my new year's resolution

        The celebrating is all over, but the year is still new, so there's still time, hopefully, for a New Year's Resolution.
        My usual modus operandi regarding New Year's resolutions is to kind of take stock of what I'd like to resolve about myself and then conclude that it's just not gonna happen.  
        However this year I've resolved to make, and even ty to keep, at least for a while, for as long as necessary, that is, a New Year's  resolution.
       My New Year's resolution, alas, does not seek to bring anything of particular value to the planet or my fellow earthlings.  It's not  even the least bit creative or original.
        My resolution is to go on a diet.
        Well, not an actual diet per se; more of a just getting back to where I belong.  Or think I belong.
        See, when I stepped on the scale on January 1st it read  five pounds heavier than it did the day before Thanksgiving.  And to make matters worse, they were two different scales, and my daughter
informed me that her scale, the January 1st scale, weighs  two pounds light.  My scale, the day before Thanksgiving scale, doesn't.  So after I did the math the five pounds became seven pounds.  
        So I just need to get rid of those seven pounds.  Just to get back to my fighting weight.  That's my plan.
        I guess that is called a diet.
        Here's a couple things  I believe, based on personal experience, about losing weight:
        1.  The really hard part about losing weight is trying ot change your old foodie habits.  Habits are developed over time until our brains get programed to make us continue to do what we always do.  Breaking an old habit and replacing it with a new one involves re-programming your brain.  This re-programming takes time and Herculean effort.  
         2.  No matter what any weight-loss program might claim,  losing weight is hard.  Really hard. If you commit to going on a serious diet then you have to be prepared for a period of self-denial until you've managed to get the re-programming ball rolling.    I call this period Hell Week.  Or it could be Hell Month.  Or, for those whose habits are entrenched in bedrock, Eternal Damnation to Healthy Eating Hell.  In any case, if you go on a diet, be prepared for at least some intial suffering.
        3.  You won't lose weight just because you're exercising more.  You have to eat less.  I see folks of a good size at the gym who've been at it for years and don't appear to have lost a pound.  On the other hand they're probably pretty healthy all the same.
        4.  And then there's my  experience:  on the Camino I walked about 12 miles a day, all day long, over rugged terrain, and didn't lose a pound.  That's because the whole time I ate like three Sumo wrestlers.
        5.  In our society, where so much of what we eat is calorifically pumped up with high fructose corn syrup, corn starch, oil, fat, salt, sugar, more fat, and all those other naughty additives that make our food so tasty  and irresistable, anyone who can stay thin through adulthood and into middle age an is working at it.  They have to work all the time at keeping their brain programmed to eat the right things.  They have to consciously avoid, and with some degree of effort, the "bad stuff".
        6.  Any thin person over forty-five who says they can eat anything they want is probably lying.  Unless they've somehow succeeded in programming their brain to only ever want to eat the things that keep them thin. Ha!
         7. Once you reach your mid-to-late 40's, if you just keep eating the way you've always eaten, you'll put on weight. 
          8.  It's okay to splurge once in a while.  I splurge on a regular basis but not all the time.  Except between this past Thanksgiving and New Years when I was spluring all the time.
           9.   If I always ate everything I felt like eating I'd still look like I did when I was 24:
     
   

        10.  And it wouldn't matter.  That's how I looked when Tom Liszkay fell in love with me, I had lots of friends and fun back then and my world was overall a happy, interesting place.  If  I still looked that way I doubt my life would be any worse or better than it is now.
           11. So why do I want to want to get back to my pre-Thanksgiving weight?  Eh, I guess it's just that it took so much time and effort to get there in the first place.  I'd hate for all those Hell weeks to have gone to waste.