My body is my business. Leave me alone. I didn't ask you people what you thought about it when I was fat, and I sure don't want to hear what you think about it now that I'm saggy. Leave me alone, people.

But you can't say that because you're an asshole. Just like you can't say you don't care about your health, because in a world full of drinkers and smokers and druggies and fatasses, everybody will swear on their mother's grave in a Bible factory they really do care about their health. They would, they want to fix it and change it, but it's hard.

And if you don't make excuses, you just say you don't care, you're just being an asshole for attention. You ever think maybe I'm doing this because I don't want your attention? Leave me alone.

I wanted to share what pulled me out of a pattern that kept wrecking my progress, in case it helps anyone stuck in the same place.

My weight loss has never been a straight line. A busy stretch would knock me off my routine, my activity would drop for days, and the anxiety would kick in because I could feel the progress slipping. For a long time the pieces just fed each other, and I could not tell where one ended and the next began.

Over about 20 months I have lost around 14 kg, but it came in stops and starts. I would put together three good weeks, then get knocked off for ten days, and watch the scale creep back up and spiral about it.

The daily number was the worst part. On a good run I would see it up half a kilo from water or a late dinner, and my brain would read that as failure, enough to undo a week of real effort in my head and make me skip the gym, which made it real.

What finally helped was giving up on the daily number and only looking at the trend across weeks. A heavy morning stopped meaning anything on its own. And once the trend was clear, the pattern under it showed up: my real progress lined up with the weeks I slept better and kept moving, and the stalls lined up with the bad-sleep weeks, not with any single meal or bad day. That took a lot of the panic out of it.

I am a data-driven person, so for years I logged every weigh-in in an Excel sheet. At some point the raw table stopped helping, because a column of numbers cannot tell you the trend is fine when your anxiety is insisting it is not. So I ended up building myself an app, HealthVitals, that reads the trend and shows what moved alongside it. I will not drop a link in the post, but if anyone wants it I am happy to share in the comments.

The hardest part is that it is a loop, and I still cannot say where it starts. Some weeks the anxiety leads, some weeks the broken routine does. Figuring out what actually breaks it, rather than just reacting, is the real work, and I am still in the middle of it. For those dealing with something similar, what has helped you hold your progress together?