August 07, 2009 
By Jacey Eckhart
I’d like to sit at a table dressed in white linen. I’d like real silver, please. White candles. A sommelier with keys jingling at her belt. I’d like to hand a leather-bound menu back to the waiter and say softly, “I think I’ll take the gastric bypass, please. Or, oh, wait… does the liposuction look particularly good tonight?”
Because I’ve been working on weightloss for months. I just wanna quit. Today the prospect of losing any more weight seems so hard that cutting a hole in my comforter to make a poncho smart in comparison. Buying bigger clothes seems like a brilliant idea.
Except my head is too small. If my head would grow in the same proportion as the rest of my body, I could be OK with being heavier. But my head is tiny. I put on weight and I look like one of those stacking toys for babies with the ball on top and the colorful rings below.
This isn’t fair. In a culture where my car has a switch that can turn on the parking lights on just one side, I figure there ought to be some kind of after market switch for me, too.
I’m thinking, Click! Gain weight. Click! Lose weight. How hard could that be?
Too hard, obviously. Or we’d have the switch instead of invisible tanks or planes or whatever we’ve got that’s invisible.
Maybe I shouldn’t wait for an invention, though. Since I gain weight like a stacking toy, maybe I could learn to lose weight like a stacking toy. I could learn to grow a nice round ring and then just… wriggle… out of it. I could pop a big stack of fat rings over my head and reveal a skinny self beneath. I would be willing to retain one ring around my chest for Homecoming. Woo hoo. Nothing I wouldn’t do for the troops.
Think of the implications for the nation: If we military spouses could start growing our fat in detachable rings we could start a whole industry to employ ourselves. We could market the rings to Firestone or Goodyear--biodegradeable tires! Obama is gonna love this plan.
Maybe that’s going a mite far. The truth is, that when it comes to weightloss I don’t really expect those easy answers. I don’t expect to go under the knife and cure what ails me. What I really want to do is to quit. The struggle feels too hard.
And that is the problem, isn’t it? From a life inside the military, I know that too often the thing worth doing, the thing that pays off the most, the thing that MUST be done, is the thing that is the hardest. I trust in the difficult. I can’t help but believe in doing what is hard.
When I talk to other military spouses who are also fighting the weight battle, we eventually get past the make-believe solutions and get down to reality. What we are really talking about with weight loss is the same thing that we struggle with in every area of our lives. We’re talking about managing change.
Real change.
That’s why we struggle. It is so much easier to let ourselves follow the well-worn tracks in our own brains. Stressed out from work? Get the
Cheetos. Kids home from school? Get the Cheetos. Husband working late? Out to sea? Stuck in Korea? Deployed to Iraq? Getting shot at by terrorists? GET THE CHEETOS.
Eat enough Cheetos and the carbohydrates kick in with that familiar peaceful lull. Cheetos outlast Qualudes every time--and they’re legal in 50 states.
Sadly, stress Cheetos also form those nice round rings from neck to knee. That’s why we know that if we are really going to change, we need to be able to summon the energy to change. When you are a military spouse often your energy is already spent before the day is even started. So we start small. We figure out the smallest action to take with our weight. We experiment. We figure out what works for us (eating breakfast, walking the dog) and what makes us crazy (3 cappuchinos instead of lunch). We summon encouragement to ourselves wrapping it in evergrowing rings around us.
Jacey Eckhart is syndicated columnist for CinCHouse.com and a military life consultant based in Washington, DC. She is the author of “The Homefront Club” and “These Boots.” Reach her at jacey@jaceyeckhart.com.