A food critic finds motivation to stay on the weight-loss wagon for the long haul

Over the last few months, I went from the worst shape of my life to the best while continuing to eat like a food critic. Don't punch me in the face; instead, read how I did it in part seven of this series:
There have been a few defiant (mostly ice cream-related) bumps in the road since I started my grand unfatting project with Jamie Atlas over at Bonza Bodies. But for the most part, I spent the summer metamorphosing from lumpy Laura to svelte, sexy Laura at a rather regular pace. As fall hit, I stayed on track, losing weight slower but maintaining my momentum. Things are good, I thought. I'll never be fat again.

Cue the effing Christmas music, it's the holiday season. Things have changed.

"Candy season starts on Halloween and runs through Mother's Day," my grandma says. "No use starting a diet in those months." Candy I can more or less resist. But the spiked punch? The cranberry pudding? The sticky toffee? The foie gras? My fat pants fit again just thinking about it.

In Jamie's fantasy perfect world, the re-feed day of the plan would be all we'd need to get through the holidays. We'd all plan our re-feed days to coincide with a particularly delectable holiday feast, getting in a short, intense workout and then savoring every second of our binge. Hell, his plan allows for one of those re-feed days a week -- so as long as we plan right and eat protein and vegetables the rest of the time, in theory we should have no problem surviving.

Unfortunately, that theory ignores this reality: The holidays are a super-festive time when we all get to come together overeating and drinking other peoples' food and alcohol for free. Also, it's eggnog season. And holiday pastry season. And family season, which even drives my mother to drink...when she spends the rest of the year smugly skipping the sauce.

Between my eating-out schedule and my lineup of holiday cheer-promoting events, I'm still on the weight-loss wagon -- if you consider dragging along behind the wagon while holding on with just one pinky being "on."

Luckily, I already went through something similar to the holiday season during this summer's wedding season, when buffets and open bars consumed my weekends for months on end. At risk of losing people -- myself included -- with a sports analogy, I came to kind of compare the whole weight loss thing to baseball. Ideally, you want to be rounding bases and moving forward. But sometimes it's about staying on base for one more batter -- you just don't want to get thrown out. I might be sliding in the dirt, getting scraped up and bruised in order not to get picked off, but I'll still obey a few hard and fast rules to make sure I'm safe. After all, if I can just stay alive until January, New Year's resolution season should be good motivation to come back on the plan strong. Those rules: