The scale lived in the bathroom, and Monday was weigh-in day.
So Monday I didn’t eat. Not really. A little coffee, maybe. I’d push through the whole day on nothing, tell myself it was discipline, and wait for evening — because I weighed in at night, and the less in me when I stepped on, the better that number would be. A whole day of running on empty so a piece of metal on the bathroom floor would tell me I was doing okay. And it was Monday. The start of the week. Everyone else getting going, and me already gone.
The kids felt it. Twelve and under, all of them needing something, all day, the way kids do. And I didn’t have it to give. “Not right now.” “Leave me alone for a minute.” “I don’t have time for this.” That tone — clipped, done, go away — that was the sound of a mother running on no fuel and a head full of a number she wouldn’t see for hours. They weren’t getting me on Mondays. The scale was getting me. They got whatever was left.
Then evening came and I’d step on.
If it went down, I felt okay — relief, a little see, it’s working. If it went up, it was defeat, that old drop in the stomach, here we go again, I’m never going to get this. Two completely different feelings. But here’s the part nobody tells you: it didn’t matter which one I got, because both of them ended the same way — with me eating. Down, I’d starved all day and my body was done waiting, so I ate. Up, I was crushed and food was the only thing that would quiet it, so I ate. Win or lose, I ended up in the kitchen, reaching for every single thing I’d told myself I couldn’t have all week. The scale had me either way.
Starve, snap, weigh, eat. That was the week. Every week.
So let me ask you something. When you tell yourself you’ll start next month — when it won’t be so busy — are you really putting it off because you’re too busy?
Because watch how the year goes. Summer’s not the time to start, too much going on. Then it’s I’ll wait till the kids go back to school. Then September shows up with the fall festivities and the fall sports, and there’s no room. Then it’s October shows up and it’s weekend pumpkin patches with family and friends or if you’re a farmer it’s your busy season. Then it’s
the holidays, and well, might as well wait till after the holidays. Next thing you know it’s January and you’re standing exactly where you started, having waited the whole year for a calm season that was never going to come.
Or is it something else? Some part of you remembers that — the starving, the short fuse, the version of you that diets turn you into, the one who hasn’t eaten and has nothing kind left for the people in her kitchen. And you look at summer, at the holidays, at all that time together coming up, and something in you says: not now. Not when they need me. I won’t be that mom during the good months.
If that’s what’s happening, I need you to hear this. That wasn’t laziness. That was love. You weren’t avoiding the work — you were protecting your family from what the work used to cost. You looked at the seasons when everyone’s home and together and you decided not to spend them hungry and irritable and half-gone. That was the right instinct. A good mom protects the table.
The waiting was never the problem.
The problem was that the only way you’d ever been taught to lose weight required you to be that woman. Starve for the number. Pay for it later. Be worse to the people you love in the meantime. Of course you waited. Given that deal, waiting was the most loving thing you could do. And then the whole diet world has the nerve to call you undisciplined for not starting.
You were never choosing between your family and your body. You were handed a method that made you choose — and then blamed you for choosing them.
Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then.
I lost 65 pounds. And I started during harvest.
If you don’t know what harvest is on a farm — it’s the busiest, longest, most all-hands stretch of the whole year. Meals in the field. No spare minutes. The opposite of a calm runway. And I started then. I had biscuits and gravy on my plan. I had ice cream. And Friday was still date night with my husband — beer and pizza, same as it always was. I ate when I was hungry and I stopped when I was satisfied and I kept the foods I loved, and the weight came off anyway.
Nobody got the deprived version of me — because this way doesn’t make one. There was no starving all day. No stepping off the scale and burying myself in the pantry. No “leave me alone” because I was too hungry to be kind. My kids got their mom. My husband got his Friday night. I was fed. I was there. And it still worked.
The fear was real. I’m not going to tell you it wasn’t. I lived it on the bathroom floor every Monday night for years. But the fear was attached to the wrong thing. You think you’re afraid of starting. You’re not. You’re afraid of the diet — the hunger, the grumpiness, the failing again. And those fears are pointing at a method. Not at you, and not at this.
You don’t need a clear month. You don’t need the season to settle down. There’s no season this ruins, because nothing about this asks you to go hungry in front of the people you love.
You can start today — with your kids needing you and dinner unfigured-out and your life exactly as full as it is right now.
If I can do this during harvest, you can do it during yours.
If you’ve been waiting for the right time, this is me telling you there isn’t one — and you don’t need one.
I put the whole method in a free guide: 3 Easy Steps for Losing Weight While Feeding Your Crew Their Favorite Meals. It’s exactly how I started — during harvest, with biscuits and gravy on my plan — and it’s the same three steps I’d hand you if you were standing in my kitchen.
No restricting. No starving. No becoming a different person at dinner. Just a way to start that actually fits the life you already have.
Grab it below. Then start tomorrow — busy and all.
