Pong hits

Lawrence Toppman:

I'm feeling like a little white plastic ball these days, getting whacked back and forth by Destiny between weight loss and unloss (as a dieting friend likes to say when she puts back a couple of pounds).

The process no longer seems logical to me. I slacked off for most of a week, and I've gone down to 183 pounds as of this morning, the least I've weighed since VCRs were the preferred form of video playback.

Whether my scale is accurate is beside the point: If it was wrong when I weighed 194.5 pounds on January 1, it's wrong in the same way now. I'm still 11.5 pounds lighter, either way. But why?

Exercise has SOMETHING to do with it, but I did only two sessions last week. I'm told it's easier to lose weight if you maintain a regular sleep pattern, but I got less sleep than normal last week (and in an erratic way). I ate less bread, but I also had three dinners where the main course was a vegetable and pasta salad.

Was I carrying around water weight until the weekend? Was I eating more fruit and filling up on that? I'm thrilled and bewildered and drawing no conclusions.