I gained almost four pounds yesterday. While this is disappointing, I can’t say it was unexpected. I got hungry before noon, so what was supposed to be my only meal of the day was, in fact, just lunch. I made myself a cheeseburger (no fries), and I’m starting to think that the combination of the ground beef and cheese just contains too many calories. The giant bun with its 45 grams of carbohydrates and white flour that quickly spikes blood glucose doesn’t help, either. I’m pretty sure I got so hungry so soon because of the sugar I’d consumed the day before. For some reason (and I should find out why), consuming sugar and other high-glycemic carbohydrates only results in more hunger later. It’s kind of a vicious cycle, really.

Had I made the cheeseburger the only meal of the day, I might have escaped with no weight gain. But the problem with the weekends is that there is nothing that absolutely demands my time. Sure, I have things to do, but I get to choose when I do them (or if I do them at all). In other words, there’s a lot of discretionary time, and too many opportunities to slip up when it comes to eating. And slip up I did. I had an apple (which I don’t feel bad about because of the high fiber and phytonutrients), but I also had some pineapple later (which contains a LOT of sugar). I had some steamed broccoli in cheese sauce in the evening hoping to curb my appetite, but it didn’t work, so I had a grilled cheese sandwich with another one of those giant carbohydrate-laden buns.

For some reason I got to thinking about the tiny cups of ice cream I’d had the night before. When you eat even just a small amount of something that you haven’t eaten in a while (although a few tiny cups of ice cream can’t really be considered a “small” amount collectively), you really notice the way it tastes. I couldn’t get the taste of the chocolate ice cream out of my head. I needed more cheese for today’s cheeseburger, so I went to the grocery store and looked for the single-serve cups of Haagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream. They were out of stock. This was unfortunate as it prompted me to look at the pints. I won’t go into the details of what happened next, but there’s a reason why I gained a not-so-small amount of weight yesterday.

The weekends have been a problem. I’ve got to do better about sticking to what I plan to eat and when I plan to eat it. One meal per day needs to be the rule for depletion of glucose stores, and that meal needs to be reasonable in terms of caloric load. I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the sneakier reasons why intermittent fasting works is that it does result in calorie restriction. It would have been nearly impossible for me to consume what I ate yesterday in one sitting. And the carbohydrates and related glucose spike from the giant buns are also problematic. My dad eats cheeseburgers without the buns, but I consider the bun to be part of what makes the cheeseburger a cheeseburger, so maybe I just need to avoid burgers altogether. Red meat is a source of inflammation anyway, so maybe I need to cut it out entirely.

I’ll lose the weight I gained this weekend because I’ll be fasting Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of this week, but it’s disheartening to have these spikes of weight gain when the goal is to have a consistently linear downward trend. Also, I think I’m now behind the pace I should be at in terms of reaching the goal of losing 80 pounds in four months. At some point my brain has to realize that it’s going to be easier to reach that goal by avoiding these intermittent spikes in weight. I think I’m going to commit to no sugar for the next two weeks and hopefully avoid any spikes.