My disease loves vagueness about the food. The trouble is that if I don’t have a line, how will I ever know if I went over the line? In baseball, there’s this thing called a “warning track” – a patch of dirt before the outfield wall. Before this was invented, baseball players chasing fly balls would be so intent on catching the ball that they would run headlong into the wall and not realize it until they regained consciousness. The warning track lets them know they’re about to hit the wall. I think this is an important component of all food plans and abstinences – knowing when you’re heading toward problem eating.

Designing a good plan is not as easy as it sounds. My abstinence needs to be strong – but not brittle. I saw this with that other program phenomenon when I was in another program with very stringent parameters on food. People would toe the line for a while, but then when they weren’t perfect, they would go “off the wagon” with abandon and disappear for months at a time before reappearing heavier – often a lot heavier.

Maintaining an abstinent food plan can be likened to standing astride a steeply pitched roof. When you’re in that kind of situation, you can roll off in either direction. The one direction you can roll off in is having too loose a food plan so that you say “Oh well, I ate a lot, but it’s not a break of abstinence and I won’t beat myself up about it!” The trouble is that it’s very easy to then find yourself excusing that kind of eating a couple of times a week. If you’re the kind of addict that I am, those incidents will become increasingly frequent. The other side of that steeply pitched roof is just as deadly. That way says “I ate an extra pea I shouldn’t have, so now I’m not perfect. What the heck, now that I’m not perfect, I might as well go out and enjoy myself.”