I hate being overweight. Some of you reading are thinking, "Yeah, me too" (whether you are just a few or many pounds over your "ideal"), while others might be thinking, "Well, then just do something about it!" Well... I started trying to count and restrict calories this morning. By midday I was ready to quit, hah. I am really not good at it.

In my defense: I recently read about the Minnesota semi-starvation study. In 1950, 36 healthy men volunteered to undergo semi-starvation so that a scientist could study its effects on the human body and develop the best ways of re-feeding starving people. One interesting thing about this study is that during the re-feeding period, the men would eat almost continuously in order to get back to their normal weight. Their hunger was often insatiable. The men initially gained back about 10 lbs. more than their normal weight, and then gradually lost the extra 10 lbs., eventually returning to their normal weight.

One of the things that they realized from studying the re-feeding was that our bodies have a strong biological drive to maintain a certain weight. When we try to drop below that particular weight, we begin to undergo the symptoms the men in the study experienced - preoccupation with food, emotional distress, listlessness.

Ok, I'm not trying to say I am at my biologically programmed weight. Not even close. But I guess the point is, our bodies can really, really fight against us sometimes when we'd like to lose weight. Right now, nursing makes me feel like I'm starving all the time. Because my level of stress is fairly high right now, I do not function well while trying to tolerate the irritation of hunger. So I just eat. And eat and eat. To complicate things more, I am taking a medicine that causes me to gain weight. I went off the medicine for a year and lost about 3 lbs. a month for a year, without really trying. (I also made some dietary changes, but in retrospect, I think being off the medicine had a greater effect - the dietary changes were easy to make when I wasn't hungry all the time.) After a year, I went back on the medicine and started gaining back about that much per month.

I think fasting is a great way to regain perspective and break our "addiction" to food. But that's not an option while I'm nursing. So here I am trying to count and restrict calories and wondering if it's worth it. Maybe I should wait until I'm not so stressed, and I can better fight against my body? But on the other hand, will I ever not be stressed?