Our long national nightmare is over.

In the end it didn't take very long at all - barely more than a week. But I have come to the conclusion that the Weight Watchers points plan, or a points plan of any kind really, is not for me. Below, some reasons why.

* Maybe it's better to go to bed hungry than stuffed, and maybe you should find yourself feeling hungry for some time before actually eating. But I was hungry all the time. I mean, all the time - I'm talking about "going to Subway, eating a foot-long turkey sandwich, and still being hungry afterwards, never once feeling satiated." Is this, to some degree, what you need to do to lose weight? Maybe, but I can't keep that up.

* The obsessive point-counting, it turns out, caters much more to the bad side of my OC nature than the good side. It's not just comments like the one about Chipotle being far too many points, it's not wanting to buy tofu because there were "too many" points in a package. Tofu! I'm pretty sure it's possible for me to resist buying candy and pop for reasons other than "too many points in a package;" after all, I dropped regular pop more or less cold turkey a couple months ago and have done just fine avoiding it between a lot more water and the occasional diet soda. Combine that with the fact that refusing to get things that are plenty healthy just based on some arbitrary formula is kind of counterintuitive, and you can see where this is going.

* It got to the point where Alma flat-out refused to talk about food with me because I was kind of freaking her out, and she was right - we weren't talking weight control so much as the early warning signs of an eating disorder. The obsessive counting, denying myself food even when hungry... this had the earmarks of something that could have gone beyond a simple "diet." I doubt I would ever have let it get that far - when she said this to me, tonight, I was already preparing to kick the system. But her reaction cinched it.

* This will seem like a rationalization, but I don't think I need to diet. Let's examine the history of my weight for a second:

1982-1996: Generally speaking, I was a skinny kid. When I graduated eighth grade I probably weighed around 130 pounds.

1996-1997: In the space of about a year, I put on something like 50 pounds.

1997-2001: From high school into college, I weigh around 180 pretty consistently.

2002: Over the summer, down to 165.

2003-2004: Back to 180-185.

2005: Near 200 for the first time in my life.

It's worth noting where the break points happen. 1996-1997 was my freshman year of high school - meaning that it was also when I stopped walking to school on a consistent basis. I got a ride to high school every morning for four years, and more often than not was picked up and brought home. So while in middle school I walked a mile or more every day - and the afternoon walk was uphill - in high school I rarely walked at all. I also developed a Blimpie sandwich habit, but I think the walking is even more telling. Note that my weight stayed pretty much the same for the rest of high school and into college - I didn't even put on a freshman 15, probably largely due to the fact that I had to walk again, canceling out the decline in quality of food I was eating.

In 2002, the weight loss was due to running and exercise at the gym. While I probably ate generally better while living at home, I didn't really eat less, just a bit less junk. So when I went back to college and put the weight back on, that's more attributable to ceasing the exercise regimen, not what I was or wasn't eating at school.

Similarly, the 10-15 pounds I put on after graduating college can be attributed to this: after I left school, I didn't have to walk any more. Worse yet, I wasn't working consistently. So what was I doing? Mostly sitting around the apartment. Was I eating any worse? Not really - to some degree I was probably eating better. But I wasn't exercising at all. And that, I think, is where the weight came from.

So to hell with the diet. I'll try to eat better, but eating less is just going to drive me crazy. What I need to do is join a gym, and go to it four or five days a week. Of course, I doubt any of the gyms around here is all that cheap - but ultimately, won't it be worth it? More so than what I'm doing now, anyway.