This song makes me feel like a superhero.

After the weekend scale freakout, I focused Sunday on eating real food in small amounts, and distracting myself at night. 

Turned out, I didn't need to distract myself at all -- I simply wasn't hungry!

Weird!

I checked the My Fitness Pal pie chart and saw that the carbs, protein and fat divided into a perfect Zone -- 40 percent carbs, 30 percent protein and 30 percent fat. And I was floored to see that I kept my calories around 1,300. I really didn't plan on that but at the end of the day, that's where I wound up.

And when I got on the scale this morning, I had knocked off a pound and a half from Saturday.

I'm fixing it.

I did finally start something that I have been meaning to do for months -- cracking open books that focus not on the "what" but on the "why" and "how" of losing weight. Believe me, I know what to eat -- I need to master why I eat when I eat and how to focus on needing to eat instead of wanting to eat.

Last night I started the book "Thin Side Out: Stop Binge Eating, Overeating and Dieting For Good Get the Naturally Thin Body You Crave From the Inside Out." It's written by Josie Spinardi, a behavioral change specialist. (It's only available as a Kindle book.) I'm only a couple chapters in but I love the book so far.

The premise is that conventional "dieting" turns our brains and psyches into neurotic mush and ruins our ability to eat like a normal person. 

I was talking about my new nighttime immersion reading gameplan with the Weight Shrink today and she asked me what I thought about retraining my brain to do things differently. I likened it to learning a completely new language because I've never known anything but being "on a diet" since the age of 10. 

Really.

I don't know how a naturally thin person eats because I've never been one, so I know it's an uphill battle. But I'm up for the challenge.

Aww, poo. Yeah, that's 3 pounds up this week. I can chalk this up to a couple things:

• The prolonged PMS/bloating thing (put up or shut up, ovaries!)
• Following the caloric advice of my phone app.

Hey, when something or someone tells me I have 200 calories left to eat at the end of the day, who am I to say no? 

{Derp.}

My Withings scale and my Fitbit One are connected to the My Fitness Pal app, which calculates how many calories I can eat based on my Fitbit reading and my weight-loss setting on My Fitness Pal, which I have set to the max (2 pounds a week).

Obviously, I don't metabolize like most humans because the 2-pound-a-week weight loss somehow turned into "gain 3 pounds in a week."

So for now I'm going to ignore what the app says and stick to around 1,500. I went back into the weekly calorie tallies and saw that a couple weeks ago when I actually lost weight I was averaging that. 

Finally figured out how to get a screenshot on my phone.

 I also took a peek at the pie chart of carbs, protein and fat and saw that the "loss" week was 47 percent carbs, 22 percent protein and 31 percent fat. I mention that because I don't remember being physically hungry. Then I looked at this past week and it was the same and I was hungry. Gaaah!

But I do notice that if I focus on a "healthy fat" snack -- something that contains nuts, avocado, or seeds -- it really shuts off my hunger. And while it seems counterintuitive to focus on fat (oh, how wrong you were, Susan Powter!), when I eat more fat within my calorie allowance, I'm more satiated.

Notice I said eat more fat. It's not oils and dressings, it's that fat bound up with fiber and/or protein that does the trick. 

Today, for example, I had a Perfect Foods Fruit & Nut bar for breakfast and it's got 17 grams of fat coming from peanut butter, walnuts, flax, and sunflower, sesame, olive and pumpkin seed oils. It kept me full through a great CPR-training seminar I took with other South Florida-based bloggers at One Beat CPR (more on that Monday).

From my fave comic strip, Mutts.

 When I got home I made myself a green smoothie but it was missing any sort of fat so within a couple hours I was grumbly in my tummy. I remembered to have a "fatty snack" so I sliced up a really great tomato and added a couple ounces of turkey breast and dolloped a Wholly Guacamole 100-calorie pack on top. Totally did the trick.

So bring on the guacamole!

... I guess. (Geez, what a frustrating, inexact science this losing weight is.)