Stress Makes Me Fat

I keep my weight under control for a variety of reasons, not least of which is I don’t want to buy “fat clothes.” I’m not obsessive about it. I have an ideal weight, at which I think I fit most of my clothes well, but I allow myself to fluctuate from it by about 5 pounds. More than that and my pants are uncomfortably tight; lower than that and my clothes look baggy in an unattractive way.

One of my big weight control nemeses is eggnog. I love eggnog, and it doesn’t help that eggnog is only available during the Christmas season. I can’t hold off on treating myself to some eggnog, because come January, it’ll all be gone. And so it was no surprise that early this year I found myself dangerously close to my weight maximum.

So I started doing what usually works for me: I switched in my more strenuous workouts and watched what I was eating more carefully. I had no dramatic results, but it seemed to be keeping the pounds in check, until early February. To my surprise, I gained 3 pounds over the weekend. I hadn’t porked out on food, nor had I stopped moving, but I had suddenly and abruptly blown up and through my personal weight ceiling.

I was, however, stressing about getting good hotel rooms at the San Diego Comic-Con. I had lots to worry about: competing with 100,000 extremely motivated Comic-Con attendees for access to the reservation system, the fact that I wouldn’t know which hotels where available or how much the rooms cost until the very moment I needed to make those reservations, and the known fact that there are far more people who want hotel rooms than there are hotel rooms.

And I think that, and that alone, made me fat. After my valiant army of reservationists managed to break into the system and get enough good Comic-Con hotel rooms for all of us, I lost the surprise poundage.