It is much easier to break up with a girl than to deal with change and adapting to the needs and desires of another person.

In the same respect is much easier to quit eating all together in order to lose weight than to diet. The eating disorder such as obesity or binge eating is unlike any other addition, to end it you cannot just stop eating. Eating too much is a far too common disorder, drastically more common than eating too little or bulimia. But unlike alcoholism and drug addiction where the victim simply stops drinking or doing whatever, with eating you cannot simply stop.

“You’ll die faster if you stop eating than if you eat too much,” I said to a lady who was embarrassed about already eating at Chipotle on her first day starting weight watchers. Sure it may have been me marketing with a little propaganda, but also there is some truth to my statement. I know, she did order double meat, a large soda, and a bag of chips, but just like her, to shed my extra pounds, I cannot simply stop eating.

With the addiction to food we have been trained on since we were prehistoric cavemen, not knowing when the next meal would be, we have to fight against the instinctual urge for life-sustaining calories.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not support obesity. I just understand how it happens. With eating, we have to stare down, consume, and digest that which is killing us and keeping us alive.

I, in addition to the failing “weight watcher”, need to lose weight. No, I am probably not going to become ill of heart disease early in my life like two-thirds of the American population. But I do need to watch my weight for my own reasons.

“A runner weighing 160 pounds has to muster about 6.5% more energy to run the same pace as a runner weighing 150 pounds,” I read in the book “Racing Weight” by Matt Fitzgerald. According to that statement, if at 140 pounds I run a 18:40 5k, at 130 pounds theoretically I would be able to run the same 5 kilometers in 17:20. Of course there are other factors such as body composition and slight power loss due to muscle loss. But still yet there is no way to overstate the drastic difference that a simple ten pounds could do.

However, it is much easier to subtract 10 from 140 in my head than on the scale. If I had my way I would do a three hour ride five out of seven days a week, consume half the calories I was burning, go to bed hungry, and be at my race weight in a couple weeks. I wish it were easier to reprogram my innate desire to eat more but especially after coming off a trip involving four months of rationing, that pantry is looking pretty inviting.

If I want to win though I have to start a progression, a chart of my weight and my body fat percentage which currently is supposedly at 14% (Whoa!) and 139 pounds. According to my body fat percentage, and my body type, I can lose eleven pounds before I begin to tango with genetics. So I will read the book Racing Weight and commit to a diet plan so I’ll show up at my mid-season races  92% of who I am now in weight and 106.5% who I am now in speed.

Call me anorexic, say “But Grayson you’re skinny already.” The only reason I look thin is because I am living in a world of low standards for weight. We should be carrying around almost no extra fat. We need almost no extra fat to live so why carry it up and down stairs ten times a day? Everyone in this world should be able to grab his or her tummy and hold it, thinner than a newspaper. I consider myself overweight, not because I am unhealthily fat, but because I am as I said over-(my ideal)-weight. I don’t blame the world for being so chubby, it is the way our instincts led us to be and a difficult addiction to hinder. But at some point we need to take control of our calorie-crazed culture and recognize that we are stronger than instinctual beasts, that something greater than us had better expectations. Some big dog gave us a brain, the power of will and deduction and the understanding that we can change and the desire to commit that change.