentially starving myself does NOTHING to make those little numbers on my scale go down. Quite the opposite, in fact! Since retiring over 3 years ago I have gotten into this pattern of staying up late (midnight-ish), and consequently, sleeping late. I usually get up around 9:30. Not extremely late, but late by working-people standards. Since it can take up to a half hour to do my usual morning routine of pottying, washing my face, feeding the cat, brushing my teeth, taking my pills, getting dressed, & sometimes putting on a load of clothes to wash, it's mid-morning. Which means, it's technically not breakfast anymore, but not quite lunch. I'm not a morning person, so the idea of "cooking" a breakfast is not appealing to me. I gauge 11:00 as the start of lunch, which is when most restaurants do. So I will eat something like saltine crackers or buttered toast to get me through the “end-of-breakfast-and-start-of
-lunch” hour. Then it’s around 3:00 or 4:00 before I can reasonably eat "lunch". But…, and here's the real conundrum, my mind balks at the idea of eating dinner past 6:00. I think this stems from being raised to eat meals at a regular schedule. So, what do I do? I eat a snack – just to keep my stomach from growling. And sometimes I will eat another small snack around 9:00 because I’m hungry again.

I love to cook, but I live alone. Cooking means clean-up follows, and I hate to wash dishes. No, I don’t have a dishwasher. (I wish.) When I do cook, I make enough to have leftovers for a few days. But, again, there’s the problem of my screwed up dining schedule. When to eat the leftovers.

Sorry, I had to go around the block a few times too many to get to my point of realizing that I NEED to eat 3 meals a day in order to see those numbers fall. I’ve proven it to myself, but now I’m not sure how to accomplish it. I could start going to bed earlier, but that brings up another issue: I don’t want to. Not yet anyway. I like staying up late. So I guess I will just keep on keeping on until I can decide whether I like staying up late a lot more than wanting to lose weight. Seems like a no-brainer, but tell that to my brain.