Am I alarmed? Not particularly, but only because eating healthy has grown into a habit, and changing that habit takes a certain amount of planning and convincing.

I am, however, a tad weary of a growing tendency to overdo healthy items. For example, take the big fucking salad I made Sunday night. Now, when I make a salad, the ingredients can fit into two categories: The undoubtedly healthy things, and the reduced fat things.

The undoubtedly healthy things were as follows: Lettuce, mushrooms, onions, green pepper, tomatoes. The reduced fat things were: fat free shredded cheese, fat free cottage cheese, fat free croutons, lowfat salami, and nearly fat free thousand island dressing.

Also, there was salt and pepper to taste, but we’ll just ignore those in this example.

The worry here comes from my willingness to add in extras of all the reduced-fat items. Those, of course, are the things that add calories to the salad, and make it a less-than-ideal meal. But there I was on Sunday, tossing in some extra cheese, extra salami, extra croûtons.

While the salad probably didn’t contain more than 600 calories (not bad for dinnertime standards), it is just a trend I’d prefer to make go away.

As for the wall I spoke about earlier, I just feel like I am doing myself no good. Perhaps it has something to do with not going to the gym after last Tuesday (though I made it back on Sunday, and should get on a regular schedule from here on out). It just feels like I am doing the least amount of work possible and cheating myself in the process.

I sort of expected this to happen around the halfway point. But I am still frustrated that it has taken so long to get to this point, and I am still in a bit of gray area here, since the finish line is still too far away to envision.

For now, I just need to concentrate on getting down to 265, then 260. This is the summer of the diet, and the dog days are setting in. Motivation is scarce because there really is nothing to immediately look forward to.

But I have to push the wall down and break through on the other side. Healthy eating decisions, regular trips to the gym, regular blog posts and an entirely optimistic outlook on this entire process. That’s what this is going to take.