I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever really struggled with my weight. Throughout my life I’ve usually been of above average weight, though. When I was a kid I used to get made fun of for being fat. I wasn’t really fat, though. I was what parents like to call husky. I was rounder than the average wiry kid and I used to dread hearing “skins” in gym class.

Time passed and I grew up and all of the kids who were skinny in middle school and high school became bigger than I was and magically I became average.

Even as an average adult, I knew I could stand to lose a few pounds. I never really did anything about it, though, I just sort of wished I’d lose weight eventually making peace with feeling slightly uncomfortable all the time and hating seeing most pictures of myself (this phenomenon was compounded in my thirties by hair loss).

Sure, I did fad diets. I did Atkins and I did Whole 30. I once did something called the cabbage soup diet where you make this huge pot of cabbage soup and basically starve yourself for a few weeks. They worked a bit but I would always go back to my old habits of eating anything I wanted whenever I wanted.

It wasn’t until last year that I discovered the perfect diet. It turns out that the best diet for me involves portion control and having your girlfriend of four years dump you over the phone and then resuming smoking and, ironically, running.

Last summer was awful but those pounds sure melted off. The constant nausea of heartbreak makes it easy to stick to limited calories and running is great exercise, especially when coupled with an appetite suppressing cigarette!

I finally snuck into that part of the BMI chart that’s green, having hovered in that yellow section for my entire adult life.

And I liked it. I liked the way that my clothes fit. My pants didn’t slide down off of my love handles (not as much as before anyway). I liked it if someone noticed that I had lost some weight. (Not everyone did. A lot of people can’t tell at all.)

So, I just want to maintain my new weight but the anxiety ridden mind works in mysterious (actually quite predictable to a mental health professional) ways. In addition to or perhaps because of my anxiety, I love amassing data through observation. So, I’ve become obsessed with monitoring my weight. I monitor calories. I monitor exercise. I weight myself every morning and sometimes when I come home from work. How much weight will I gain from that piece of office birthday cake? How much do I weigh after peeing? How much do I weigh after drinking two full glasses of water? (It’s weird, I have a digital scale and sometime neither behavior does anything, other times, it can make a pound and a half difference.) How much do I weight after a run? How much sweat did I lose?

I read somewhere that Graham Chapman knew he was an alcoholic when he panicked not having a bottle on the set of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I wondered if this weight thing might be a problem when I went away this past weekend with friends and I thought to myself, “I wonder if there will be a scale there.” (There was. I checked it like three times.)

I’m more conscious about what I eat now and I’ve found exercise that I really enjoy, which are positive developments. But this weight obsession is a little exhausting, pretty vain, and maybe a little unhealthy. But here’s the thing, I fear gaining the weight back because I don’t think I could ever lose it again. The heartbreak and smoking were both a big help the last time around and I don’t want to have to resort to either of those things ever again.