Although I started out both Saturday and Sunday with healthy eating (giant salad, mandarin oranges, almonds, etc.), neither day ended well. I made the unplanned excursion to P. Terry’s Saturday night, and I had crappy pizza and amazing cookies last night (after reconnecting with my friend). When I go over to this particular friend’s place, I tend to eat whatever she’s eating, and that needs to stop because she tends to eat poorly at times. This is the same friend I’ve mentioned before: the one who’s gained weight with me over the past two years or so. The end result is that I gained five pounds back over the weekend, although some of that is fiber and water from the healthy eating done prior to dietary disaster striking.

The pizza was from Papa John’s (I didn’t pick where it came from), and it was garbage, hardly resembling pizza at all. For some reason, though, I kept eating it, probably because it at least was pizza-like, and I’ve craved pizza often since beginning this project. The cookies, from Tiff’s Treats, were amazing (as usual), except for the raspberry shortcake flavor (I didn’t pick the flavors), which tasted like Fruit Loops cereal. For some reason, I had two of the raspberry shortcake cookies in addition to the standard chocolate chip and snicker doodle cookies.

The crappy pizza and the weird-tasting raspberry shortcake cookies are both things that I should have discarded as soon as I realized they didn’t suit my palate. For some reason, though, I tend to consume carbs in whatever form they come in, even if that form is mediocre or not so tasty. I’d say that I’d succumbed to the sunk cost fallacy, but I didn’t pay for either the pizza or the cookies, so I’m not sure what my motivation was. Anyway, if I’m going to cheat on my diet, I should resolve to cheat only if the food is at least good (if not exceptional).

And I’ve got to stop eating whenever this friend decides to eat. She’s very impulsive and has little self-discipline, so she’s prone to bad decisions regarding food despite the fact that she’s trying to lose weight. When I met her, she wasn’t overweight at all, but we tend to reinforce each other’s poor eating choices, especially when it comes to anything involving sugar. Gaining weight for this friend has been particularly hard on her—she’s a beautiful girl who used to be able to eat anything—but she’s not yet found the discipline to change her diet (not that I have done much better at times).

Anyway, my goal for this week is to lose seven or eight pounds to get under 240 pounds. Although I’d planned to fast only on Tuesday and Thursday, I’ve got to fast today to get all of the garbage out of my gut, so I’ll probably be fasting three days this week. We’ll see how that goes.